Good or Bad

At first I wasn't even going to open the link in my inbox that said, "How do I know if a book I don't like is really bad, or if it's just me?" (here). Seriously? Doesn't seem like a very good vector from which to write an article. I was wrong. Although there were no epiphanies, there were two passages that caught my eye and made me think.

The first speaks to me if only cause I'm worried that my own novels might be classified as " a construction, an arbitrary, lifeless invention that moves ploddingly and clumsily, like the puppets of a mediocre puppet master whose threads, manipulated by their creator, are in full sight, exposing them as caricatures of living beings." a quote from Mario Vargas Llosa in "Letters to a Young Novelist" that is quoted in the article.

The second passage I noted encapsulated my own thoughts precisely. I thought that The Great Gatsby is over-rated too.

The American Book Review has a series of short essays on bad books by 40 writers that cover everything from The Da Vinci Code" ("formulaic knockoff") to "The Great Gatsby" ("the worst novel in American literature"). Here I learned that Donald Barthelme called bad books "buckets of peanut butter with a layer of whipped cream on top" and that D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love" struck one scholar as what would have happened if "someone put a gun to Nietzsche's head and made him write a Harlequin romance." I liked "The Great Gatsby" so I don't advocate trying to regulate fiction as a Mrs. L.H. Harris did in 1906. "Every novelist should be required to hold a license certifying to decency of imagination and a sense of moral responsibility," Mrs. Harris wrote.

These articles always make me think about my Harry Potter hating friend Bill. He discounts Harry Potter even as a bridge book to a more reading. I don't go that far. I see value even in bad writing, what I don't like is when no one can tell me what they specifically like about it and why it's good.