On Reading “Bad” Books

No, I have not sunk this low. Yet.

A question which was asked of me recently, which kind of rekindled my desire to write to this blog, went something like this:

Johnny Slick, oh you who are the greatest of great men, and who have impeccable literary tastes among other things… why do you read bad books? Is not life too short for that crap?

The short answer to that last question is, for the most part, “yes, life really is too short to waste your time reading an entire damn book that you don’t like”. That being said, I think it’s useful to unpack this question and the entire experience around it.

First and foremost, I’m a bit of a fan of bad movies, thanks in large part to these guys. There are lots and lots of reasons why, for instance, a bad horror movie can still be funny, or a bad drama, or really anything but a bad comedy. That being said, movies are not books, and while I think there’s a market, particularly in our post-MST3K world, for that kind of thing, there is a huge difference between investing an hour and a half on your time on something that is inexpertly done and 10 hours. Even aside from the pure time investment aspect of it, shit just gets old, yo.

That being said, there are several 1-star books in here already and there figure to be even more in the future. I certainly do not finish every book that I start. I’ve failed to finish a lot of pretty decent books for various reasons and I have no compulsion to read every page of a book that I find irredeemably crappy. So why do these 1-star reviews exist? I’ll tell you straight up, they aren’t for the benefit of you the reader. No offense, I’m sure you’re a nice person and all, but I can tell you that in pretty much all of these reviews, what I was going to tell you about the book didn’t even cross my mind when I was reading it. So… without further adieu, allow me to elucidate some of the main reason I find myself reading a bad book:

It didn’t seem bad at the time. I think the furthest I’ve gone back in a review that I’ve published so far was Ender’s Game, which I last read when I was still in college.* That book, I gave 3 stars to, but I doubt I would be nearly as nice to, for instance, the Warren Murphy/Richard Sapir Destroyer novel series**. I loved that series when I was a kid but even without having re-read the books I am 100% positive that they were really trashy and proably not a very good time for me today. I have noticed in my particular case there is a very sharp dividing line of taste between books that I enjoyed before I seriously studied literature for 3 years and those that I enjoy afterward. I put up with a lot more garbage because I didn’t know any better and conversely didn’t read a lot of what I think are really awesome books because, well, I didn’t know better.

There was some saving grace that kept me at it. I recently read not just one, not just two, but two and a half episodes of Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files. People, these books are terrible. Terr. I. Ble. The “style”, in the Hemingway sense where style is all the mistakes that the author makes on a sentence-to-sentence basis, is laughably bad at spots, the characters tend towards the flat and wooden in the sense that cars tend towards the wheeled, and even the central idea that sparked the first book – a wizard in modern-day Chicago who makes a living as a private detective – was completely botched because Butcher clearly had not actually read detective novels before writing one. But I kept reading. Why? I have to admit, I found the milieu cool enough to wade past all the bad stuff. The same reason I got a whole season and a half through Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I guess. It didn’t hurt that the books were bad and quick rather than bad and slow.

My mind turns here to the great soliloquy by Anton Ego in the movie Ratatouille. The exact line is:

Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist *can* come from *anywhere*.

This applies, I think, even within the context of an otherwise forgettable piece of art. Possibly the most powerful war-related piece of cinema ever created occurs during the first 15 minutes of the very, very average Saving Private Ryan; in fact, I think that bit has led a lot of people to believe that this was a much better film than it actually was. In the case of Butcher, I was compelled by the cool world he created for his readers as well as all of the research he conducted (not to mention the way he was able to slide this research fairly seamlessly into his writing, not an easy task considering how much of a struggle it appeared to be for him to slide anything else in there). Although I’m firmly convinced that the books are not good (I’m told by some that they get better), they are at least interesting failures.

You don’t always realize a book is bad until it’s too late. This is the Stephen King category. Some writers are very compelling stylistically and/or can craft a story really, really well, but when you finish their book you realize that the whole was not equal to the sum of its parts. It’s hard for me to think of an equivalent of this outside of the medium of the novel; a video game with a crap story can still be well worth the 40 hours you put into it if the mechanics are fun, and genres like film or short stories go by quickly enough that the calculus of enjoyability/payoff are too closely linked to really pull apart. I guess the TV show Lost might be a good example of what I’m referring to here (although I never watched that show so I couldn’t tell you for sure).

I do have to say that this is possibly my least favorite reading experience. At least a book that’s bad on all counts compels me to put it down before I’ve wasted so much time on it. A well written bad book, on the other hand, represents countless hours which, frankly, feel wasted at the end.

There is a certain value in playing “what if”. One of the things that got me through the first book in Dresden Files was that, unlike the author, I’ve read a fair number of detective/noir novels and as such I’m aware of the cliches/pitfalls throughout them. It was to some extent a fun exercise, then, to think “well, in this part the protagonist talks to a straight-up damsel in distress who turns out to be nothing more than the damsel in distress she’s portrayed as. What if she was a femme fatale instead? That’s also kind of a played cliche, but at least it would give this woman some agency of her own.” Admittedly, my status as a failed author probably feeds into a lot of this, but even if you never intend to write a fantasy novel set in Chicago of your own, it can be an interesting intellectual aside to think of what you would do to “fix” a failed book. I’m not saying this is enough to make some trashy romance novel readable*** but it might be enough to make a slightly unenjoyable book enjoyable.

Because “guilty pleasures” exist. There is an argument that there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure – that there is just plain pleasure and that’s it – and while I’m sympathetic to the thought processes behind that line of reasoning, I have to disagree with the conclusion. There are well-written novels I like and there are less than well written novels that I like, and I would be remiss if I didn’t recommend the former to more people than the latter. “Popcorn” movies exist; why can’t “popcorn” books? Granted, if a book doesn’t try for much but more or less succeeds, I’m not liable to give that book a one-star rating, but if pressed I could probably come up with a couple of examples of very, very bad books that I would nonetheless re-read and have a good time with.

This was probably a bit longer than future Soapbox Saturday(!) posts will be but I had a lot to get off of my chest. OKAY!?

*Because I was a bit of a loser and didn’t get my worthless degree in English/creative writing until I was 29, this is a bit later than you might think. It’s still a good decade ago, though, and… crap, I just gave away how old I am, didn’t I.

**Actually, I’d need to re-read at least one of those before putting out a review because roughly 80% of what I remember from them, I actually remember from watching Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Which, by the way, I did NOT READ by the light of a lava lamp!!!

***Or, if you’re into trashy romance novels, insert something else here, like Louis L’Amour westerns. I am not casting aspersions on romance specifically!