Friday, August 25

What makes a book good?

While waiting for a top-secret, aka public, meeting of the New York Inquirer to begin, I cruised the Barnes and Noble a block away. It was raining, so I took my sweet time checking out the staff recommendations on the first floor (the escalator was out). On each shelf — fiction, non-fiction, classics, New York, "interesting," etc. — I saw two or three books that I have read.

My responses intrigued me. For instance, I saw The Effect of Living Backwards by Heidi Julavits, a book I did not enjoy while I read it - but its themes are burnt into my head. I also saw two David Sedaris books, Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day, books I remember loving, but I can't recall a single episode from either of them. Sedaris may be a bad example, because his writing is purposely disposable, but what to make of Julavits? My experience with her book is almost the opposite of what I'm going through now with The Great American Novel. For whatever reason, I'm kind of having a rough go with it, but I only have good things to say about it, whereas I plowed through TEOLB despite my disdain for a lot of what was going on. The tricky part is that I remember a lot of it, and I would say it's a good book if you want to see the effects of shame. In some ways, it's kind of like Anchorman. I like quoting Anchorman, but I've never found it particularly funny when I watch it. That's obviously a strike against it, but with its sticking power, how big of a strike is it?

9 comments:

Ben said...

A good book is a book that finds the right reader. It is as simple as that. Geach would agree with me, in part, right?

What makes a book good for you is a separate question that only you can answer.

What makes a book good for the masses is a still another question, this one having too many answers to bother with.

The notion of sticking power is something that resides on the periphery of “goodness.” There are so many reasons that an idea, a scene, or an entire plotline can linger in your head. I often find that the films I react negatively towards are the ones I that I wake up thinking about the following morning. The ones that are merely good are good and I move on. The ones that I love I remember always. But why do I waste time considering things I don’t like? Am I trying to convince myself that I really do like them? Am I searching for something, anything to appreciate about the film? I don’t know, but some movies that are not good have incredible staying power. Books, on other hand, I do not have such a relationship with. If I dislike a book it is forgotten.

I, too, remember almost nothing from Me Talk Pretty One Day. I've mentioned how much I am enjoying the Murakami short stories that I've been reading. I enjoy these stories because they are bizarre, fun and disposable. They are valuable only insofar as they provide me with smiles during the short period of time we're acquainted. I think that a Sedaris essay or a Murakami short story might be disposable due in large part to the role of the reader. When we read something that we expect to be light and inconsequential we set ourselves up to be lazy readers. A lazy reader will not pass a reading comprehension quiz years down the line. When we read something we expect to challenge, inspire, or make us think, we offer it with more of our brain: It is not disposable because we don’t treat it as though it is disposable.

Perhaps an example everyone can relate to: The Da Vinci Code. The single most disposable book I have ever read. For others, so much staying power that they own piles of books about the book. I read it and by the time I returned the copy to my father it was forgotten. Meanwhile, my father has read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the illustrated Da Vinci Code and the Gnostic Gospels. We both thought it was a good book, but clearly his brain was more generous in terms of welcoming in the plot's particulars. Neither response is better than the other and it’s a good book by any measure I know. It seems as though staying power is entirely up the individual and his or her expectations.

Of course there is also the issue of when we engage in a work. In a different mood or at a different time in our lives, we are certainly likely to have a vastly different response to the very same book. For the author there is no accounting for this: the expectations, the concentration of the reader, the mood of the reader, the place the reader is at in their life.

Ben said...

Hmmm, I think book finding right reader is a rather simple concept. What is not simple is what makes the reader right for the book. I'm placing more of the emphasis on each reader's sense of what makes a good book for them rather than trying to explain what I think makes a book good in general. If my conception of goodness has an intrinsic quality about it, I would submit that the intrinsic quality belongs just as much to the reader as to the book.

When we ask, "good for what," why can't we simply answer, "good for the enjoyment of the reader"? Would that defeat the entire purpose of this discussion? Perhaps, but that's what I believe it boils down to. What is any hobby good for? Escapism or edification, whatever the goal, reading is not unlike other hobbies, and just as with other hobbies the payoff for each individual is unique.

As for Murakami, he's definitely not for everyone. Having read just four of his books I am far from an expert. Some find him cold. A good portion of his writing borders on science fiction and I think often that coldness serves the story well. It's not unfair of you to criticize some of his language for being dull--but you should not take away from your skimming that all his writing is this way, because it's not. His dullness and banality, like the coldness, are intentional, and are used to juxtapose the rich and bizarre goingson. I find his writing very clever in this regard. His language is clean and decisive, his stories are rather kooky. His writing is beautiful, but rarely elegant--does that make sense? He makes me laugh because I appreciate his surrealism and his deadpan humor. I appreciate how he takes stories that are set in the most ordinary of domestic settings and creates worlds that are recognizable as our own, but a few beats off a rhythm we are familiar with. His style is as unique as his stories and there is value for me in submiting to his universe.

I can't say I like your tendency to skim books and dismiss them. To me it seems akin to watching a movie in fast forward and concluding that it just doesn't interest you. But, I will say that Murakami and Mitchell are very likely to be writers that are not good for you, so perhaps your skimming skills are effective a weeding out the books that you would rather pass on. I certainly cannot criticize you for being a selective reader. There are far too many books that do suit us to spend any significant amount of time on those that do not.

Bryan said...

I learned more while reading those posts than I did in all of college. And you think I'm joking. I had to make talking points to respond to everything, so here it goes:

Louis, you're obviously right when you say our reactions to books are contextual - our reactions to everything are contextual. If I read a book this week, will I like it? How about next week? I do find that books tend to overcome a little bit of that context in the long run because, since it takes them a while to read, the context in which they are read becomes a larger sample size of the greater context of the reader's life. Now, those two weeks or two months are also highly contextual, but they're more representative than, say, three hours.

I do agree with Ben that a "good" book is one that finds the right reader, but I don't think his other question ("What makes a book good for the masses?") is as difficult as he makes it sound or as philosophically difficult as Louis makes it sound. A "good" book for the masses finds the most right readers, and a "great" book - here's the rub - finds the right readers over a long period of time, over several generations of personal contexts. Now, to any individual reader, Shakespeare may be crap, but insofar as the word "good" exists, it's probably best to apply it to items that best fit its Merriam-Webster definition ("of a favorable character or tendency").

That leads directly into the philosophical question of what something means to be "good" and whether instrinsic "goodness" actually exists, two questions I didn't foresee when I made this post but are the appropriate ultimate questions to ask. I agree with Louis that nothing is intrinsically good, even if it's hard for me to do so: I've had this argument before, and I used to argue that there was a "good" without context, and I'm afraid that it's an impossible argument to make unless you invoke religion (and even then, you're still wrong). However, you cannot limit the idea of "good" to philosophical discussions. There is a real-world application. When a book such as Hamlet or The Sun Also Rises or whatever you want, really, reaches the wholly subjective level of "Classic" (as determined by some publisher, critic or Barnes & Noble nose-ringed, slightly goth, strangely hot employee), it has done so by being labelled as "good" by enough people for enough time that it obviously appeals to people in hundreds of thousands of contexts, with no sign of becoming "dated" - while it's not necessarily accurate to call this a "good" book in the stricly philosophical sense, it has certainly reached the right reades (of whom there are more, because of its "good"ness) for long enough that the distinction between calling it a "Classic" or "good" book moves toward the zero point. Even if you as the reader don't like it, it will have provoked discussion and emotion for long enough and among most people that it would be unfair to criticize it (unless it's really bad, like The Da Vinci Code). Getting back to my initial post, I guess that makes The Effect of Living Backwards a "good" book for now, seeing as it's beloved by many others. Perhaps I'll love it in another context 10 years from now. Or perhaps it will have faded away.

Louis, I also skim books, and the other day I read the Introduction to Franzen's How To Be Alone in which he says that he went a little bit overboard in the days ofThe Corrections, and that he realizes that his dystopian view of society was either wrong or silly, but most of all, not all that helpful.

Bryan said...

Half-Nelson has also been recommended to me. Though I know Louis won't watch it, I'll recommend the defunct TV series Undeclared, by Judd Apatow, writer of Freaks & Geeks and The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, of which I watched several episodes this weekend. It's funny and "good," and actually tackles the question of what is ultimately "good" in one episode. It's true.

Bryan said...

Finally, I also learned who Leigh Lezark is this weekend, and while I would almost certainly find her to be the most offensive type of person imaginable in a social setting, she is most assiduously not ugly. Though one wonders what years of drug use will do. Google away.

Bryan said...

I would say I overstated my position on the Da Vinci Code to placate Ben, having not read his post close enough - I have no real problem with it, but I can see how people would think it's bad literature. As BAG said to me just now, "silly, harmless entertainment." Or something like that.

Ben said...

Just a few quick ideas I hope to better articulate before me move on:

1) Louis and I may be closer in opinion than he thinks. When I say, "good for the enjoyment of the reader," I do not mean to imply that that good is good for anything. Escapism mostly. That's why I tried to place writing on the same level as any hobby. Perhaps it is ultimately meaningless, but it still has much value within a life. This leads us back to the satisfaction and productivity line of thinking, which I like.

2) When I said "What makes a book good for the masses is still another question, this one having too many answers to bother with," I wasn't really trying to dismiss it as an impossible concept to unravel. All I hoped to get across was that I think there are too many variables to play around with for me to concern myself with the why and how of widely popular books in general. Certainly with any given book one could identify particular traits that make it so accessible to such a wide audience, but to attempt to formulate a kind of template for mass popularity would unravel your brain more than it would the issue at hand. The qualities that Louis outlined above: "recognizable style, literary innovation, the proliferation of striking metaphors, a memorable scene, a surprising plot twist, a character the reader can strongly identify with, etc." are certainly helpful, but a book could conceivably have all of those things and still not become "a good book for the masses." Too many answers to bother with.

Ben said...

So we might not be as close as I had supposed. But I believe the gulf is made mostly of semnatics. No matter the case, I am a little tuckered out in regards to discussing the topic. I don't even know whether I believe in what I believe.

As for the last point, I agree completely that the qualities you mentioned "style, innovation, etc." are valuable for the individual to use in order to put their finger on what about a book they enjoy. I brought up the idea of the difficulty with a checklist or template simply to expound on my statement about the futility of trying to predict or define what a book popular to masses might be.

Ben said...

Also, Franzen sounds like a total ass.