2008 books

11) Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, 1948
Some writers can do stream-of-consciousness stuff, others can't ("Out of what. Out of nothing. Silly that you are..."), or maybe it's an elaborate leg-pull that I just don't get. Stein wrote this attempt at a murder mystery to overcome a period of writer's block, after a series of mysterious incidents at her house in France. Her writing was already highly idiosyncratic, but this is so impenetrable and makes so little grammatical or conceptual sense from beginning to end as to render it, in my mind, essentially worthless. She herself thought it was a failure with an interesting title, and I have to agree.