Biggest Disappointment of 2006

Continuing the Best Books of 2006 list, I’ll have to throw one negative on the list: the biggest disappointment. Here, the award goes to Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi, which felt overly intuitive and self-referential. I’ve been at conferences where Ferrazzi was the keynote speaker (though I missed hearing him speak), and I’ve been excited to read this book for awhile, but I didn’t get anything else out of it that wasn’t on the book jacket.

For fiction disappointments, I’d pick Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, which I found dull and meandering. I loved his Everything Is Illuminated, so this was an especially big letdown.

Any recommendations of books to avoid? Those are welcome too, and if you post a comment, it’s eligible for an entry to win any one of the books recommended on the blog this month. Given the backlog of books I have to read and the multiplying numbers of media sources out there, some recommendations of what to skip can be even more valuable.