The Best Book I've Ever Hated

I hated it.

I despised it.

I wanted to tear out the pages of this infuriating tome. I longed to set fire to it and dance around it in some sort of pagan rite, freeing me. I wanted to do away with this, this thing, lest I be subjected to one more page of torment.

I hated it. And these are words you don't hear often from me. I never felt the desire to destroy a book until I read this one.

The World According to Garp is the best book I have ever read.

Never before has a book done this to me. Usually, if I don't like a book, I can't get past page 5. If I finish a book, the author must be amazing indeed. I love to read, but when it comes to fiction the author must catch me fast and not let me go. John Irving did this masterfully. He took me in and kept me for 609 pages of misery.

The book is about the life of writer T.S. Garp. It follows him through his life and dealings with his crazy mother and obnoxiously naïve wife. Although the story is interesting, everything bad that happens to them made me hate them more. I would yell at the pages, "What were you thinking?!?" I would go on long rants to the characters about how dumb they were. I would throw the book down in disgust, only to pick it back up five minutes later.

I hated almost all of the characters. I can only say that I liked 3 of them, and two were minor but had effect on the plot and the other was pretty insignificant. The plot annoyed me. I got accustom to calling it "Dumb things done by dumb people." But despite all that, this book was amazing.

I actually caught myself caring what happened to these characters. Not knowing what happened next kept me up at night, and when I could sleep the characters and settings would invade my dreams. From cover to cover of this book, I was not only driven to read further but utterly obsessed.

I tried to give it away. "Please take this book so I don't read any more." People thought I was joking, but I was not. It was like a decent into madness. These characters were so real that I couldn't get them out of my head. For the week or so I was reading this book, I could think of nothing else.

The irony is that while I hated the novel itself, I adored the writings supposedly done by Garp. Even the sample chapter of the book which was supposed to be his worst, I loved. The short story included is masterful. I almost considered keeping the blasted book for those too few pages.

This book is a masterpiece of modern fiction. The characters, settings, plot, writing style are nothing less than spell binding. John Irving is a literary genius. This is probably the best novel that I have ever read.

Now, don't you dare go read it.