NBLB Weekend Survey #4 (FINALLY!): Literary Smackables Galore

Finally, after letting Real Life get in the way of blogging during this weekend, the readers of No Book Left Behind have managed to sit down and unleash their anger issues on ten literary characters of their choice. We've both had so much fun trashing our least favorite characters throughout the week that unleashing the can of Literary Whup-Arse on more of our non-favorites would be apt.

Special thanks to the American Library Association for their "Read" posters, and to Tim Gunn for holding the fort and "making it work."



The Happy Scribe: Whiny vampires and milksop heroines need not apply.

10) Fanny Price. Can. Not. Deal. The only Austen heroine who I feel needs a backbone transplant.

9) Bridget Jones. Liked the movies better than the books. Heroine is v. v. annoying. Smoking and kvetching gets old, especially in second book.

8) Louis. Yes, his immortal whining launched Anne Rice's career. But oh my god...someone stake him already if he's so unhappy with his sucky immortality.

7) Edmund Pevensie. I really hoped all that Turkish Delight would make him explode.

6) Fleur Forsyte. Egh. Why in the world she had Jon AND that budding baronet around her spoiled little finger was beyond my comprehension! Maybe because Soames was already a pill...his daughter was just...too much!

5) Dorothy. I loved Baum's other characters. Dorothy was just a little too self-righteous for my taste.

4) Briony Tallis. Too many exclamations from my reading corner on how her dangerous fancies and childish ignorance ruined her sister's chances at love.

3) Bertie Wooster. I adore P.G. Wodehouse's class romps, but in fairness, I feel Jeeves should've filled stupid Bertie's socks with jelly and left to serve the Queen.

2) Fred the Mermaid. Mary Janice Davidson wrote a mermaid series as well. Sometimes I wish Fred would stay underwater. Not my favorite MJD heroine.

1) Any Bertrice Small heroine. See Mei's bodice ripper cliches. (Though in hindsight, these ladies might actually get turned on by a smacking.)


Note: I did not mention Anita Blake because she could probably kick my ass with all her limbs tied together.



Meimei: Shut up, Daedalus. (You too, Judith Krantz and Jean Rhys.)

Before I begin with my list, I have to explain that these characters represent the tip of the iceberg as far as slap-worthy characters are concerned. I’ve already explained Bridget Jones last week; I was also tempted to add Anita Blake, but that’s more of a hate-on-sight (without having read a single book) than a genuine kind of hate. And, while both Agatha Christie and Ian McEwan have written slap-worthy characters, I can’t put them on the list because none of them inspire me to bring on the Slapsgiving that these have.

1) Stephen. Freaking. Daedalus. No other character has ever deserved such a violent smacking – and not just because anyone who has ever gone to the same high school as myself and The Happy Scribe has Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to blame for turning our otherwise fun IBH English classes into depressing slogs. I can’t remember having read Portrait without repeating the words “shut up” so many times - sometimes loud enough to scare my parents - and as much as I actually tolerated Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, I still have Daedalus to blame for ruining the rest of Ulysses for me.

2) Holden. Freaking. Caulfield. The runner-up to Stephen Daedalus in the “Stream-of-Consciousness”/ Douchebag division, easily beating out both Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise from Kerouac’s On the Road (talk about two people who just won’t Shut Up). The only saving grace I could find for Holden comes towards the end of Catcher in the Rye, when he takes his sister to the carousel… but other than that? Grow up, already!

3) Goldilocks. Just because there’s a successful Filipino bakery with your name on it doesn’t make it OK for you to barge into a stranger’s house unannounced and make catty, unwarranted comments about their food and furniture. I hope those three bears caught up to you.

4) Jewel Bundren, from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In a book full of slap-worthy characters – including poor dead Addie – Jewel stands out as the whiniest and most incompetent of them all… and that’s saying a whole lot, without giving the “plot” (ha ha) away.

5) Mama Elena, from Like Water for Chocolate. Unlike her fellow archetype Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mama Elena’s cruel hounding of her own biological daughter seems way too telenovela-ish for me. Did Laura Esquivel really need to manifest her as a vengeful ghost and a hypocrite at the same time? At least Elizabeth Bennet got to dispatch of Lady Catherine with one of the best smack-down monologues ever written; Mama Elena’s come-uppance, on the other hand, comes a few chapters too late, and even then – both in the book and the movie - it’s handled way too abruptly.

6) The titular character from How Stella Got Her Groove Back. It didn’t take me too long to realize that this Stella was Terry McMillan’s version of a Mary Sue… and that’s before she realized that her Hot Jamaican Mandingo Lover Man was actually a gold-digging little queen.

7) Every single female lead character in the Danielle Steel oeuvre. “Hi, I can’t decide what I want for myself because my mother was too frigid to love me as a child, and Danielle thinks that giving me an actual personality would ruin all those dramatic ‘scenes’ and ‘monologues’ she wrote for me. Watch me as I screw my way through this book like a dispassionate sexbot!”

8) Billy Ikehorn, from Judith Krantz’s Scruples series. “Hi, I can’t decide what I want for myself because I’m used to being a horny, power-hungry slut, and Judith’s idea of giving me a personality is to have me screw rich and powerful men so I can dump them when they get bored of me. Watch me as I sleep my way to self-esteem… through three books!”

9) Waverly Jong, from The Joy Luck Club. True, she was the uppity daughter of an uppity mother, and Amy Tan did take both of them down a few pegs towards the end of the book. That doesn’t make the scenes where she rubs the other Joy Luck girls the wrong way any less painful, though.

10) Bertha Rochester. Fine, I say: Mr. Rochester was an idiot to keep her in the attic. And, from having watched the first movie adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea, maybe there are a few reasons for me to be sympathetic towards her. But, c’mon – of all the interesting side characters in Jane Eyre, did we really need Jean Rhys to tell us how horrible Bertha and Edward were to each other? (And would the world be a better place if it had been Jasper Fforde’s province instead?) Extra slaptastic points goes to Bertha’s most recent adapted-for-screen incarnations – not just for getting to play “Touch My Body” with Nathaniel Parker and Rafe Spall (note to Rafe: Final season of LOST – look into it) but also for damn near defacing the lovely visage of Toby Stephens, who recently became one of my favorite OG Rochesters.