I have a lot of books.
I mean, really, really, really a lot. I don't just mean a large personal library of the kind that the odd individual might have here and there but decades' worth of bibliomania: so many that I can't even hazard a guess at the actual number.
With life being a short and uncertain thing I don't waste my time on bad books, but when it comes to the single worst book of which I have direct personal knowledge, no question.
I'm a great admirer of Henry David Thoreau (look him up if interested). I collect various editions of his own work (not difficult as his output is comparatively small, with the exception of his vast personal journal) and inevitably books about him by others - biographies and the like.
I can't recall the exact title or the author, but one of these studies is easily the foullest, most disgraceful waste of trees that I've ever encountered in my life. It's not a biography as such but a study of his writing by an American academic - female I think. It's the worst writing I've ever come across - there isn't an adequate vocabulary I know of to describe how pompous, pretentious, turgid and long-winded it is. It's like a parody of the very worst kind of academic writing except that it was apparently offered up in absolute sincerity. The author never uses a simple and direct word or phrase where a circumlocutory hippopotamosesquipedelian construction will do. All of the rules (variable, admittedly) that people advise about clear, concise and to-the-point writing are not just ignored but flouted with what I still suspect may be active and avid malice. In its own way it's something of a wonder, which is why I kept it as a curiosity a bit like a hideously deformed foetus in a jar; it's quite remarkable that anything so relentlessly horrific got past editors and proof readers and made it into print. I'd rather eat my own legs from the feet upward than dwell too much on it but if I could lay my hands on it I'd have quoted some brief passages from it to demonstrate the eyeball-bleaching horror of the English. Sadly I can't, and I can't track it down on Amazon either.
