Saturday Book Discussion: Liking bad books and hating good ones
Reading lots of books in lots of genres is essential to being able to read and review critically and intelligently. But sometimes you just want comfort reading, and sometimes you just like what you like. Conversely, sometimes you can appreciate a work of literary genius even if it makes you want to gouge your eyes out.
But a lot of people seem to equate "Good" with "What I like" and "Bad" with "What I don't like," and I am wondering how prevalent this is and how it affects the way you review or rate books.
When I rate a book my ratings tend to be a combination of how much I liked the book and how objectively "good" I think it is.
"Wait a minute," I hear people saying, "'good' and 'bad' are purely subjective terms."
I would argue they are largely subjective, but not purely subjective. Let's say you loved Twilight but hated Great Expectations. That's fair and understandable (even though it's utter madness and means you have no taste and are a bad person and should feel bad and you should never be allowed to read books again), but would anyone over the age of 12 seriously argue that Twilight is better written or is, in any sense but the quality of sheer value-free entertainment, a better book?
Seriously, I don't blame people who would rather read vampire romances than Dickens. (I'm lying: I totally judge you. :P) But even someone who's not an English major can recognize that some authors use words better than others, that some books are deeper and more meaningful, that more effort and thought went into some books than others. We can argue over whether that automatically makes a book "better," but I will certainly argue that the quality of enjoyability is not the same thing as the quality of, well, quality.
F'rex, there are books I enjoy that are not well written. Besides having plot holes and characters that no one would believe could actually exist and behave like that in the real world, they just plain suffer from bad writing to varying degrees. Yet I like them because they are happy-making when I want a fun read. My current favorite example is Ian Fleming, but a recent gutting review of Justin Cronin's The Passage on Ferretbrain was, while largely accurate (the reviewer did exaggerate and dumb down a few points to make for better snarking, a frequent flaw in Ferretbrain reviews) unable to convince me that I didn't enjoy the book. Yes, it's flawed and cheesy, but I liked it and will read the sequel.
On the other hand, I would never in a million years suggest that The Passage is in any meaningful sense except my own enjoyment a better book than The Brothers Karamazov, but I know which one I'd read again and which one I'd rather chew raw than reread.
Some books are both flawed and miserable to read, and yet I can still see the genius that went into their creation and why they are classics. I pretty much hated Wuthering Heights, and it was full of both characters and plot twists that made me think Emily wrote this on her deathbed with fever eating her brain, but there is something brilliant yet deranged about it that legitimately makes it a masterpiece.
Then there are those ponderous, prize-winning "literary" novels. I've encountered quite a few thanks to my books1001 challenge. (Why yes, I do plug it at every opportunity, thank you for asking!) I'm thinking of John Banville and Philip Roth, who write sentences that make you say "Wow," characters who are real and complex human beings who could actually walk around in the real world, and books that make you want to retreat to big dumb space operas. I'm reading a J.M. Coetzee novel right now and it's like stabbing my eyeballs with pretty words that go on and on and on. Coetzee is a writer of great skill and sophistication and I hate this fucking book I really do.
This sometimes presents a dilemma for me when I am rating books I've read. If I know a book is great and well written but I hated it, does it deserve 1 star or 5? Or should I split the difference and give it 3? Usually I try to come to some accommodation: I don't give a book 1 star unless it's completely lacking in any redeeming qualities, and I don't give a book 5 stars unless it's very well written and I loved it. In other words, I take my personal enjoyment of the book into account, but I also try to evaluate it "objectively" as a literary work.
I'm not sure if I am unusual or not in this regard. I see a lot of people who seem to rate things purely based on how much they liked it. (Which I'm not saying is wrong: folks are entitled to rate books any way they like.) And I feel sorry for professional book reviewers who are supposed to pretend that they are using some sort of pure, objective, external metric to judge a book.
We can see these arguments reflected in the perennial wanking over book awards. To what degree do awards, whether the Booker or the Hugo, truly represent a clear-eyed evaluation of the candidates according to their literary merits, and to what degree are they shaded by personal preferences, fondness or antipathy for the authors, or the desire to send a "message"?
When you review a book, do you try to separate your enjoyment of it from its literary merits? Or do you believe in "literary merits"? Do you think books can be good or bad independently of whether they were good or bad to an individual reader?
Poll Good/Bad books
Previous Saturday Book Discussions.