I am not one of those women.

In my humble opinion, pregnancy bites. Even an easy pregnancy like mine bites. The nausea, the heartburn, the nasty taste in your mouth, the chronic impaction, the sciatica, the exhaustion, the bloating, the stretching of every muscle and all the skin between your neck and your thighs, the way your body becomes this foreign entity with a mind all its own that slowly turns you into a pin-headed whale. I don’t know, somehow I’m just not feeling beautiful.

But the worst thing about pregnancy is the books it ruins.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I read A Prayer for Owen Meany. Half a dozen people whom I esteem had raved about it, and I decided to read it even though I generally don’t like contemporary American fiction (I know; ironic, isn’t it, for a contemporary American writing fiction…). Anyhoo, I’m sure Owen Meany is a good book, but I confess I can’t even think about it without feeling nauseated. What a waste.

Right now, for my book club, I’m reading Vanity Fair, a book I’ve wanted to read for years but never worked up the nerve to (it’s 698 pages with not nearly enough white space or a big enough typeface for a woman who wears bifocals), so I figured the accountability of my book club would force me to read it. I’m halfway through, and I can’t think about it without – you guessed it – feeling nauseated. I might finish it, but I doubt I’ll be reading it again, ever. Another waste of a perfectly good book.

So, in the interest of not ruining any more good books, I am hereby soliciting the titles of really bad books that I can read, books that are so bad they deserve to be associated with nausea. Anyone got a good (er, bad) one?

That richly satisfying ending transfigured the whole rest of the book, which I’d found a bit of a slog while I was reading.

As I ruminated why I’d felt this way, I realized that only the narrator hinged all the various subplots together, which made the book feel really disconnected and scattered. (This may have been the author’s intent, but as a reader I found it off-putting and distracting.)

But in spite of the slog and the randomness of the story, I’m actually glad I was stuck with no other reading material, because it meant I got to read that beautiful ending. I just wish the first 200 pages of the book had been as compelling and powerful.

Moral: All subplots must relate to the main plot and to each other in multiple places. Otherwise the story feels disjointed, the subplots seem tacked on, and the book feels thin. The connections among plot and subplots can be symbolic or visual (recurring images, for instance), but they must be clear, and they need to appear early on and keep building throughout the novel, so it feels like a tightly woven whole.

One of them is considered a classic of 20th century American literature, the kind of book that English majors are forced to read in their American lit courses. (I managed to skip that class, took Major Southern Writers instead and still didn’t have to read this book, lucky me—until I chose to, last week. Ugh.)

I actually liked the story and the writing was beautiful, sometimes stunningly so, but I got tired of the main character wandering around, describing her surroundings, and ruminating. I wanted something to happen.

To be fair, some of the ruminations worked well, created a shorthand in the story that the author could then use to describe or encompass the present action, which was very effective. But most of the ruminations and descriptions drew attention to themselves and away from the story.

It could have been a powerful and haunting book. As it was, it grew wearing and tedious. I just wanted the author to get on with the story. When she did, it was good. When she didn’t, I actually skipped whole paragraphs (which is blasphemous, a sacrilege)—I was that bored.

Moral: I must be ruthless with my own writing. Beautiful prose will only carry a reader so far, and she will only tolerate it for so long if it’s digressing from the story. Cut. Cut. Cut.