BOOK REVIEW: The worst thing I read in 2020

Buckle up! It’s a doozy.

I trust that my neighborhood bookstore has only the best selections on display, books that its employees have personally vetted and chosen, and because of this, I’ve never been let down by any of my purchases there. Until last week. Before absconding to the Catskills to sit in a hot tub for several days, I stopped by Greenlight to buy some books, which I planned to devour sitting in said hot tub or while wearing an alpaca sweater in front of a roaring fire at an Airbnb. I picked up a stack of books, and then I saw Cecily von Ziegesar’s Cobble Hill, and as I am always in the middle of a Gossip Girl rewatch I thought, oh good, this will be great to mindlessly read, like literary cotton candy, and I bought it. Reader, I hated this book so much I couldn’t stop talking about it to anyone I spoke to between December 30 and January 6. It’s possible it’s the worst book I’ve ever read, though I’m loath to even give it that superlative distinction. I’ve never actively disliked a book enough to write about it — I’m not like, a book critic, so who knows how this is going to turn out — but the unreadability of the book plus the feeling of betrayal I felt at my nice local bookstore for selling such a piece of garbage has led me down a road that ends with me typing away furiously in a Google Doc.

I want to be fair to von Ziegesar here. Having written a grand total of zero books, I can only imagine that the book-writing process is not easy. I’m sure that when you have famously not…