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

[rysmiel]

Well, for me, what makes a bad book something I will read anyway is very simple, I am a plot complexity addict. I have read some really awful series just to see how certain tangles would resolve.

I think you are right about the reinforcement of rules, and those being rules that the reader derives comfort from; whether it be readers who derive comfort from romances in which Twue Wuv triumphs over all else, or the particularly politically obnoxious books in which everyone without exception is selfish and unscrupulous and therefore the protagonists are supposedly justified in holding selfish and unscrupulous views of their own. I like to think that I am unfond of any text that advances a particular narrow range of human nature as a universal of human nature, and I certainly get cross with books which present interesting aliens (for whatever value of "not like us" is appropriately alien to the genre) but have as an underlying message that they are just like us really, particularly for values of "just like us" that read as excluding my

[asakiyume]

The notion that X, Y, or Z is just like us really can be pretty chilling for its narcissism. I suppose on a very deep level, just like us really people maybe intend it to mean inherently valuable, worthy of respect, care, and love... but when you get away from that most basic level and become any more specific, then no. Not everyone is just like us, and that's the reality we need to deal with.

[rysmiel]

I agree with you on "just like us" being shuddersomely narcissistic, but I think I am thinking of something slightly different, or on a slightly different level

[asakiyume]

Oh yes, I see what you're getting at. I find that depressing too--why couldn't the mercenary want something different. Or why can't the protagonist he's put with end up modifying his or her own outlook to be more like the mercenary's? After all, in real life influence works both ways.

Speaking of phobic reactions to human kids, have you ever seen the Mitchell and Webb skit "Fear of Children"? It's on Youtube here if you feel in the mood for a laugh!

[sartorias]

Yeah--human aliens are popular, but that's just never attracted me. (And I really tend to look askance at "aliens are just like us but better." But then I don't much care for allegory.)

[asakiyume]

Yeah, I like my aliens really alien. I liked the aliens in The Gods Themselves, and I liked the aliens in one of the short stories that comprised The Ship Who Sang--they were energy beings on a gas giant planet like Jupiter, who responded to notions of entropy in a Shakespeare play that the main characters put on for them... as I recall; it's been years since I read it...

[sartorias]

I like the aliens in the Melluch space opera--they're gross and scary and never turn out to be just trying to communicate. But they're not convenient and politically correct shooting targets, because she deals head on with human versus human, and how much that hurts.

[sartorias]

I just love stories that take some of the given rules for genre stories and play out the complexities and implications. Love, love, love.

[neile]

That's what Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry did for me. He took real human characters, turned them into the stereotype as so many genre stories do, but then showed us the emotional repercussions, the suffering involved in that. He showed us what it was like to become the Seer, to become the chosen one of the Hunt, to be involved in the Arthurian tragedy, to be the god on the tree.

It took the top of my head off so much that when people say those books are a mere Tolkien ripoff I want...to take the tops of their heads off to let some light in.

[sartorias]

The third book finally bogged for me, but there are scenes and passages in the first two that I just loved, loved, loved, and for exactly the reason you say.

[anisosynchronic]

A bunch of things in those books annoyed me, and when it went Arthurian in the last book, that was absolutely the last straw. Almost first on the the list of crap was the panty raid stuff... I probably today would shut the book and stop then and there, in any contemporary SF/F which had that and expected me to have any positive opinion and sympathies whatsoever for the perpetrators and their culture promoting it. The first "what?! Ptui!" moment that I remember, which I wouldn't have remembered except that it got mentioned on an email newsgroup I'm on, is a character named "Aileron." Yeah, sure, more right rudder -- it's a movable part of an airplane wing (apply rudder in coordination with turning and banking....) But, the look-crosswise-and-sneer at name, at least wasn't disgusting and puerile.

Yes, there was some brilliant writing and perhaps that's what kept me writing, but the content got me more and more ticked off.

[glemsydoodles]

I'm pretty fascinated by the response that the trend of "gritty, realistic superheroes" is generating. More and more I see people grumbling that they'd just like to see a good old beat-up-the-bad-guy issue once in a while, instead of Crises and funerals and all that. Sometimes, all we want is a little escapism. (For example, I don't think Tiny Titans would have even half the popularity it does if it hadn't come around when DC is killing off characters left and right.)

[sartorias]

Good point there.

[rysmiel]

I don't know that "gritty realistic superheroes" really has much of any traction in the DC universe left post-Kingdom Come, except inside Frank Miller's head; Kingdom Come is only the best and most realistic among several repudiations of it that come to mind. I think that insofar as people care to do "realism" in mainstream superhero comics now there is a tendency to see that "realism" differently from the late 80s/early 90s angstfests - well, except for the teenage soap-opera angst which was in X-Men and related titles long before grim-and-gritty became big and which is most of why I'm not interested in that set of titles.

[wild_patience]

Funny, my nephew-in-law sent me home from Easter with the Infinite Crisis and Red Son collections. I enjoyed them.