What makes a Bad Book?

( personal )

Good Reads is depressing me in regards to books. So I'm ignoring the forums and discussion threads from this point forward. And only paying attention to the quizzes and friends reviews. It's also posed the question - what is a bad book or a badly written book? How would you define such a thing? And have I written them? Probably, but at least they aren't published. (And, God, I don't want to know. Hence the depression. If you think I write badly, don't tell me. The worst critique I got on a fictional book that I wrote, was from someone I met online who stated: "well some people just are better at writing essays than fiction, maybe you should stick with that" (ouch).

Read this link provided by oursin - regarding how academics view bad books (proving that everyone has an opinion on this topic, but no one agrees):

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=418955

This made me laugh, well the last paragraph did at any rate:

From Susan Bassnett, professor of comparative literature in the department of English at the University of Warwick

What makes a bad book? Well, sometimes it isn't the book itself, it is where we as readers happen to be at the time we encounter it. We might rate a book bad and then years later reassess our views, or vice versa. I recently gave away a pile of books I had never been able to finish, all of which had "postmodernism" or "postcolonial" somewhere in the title, because in the 1990s those were fashionable buzzwords.

Somewhere on my shelves is a book about aliens visiting the Earth and drawing the Nazca Lines (in Peru), which attracted a global readership and must have made the writer a lot of money.

High on my list of Really Bad Books are two best-sellers: Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, both of which I rate as dreadfully badly written. Brown wrote to a computer game formula: solve one level and move on to the next, whereas Mantel just wrote and wrote and wrote. I have yet to meet anyone outside the Booker panel who managed to get to the end of this tedious tome. God forbid there might be a sequel, which I fear is on the horizon.

Hee. I can think of at least three people who finished Wolf Hall and enjoyed it, including my own father (who granted likes long non-fiction novels that are incredibly detailed and a bit on the ponderous side, he's right now reading the latest Lyndon Johnson bio, which goes into detail regarding what Lyndon was thinking at the exact moment John F. Kennedy was shot in front of him, including the time stamp.)

And from Thomas Docherty, professor of English and comparative literature, University of Warwick

I don't think that the world is full of bad books, but I do think that it is full of books that have not yet found a reader adequate to the task of reading them. And I am, of course, one such reader. The real task is not to make ungenerous judgement from a position of critical superiority but rather to find a critical humility that allows for the possibility of reading, for the necessity of re-reading and, above all, to respond to the great call from Rainer Maria Rilke that, when faced with art, "you must change your life".

While I'd say I generally agree, I'm guessing he most likely is not referring to the books offered for 99 cents on the Amazon Kindle.

Valerie Sanders, professor of English at the University of Hull
( What is a Bad Book or Unreadable Book according to some experts in the field of literary criticism )

2) In other news...I'm moving along in Feast of Crows - changed my mind about Cersei again. She does something reprehensible in the chapter I was reading that reminded me of what a sadistic selfish bitch she can be. I really feel sorry for poor kind Tommen. And Cersei created Joffrey, no doubt about it, granted Robert helped, but she definitely had an effect.
( spoilers for Feast of Crows )

3) Rather liked the keynote speech by Julian Castro at the Democratic Convention. Yes, it's mainly rhetoric. But at least it's rhetoric that I agree with and makes me proud to be American, and not spike my blood pressure or make me want to throw fruit and rotten meats at people (amongst other things).