What Makes a Bad Book Good?

[sartorias]

I saw a discussion posted on this topic, but by the time I'd discovered it, it had already been taken over by some folks who wanted to brangle about whether or not Harry Potter was "bad" or "good"--each implying their own taste was the standard all should use

Comments

[antonstrout]

What do we do about authors who proclaim their own book bad *cough cough cough*?

[sartorias]

Whap 'em with a squid

[lmb4m]

Hi Anton! I just read your book the other day and really enjoyed it. You made Simon a flawed but interesting character. I get tired of all the superhumanly perfect people in many urban fantasies.

Laurel

[antonstrout]

I like flaws, not that I have any myself, but characters who are a little too perfectly kick as and such bother me... which in general makes Superman a leetle boring at times...

And I'm glad you enjoyed it... just wait to see what happens to poor Simon in book two.. sigh...

[malkingrey]

Many readers found the third of Pullman's His Dark Materials to be a bad book because the author seemed to sacrifice character, plot, setting, emotional subtlety in order to hammer home his anti-Narnia (anti-Christian) message. Many readers who loathe C.S. Lewis, Narnia, and organized religion--especially Christianity--thought the triumph of message over matter a feature, not a flaw.Pullman's mad-on at C.S. Lewis was such that he eventually ended up becoming -- at least in terms of style and structure -- the very thing he loathed. (Sort of the C. S. Lewis anti-particle, in fact.) At least it allows them both to serve as illustrative examples of what can go wrong when a writer subordinates the story to the message. Fiction as polemic is often -- I'm tempted to say "almost always", but then my own biases would be showing -- better polemic than it is fiction, and readers will like it or dislike it as much based on their general tolerance for polemic and their agreement with the writer as on the literary virtues of the fiction itself

[sartorias]

Yes. That would be yet another topic to explore--fiction as polemic, or allegory and parables, bad or good?

[ellen_fremedon]

Yes indeed. I loathe Lewis, Narnia, and Christianity every bit as much as Pullman, and I still found the last book nigh unreadable.

[sartorias]

See malkingrey's comment about polemics. That might be an interesting topic to explore.

[lacylu42]

I can get behind your hypothesis! For me, a recent one was "Twilight;" a lot of things about the writing bugged me, but the plot was so quick and the story somehow so engrossing that I was addicted. I couldn't put it down!

Part of that was probably that I didn't have to work very hard while reading it.

My writer brain knew that some of the tropes (the beautiful vampires, the heroine who doesn't realize that she's beautiful, the love at first sight, the special power over the vamp that the heroine doesn't know she has… etc.) were ridiculously clichéd, but I kept reading! Long into the night when I should have been sleeping.

I have not, however, picked up any of the sequels.

[sartorias]

Yep--these tropes are effective for a reason. What intrigues me are tropes that have fallen out of fashion, and no longer fit the culture. Looking at books that were popular but not included among classics of the past are mines of this sort of thing.

[asakiyume]

Besides the books you mentioned above, have you read any other forgotten best-sellers? I was thinking about what other tropes would sink a book like a load of bricks these days, and I though, how about White Man's Burden? Can you imagine that in a book nowadays? But then I wondered if that ever did figure as a trope, or only as a poem...

[sartorias]

Trilby (du Maurier), Dodo (Benson), the swashbucklers of Leslie Whyte, , Hugh Walpole's efforts...there are lots of them. Max Beerbohm once said something, at the height of his stellar career, about how awful it would be to be forgotten.

[asakiyume]

Here's a thought from another angle: I think sometimes the criticisms of books are tied up in as much prescriptive thinking as the (bad) books themselves. For instance, your Graustark books, there, seem, by your description, to be dominated by the willful belief that sexual innocence is like a silver bullet for reforming people and assuring a good outcome. This is silly: It's what society wanted to be true, but it's not what was true

[sartorias]

A very tall order. And I think, too, that maybe examination of this sort is the sign of the more sophisticated reader. I was rereading a YA favorite, a kabillion times in print, lauded for its spunky female lead, and wow, the easy fixes in that one! The bad guy is just always bad, and also conveniently a physical coward. The heroine walks into magical objects one, two, and three, just because of who she is. But that story richly and deeply and thoroughly thrills sixth grade readers, or it wouldn't be in its zillionth printing.

[asakiyume]

A tall order, and one I don't think we'd want to fill, not always. Maybe just occasionally. I mean, I *love* ballads, and the characters in those are not complex, and the moral reasoning is, uh... well, not what we operate under these days. But I still really love them, and I enjoy sometimes writing things in a similar vein--not exclusively, but sometimes. So yeah, I want there to be room for all kinds of literature. Sometimes I want to be able to enjoy murder and mayhem without thinking about the reality of it. But not always.

[sartorias]

Oh, totally. No one is taking my super heroes away from me, I don't care how critically scorned they are. Ditto space opera.

[avengangle]

Some people (literati, critics, etc.) assume that all books that are popular must be bad. It's easy enough, but takes too few things into account, obviously.

[sartorias]

I think sometimes the critics are so very jaded that they can't see the appeal of these books. All they see are overused patterns.

[avengangle]

And the appeal is SO very different by person or by age group.

(Oh dear -- I hope I won't ever become that jaded. Then again, I'm not a literature critic; I'm a chick who reads books she wants to read and writes a few paragraphs on them. Ah well.)

[sartorias]

I wonder if jadedness sometimes comes out of being forced into analysis mode professionally, so that the enjoyment factor gets strangled? I dunno. Generalizations are dangerous. But I'm with you. I will always like a good Cinderella story, especially if it's funny.