The Book I Hate Most in the World Right Now
And what that says about me
Last fall I started to see chatter everywhere about this new book. When I looked it up, I realized it wasn’t a new book at all. It had been self-published by the author in 2023, and then traveled through word of mouth to Oprah’s ears, where she called it one of her favorite books of the year in 2025. It was then published by an imprint of Simon & Schuster (one of the Big Five) and has been on the New York Times Bestseller list for 15 weeks as of writing this piece, and is currently #1 on the list.
I have watched readers of Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, and Leif Enger rave about this book. I’ve seen trusted voices interview the author on their podcasts and in their publications. I’ve seen fellow writers Threading and Facebooking their love of the book. I shelved multiple copies at Nooks a few weeks ago and it never sticks around for long.
People are saying the book made them cry, it made them laugh, it made them reconsider their lives and want to be like its protagonist. It made them want to change their lives, starting now.
Me? I could barely get through the first ten chapters, almost DNFed it multiple times, until getting to the last five chapters and skimming my way through to its predicable conclusion. At a writers retreat a few weeks ago, I caught myself almost yelling about how much I hated the book to my friends and had to apologize for my intensity later. I have not felt so strongly against a book in my recollection. I read another book almost immediately after I read the first one, a book that also had an elderly protagonist, one a bit less likable, but also one with some unfinished business to do, and it’s the only book I’ve talked about more than the first book since then.
What is it about the first book that has hit such a sore spot in me? Why can’t I shut up about it to everyone I know? And why—this is what I’m really asking myself—do people just really love this book?
The book is, if you haven’t guessed by now, Theo of Golden. I don’t want to describe it because I find it difficult to do without being reductionistic and the subject matter of the book is not really what I want to write about today.
This morning I read an article in the New York Times titled, (gift article) “It’s Own Stars Said it was Cheesy, Now It’s a Monster Hit.” The piece is about a Netflix show called Virgin River. When it first released, I watched a few minutes of the first episode, realized I was not its target audience, and moved on. There is a place in my world for Hallmark movies and their like, and its place is in a few weeks of December in the glow of Christmas lights and the scent of balsam fir. Otherwise, I’m not interested.
To be clear, I’m not judging anyone who is interested. We all need to do for our nervous systems what others should have helped us learn to do before. For me, that’s Survivor reruns and videos on YouTube of people making impossibly tiny dollhouse furniture or building tiny houses. For you, maybe that’s self-described “cheesy shows.”
I judge thee not. Not yucking your yum.
However, I am interested in thinking about and exploring the reasons why so many seem drawn to formulaic, one-dimensional storytelling, the sort perhaps found in TOG or Virgin River and their like (the sort, you may argue, that can also be found in Survivor reruns).
Again, without giving away the plot of TOG, its characters each play a specific role in moving the story forward and there isn’t a lot of dimension beneath their specific role. I have issues with some of the language and tropes used in the story, some of the covert politicking and name-dropping, but ultimately, people generally love that stuff. It’s confirmation bias and it makes us feel good to see our values reflected in the stories we witness. What frustrates me about the book’s success, though, is that so many people I know who love dimension, character growth, and objectively really good books and writing, also seem to love this book.
It makes me feel like I’m missing something. That I’m the one who’s off here.
It makes me question my reality.
I said to a friend who just started reading it today, “I’m looking forward to hearing what you think and secretly hoping I’m being unreasonably judgmental and the rest of the world isn’t insane. It’s been a real existential struggle for me over here…” That’s really true. I am honestly hoping he loves it and can tell me, “Lo, you’re acting a little crazy about this book. It’s not really that bad and here’s why.”
And here’s where we get to the crux of this, here’s where we get to what I really want to explore: the reality of different realities.
I have a lot of friends right now, and include myself in this, who feel like they’re living in a different reality to their family or to people who vote, think, or embrace different values.
It’s not just that there’s a smorgasbord of options in front of us all, that we can all see the same pickles and orange slices, delectable meats and cheeses, figs and nuts on the table, and can choose whatever we want for our plate. It’s that we are all standing in front of the same table and calling the items on it by fundamentally different names. What I call an apple, you call a piece of toast. What you call a pomegranate, I call a slice of roast beef. What one of us calls a balanced and healthy plate, the other calls a heaping pile of garbage.
It makes one feel crazy. It makes one feel like reality—the one right in front of them, the one they have ordered and reordered their life around—isn’t reality. Or it makes them feel like their neighbor’s reality—the one they see and order their life around—isn’t real. They’re believing something fundamentally different about what’s right in front of them. It’s definitionally either being gaslit or feeling gaslit. It’s crazy-making.
I’m reading Jared Stacy’s new book, Reality in Ruins, right now, and in the opening chapters, he writes,
Pain has forced many of us to seek answers for the loss and the loneliness. Conspiracism isn’t an academic problem to be solved in order to ‘fix people.’ It isn’t a disease that demands clinical intervention. It’s an act of storytelling that attempts to express the inexpressible, to channel fear into certainty, to narrate the complex by rendering it simple.1
What bothered me most about TOG was how the narrator rendered the complex into simple. The basest thing about a particular character became their most definitional attribute. Theo, the altruistic savior. Kendrick, the poor skeptic. Asher, the mysterious artist. As a mechanism for moving the story forward (where delving into a thousand different backstories is impossible), this narrative tool works for those who are raving about it. But I think it says something about the world we’re living in right now and why exactly this story is hitting for so many people in the year 2026.
When reality feels ruinous, and you are forced to believe either your reality is untrustworthy or your neighbor’s reality is untrustworthy, the way you stay sane is to whittle down the complexity of your neighbors to tropes. Liberal, woke snowflake. Conservative, patriarchal MAGA. Single mother, deadbeat parasite. Educated, snobbish elite. The list goes on. You have them, I have them. We all have them. And if you think you don’t have them, your reality is ruinous to someone else right now.
I read this study over a decade ago and I’ve tried a million times to find it again since, but its basic premise was that roughly 50% of people tend to think they’re right about something until absolutely proven wrong—and even then, they’ll still suspect deep down they’re still right. And 50% of people tend to think they’re wrong about something until absolutely proven correct—and even then, they’ll still reserve the right to be wrong.
As a card-carrying member of the latter group, I couldn’t believe half the world was walking around seeing the world so differently from me and so I put out an informal poll on Twitter and asked people to self-identify. Over 800 people responded and the results were split, almost exactly half and half.
I can’t stop thinking about that. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. It permeates so much of what I think about and do in the world.
We are all so, so very different.
A friend asked me recently, “Why do you think Theo of Golden is resonating with so many people?” And I had to swallow the retort rising up within me because it’s easy to see why: Because we want to live happily ever after.
I’m prepared to let go of the myriad of complex reasons why I don’t like Theo of Golden and wish you didn’t either. The truth is, I don’t need us to like the same things and I don’t actually care if you like something I don’t. The fact that we like different things is actually what is beautiful and compelling to me about the world. The fact that some people want to flatten other people into caricatures, this is what scares me about the world and I don’t want to do this about you or anyone who likes the book or cheesy Netflix shows or Survivor reruns or people who make tiny furniture. I also don’t want to do it about anyone who votes, worships, or believes differently about me, even though I do. I do. I’m not proud of that about myself, but I do flatten them and think prideful thoughts to myself (and obviously write about them on the Internet…) about them.
But the point is, I’m not sure it does any of us any good to look at what you call an orange and I call a leg of lamb and try to insist to you that it is not what you think it is. I don’t think that’s working. At least it isn’t working in my life.
I wonder instead if a better way to go about it is to look at the stories we love—both the complex ones and the simple ones—and try to understand what it is we’re looking for and longing for. That’s not difficult for me at all about TOG. It’s clear as day what people like about this cast of characters and their conclusions. Good is good, bad is bad, sorry is sorry, and it all works out in the end.
And don’t we all want that? Don’t we? I do. I suspect even my most screedy liberal friends and intolerable conservative friends want that too. I have to believe that. I have to. To disbelieve it is to dehumanize, to become animal, and regardless of what you see when you look at me, I know I am not animal. Perhaps I am part orange, perhaps part fig. I know I am a seed, I am stardust, I am a beating heart and complicated mind, I am a personality and proclivity, I am doubt and faith, I am loved and sometimes lost, I am a human bearing the image and nature of God within me and on me and through me.
I am not a trope.
And neither are you.
I didn’t want to leave you without some suggestions for other books that do what I think the author was trying to do with TOG (and perhaps succeeded in doing for many of you!):
Consider Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry—and, really, all the Port William stories, but especially Jayber
Consider Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson—and all the other ancillary stories from that world
Consider Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
Or perhaps consider my favorite read of 2025, The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans—also a sleeper book that became popular by word of mouth. We do love a good rags to riches trope, don’t we?
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Reality in Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became An American Evangelical Crisis, by Jared Stacy, pg 18
I'm so glad for your commentary about this book and all the issues it brings up! Haven't read it yet, but it's our book club pick for May and I am curious about it (I'm a literary snob as well so who knows what I'll think about it).
What you call flattening people, I've always thought of as a Venn Diagram problem (I like your term better). As in, if you homeschool, I automatically assume you're anti-vax. If you fly an American flag on your lawn, I assume you're a Christian Nationalist. (etc) I try not to be this way but the best I can do is try to argue with my assumptions. If I'm a complicated person who "contains multitudes" I should treat other people that way.
It's such a temptation to boil everything and everyone down to good or bad, wrong, or right!
I knew immediately what book this was about, and have to say - like all best pieces do, while this made me think/question/introspect, admittedly it also had me belly laughing. Because I know EXACTLY what you are saying.
I feel I’m a rare bird in that I… liked it? I didn’t loathe it, and I don’t want to start sitting at a random park bench and becoming best friends with every passerby while I get misty-eyed at the sunset.
Here’s my take: you have to completely suspend your judgment of the writing to even remotely enjoy it. Like, the writing is almost not the point? I told a friend, it is most akin to what the Shack was for me. Like it opened my soul, while not necessarily opening my mind - if that makes sense.
I did in fact weep (twice), I also did absolutely cringe at certain moments that were like drinking pure sugar water, literarily.
All to say…. You are absolutely not alone! And everyone has not lost their ability to know good writing. It’s just - in my mind - a weird and rare exception.