Being a librarian, I tend to sort what I read into categories. There are the books I love and what to recommend to everyone. There the books I read that I will never re-read because they’re just kind of meh. There are, of course, the books I hated. The weirdest category is comprised of the books that I really liked but that I don’t recommend to readers because they’re too disturbing or too strange or that I worry would only appeal to a small niche of readers.
I would love for these books to be read more; they certainly deserve to be. I hope that by sharing them here, they’ll get a little bit more attention. So here it is, my no-go list:
Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor
Because this story begins with a rape, I know that a lot of readers will have a hard time getting into it. Readers who can make it past the appalling violence of the first chapter or so will discover one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read. It helped launch the recent wave of Afrofuturist literature that is not only brilliantly original but also redresses the overwhelming whiteness and imbalance of the larger genre.
Ruby, by Cynthia Bond
Ruby is also very violent and, unlike Who Fears Death, it is violent throughout. There’s a reason for the violence. I read Ruby as an extended metaphor for the way black men and especially women are treated by the systemic racism of the United States. It’s an important book for what it shows readers about how racism not only literally and figuratively beats down people of color, but also gets inside their heads to make them think that they deserve it. At the risk of ruining the novel, I will say that readers will be rewarded with an ending in which Ruby Bell gloriously breaks free.
Mr. Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi
This book is disturbing, but only because it can be hard to follow. In this novel, a writer is confronted by his muse and taken to task for how he treats his female characters. The book dissolves into a series of stories told by either the author or the muse until I couldn’t tell which was which. I loved this book for what it had to say about the power of story. Unfortunately, I know that it will take a particular kind of reader, in a particular kind of mood, to actually enjoy the labyrinthine experience of reading Mr. Fox.
HhHH, by Laurent Binet
This novel is a strange blend of creative nonfiction and autobiography, in which our narrator, Binet, agonizes about how to tell the story of Operation Anthropoid. Binet dives deep into the research rabbit hole and claws his way back out (mostly) to write this book. In every other nonfiction book I’ve read, the authors present what they found in a way they believe makes sense. Binet freely admits that he doesn’t know what that way is. He shares what he found, along with commentary about how historical information is flawed. Authors always have to leave something out—or risk writing endless tomes forever.