Hut Reading

I’ve been steadily churning through some of the quality literature that people leave in the huts and lodges at the various ski fields. So far, the best hut bookshelf is in White Star (at Broken River) which has a bunch of exciting murder mysteries and thrillers. Lyndon Lodge (also at BR) has a suspicious number of books with brightly coloured covers and titles like “The Married Man” that some reviewer will inevitably assure you is “wickedly funny”. Temple Basin doesn’t seem to have a bookshelf, but in amongst the dated snowboarding magazines piled in a corner of the dining room there are a few literary gems. The Bottom Hut at Mount Olympus has no books, and if it did have books they would be in some serious foreign language best suited to expressing suffering like Russian.

Anyone coming to these huts planning to find Pulitzer and Booker prize winners is going to get a rude shock. Mountain huts attract terrible books like fleece clothing attracts dog hair. When caught in the rip tide of terrible books I have found that it is best not to swim against the flow and instead embrace terrible writing. With this in mind I have made a point of reading the worst books I can find up here, and I have been constantly surprised by just how low publishers are willing to stoop.

Reading a terrible book is both a joy and a curse. The joy comes from the absurdity of the writing. Characters are typically absurd, the plots are nonsensical or contrived and the descriptions are alternately baffling or deeply troubling. Provided you go into the book with low expectations, all these flaws can bring great enjoyment. The curse comes from the fact that you’re reading a terrible book. At the risk of stating the obvious, the whole reason why it’s a terrible book is because it’s boring or infuriating to read.

The balance between pleasure and disgust seems to be a matter of timing. Early in the book, the terribleness is novel and funny. Slowly, that humour grows stale and you’re left reading a book that leaves you feeling let down by the publishing industry as a whole. It might seem like the easiest solution is to stop reading as soon as the book becomes terrible, but the matter is not so simple.

Unfortunately, by the time you realise that the book is terrible you’re already in over your head. There’s no clear line between enjoying the book and hating it. You’ve probably subconsciously hated the last couple of hours of reading by the time you discover that the last two chapters have been added to the book purely to fill your heart with bile. When it comes to hut reading disgust comes like a thief in the night. And once you’re trapped in the last third of a terrible book, the only way to put the issue to rest is to finish the book. Anything less would leave some kind of unresolved trauma.

This pattern of enjoyment and dismay gives hut reading two distinct phases. First, reading a hut book is like normal reading. You can read a bit before going to bed, or maybe turn over a few pages while you’re waiting for the sun to warm up the snow on a hardpack morning. In the second phase, you just want the whole thing to be over. This usually ends up in an epic reading session where you just put your head down and grind through the pain until you can emerge from the other side. Depending on when the second phase starts this can make for some late arrivals to the slopes (if it hits in the morning) or late nights.

One interesting difference between terrible literature and other forms of writing is that terrible books are clearly marketed at just one gender. Regular books are intended to be read by audiences with all kinds of body parts, but it’s almost inconceivable that a man would read a terrible book for women or vice versa. In the interests of a balanced and scientific study, I have made a point of reading terrible literature aimed at both men and women. Terrible books written for men are fairly safe. They tend to feature murders, spies, cops, submarines, violence and alcoholism. As a man, I am comfortable with all of these things provided they’re written down and not real in any way, although I could probably get along with a submarine OK.

Terrible books for women are completely different story. First off, their main characters are not cops, spies or gangsters. Secondly, instead of being about violence and whodunits and car chases they’re about feelings and friends and equally pointless crap. Third, the main characters are women. Finally (and this is a significant one), the main characters do not have sex with all the other women in the book that they are not directly related to.

At first, I thought that reading terrible books for women might give me an insight into the more baffling sex. It’s certainly true that men like violence and car chases and explosions and sex with women who aren’t related to them, and all these feature heavily in terrible books for men. However, after the two books I’ve read that are aimed at a female market, I’m not sure that this approach has merit.

In the first book, a young and attractive widow with two children chases an attractive married man around England. They almost get together but she finds out he’s a serial womaniser with a troubled past. So, instead of having an affair with him, she gets together with her late husband’s cousin (who turns out not to really be his cousin) who is also a serial womaniser but has secretly been in love with her all along. Meanwhile, her mother-in-law tries to take her children and burns her house down.

In the second book, two friends both get engaged at the same time. This is such a compelling coincidence that they agree to attempt to seduce each other’s fiancés. Despite misgivings, both have considerable success. One friend seals the deal by starting an affair with the other’s partner. Both couples break up, and the pair of people who didn’t have an affair get together, while the people who did have an affair discover they hate each other. The whole situation is confusing on just about every level.

There’s basically no defensible interpretation of these books that won’t be offensive to all the women I know, so perhaps it’s best not to get involved.