What makes a Bad Book?
Sep. 4th, 2012 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat Brain dead, so I'm watching Master Chef with Gordon Ramsey. I'd watch cupcake wars, but it just makes me crave cupcakes, which I can't eat without...severe gastrointestinal issues. Did have some issues, because Time Warner was updating the system behind the scenes which resulted in my cable box freezing. When this happens, all you have to do apparently is unplug the box for five minutes. Replug. Wait 20 minutes. And you are good to go.
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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
From Bad books are unreadable books, in my view, irrespective of what they say. Hard-core literary theory of the 1980s must be responsible for some of the most impenetrable and jargon-ridden prose of the past quarter century: "The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere" [sic]. This is actually from one of Jacques Derrida's essays, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, but any of his books would do - along with any author who dares to call George Eliot's Middlemarch "an autonomous signifying practice". As for novels, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings every time ("'Ware! Ware!' cried Damrod to his companion. 'May the Valar turn him aside! Mûmak! Mûmak!'").
She's spot on about Derrida, I agree he is unreadable. But I beg to differ about Tolkien, that's fantasy - you figure out the meaning within the context of the paragraph. This may go back to what the guy above was saying actually.
From Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick:
Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (2006). This book demonstrates the asymmetry of academic standards. A book by a theologian speaking this ignorantly about biology would never have been published, let alone become a best-seller. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work the other way round.
LOL!
Overall the article made me happy that I decided to get a JD instead of a PH.D in Celtic Mythology. (The writer of the article is a professor of Celtic Studies. And there are a lot of poor resources in that field. I had to go to Wales and study at the National Museum of Wales to get any decent material.) There is actually someone with my full name, beginning, middle, and last, who is a Doctor of Folklore and Mythology in Wales, specializing in Celtic Mythology. I find this highly amusing. She's even published a book on the stuff. I sort of envy her - one of my three favorite places on the planet is Wales.
Beautiful country. Forget England and Scotland, hightail it to Wales. Think the rocky New England Coast, with the weather of San Fran, and Castles! (At least that's how it looked in the 1980s..it may have changed since then.) I may retire there. The rest of my family and co-workers wants to retire in Florida or South Carolina. I want to retire in Canada or Wales.
The moral of the story (besides the bit about not becoming a starving mythologist in the US) is everyone has an opinion about practically everything and they rarely agree. One person's bad book is another's best one ever. Just put those two people in a discussion thread and stand back and watch the fur fly. You don't have to go far - they are doing it on Good Reads as we speak. And you thought political discussions get mean and nasty fast.
It's sort of like taking out a group of dresses and showing them to a room of friends to see which one you should wear or keep. You'll get ten-fifteen different opinions, none are the same. This is true of books too. I've had various people read my book and none of the opinions are the same, what I'm doing is ignoring the one's that conflict, and paying attention to the one's that are in agreement. And see where I can go from there.
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.
In the chapter, she punishes Tommen by forcing him to whip his servant and playmate Patel, and if he doesn't agree to do it, he'll watch Patel get his tongue torn out. I cringed.
Tommen's crime? Being angry at his mother for stating that she wanted to tear out his wife's tongue. Cersei is starting to remind me of the evil Queen in the Snow White fairy tale. She's afraid of a younger, fairer woman taking her power away and has decided that's Margery. (No, Cersei, it's Dany...but you don't know she exists, so never mind. Cersei's problem is she is so short-sighted.)
Meanwhile, Brienne continues to be my hero, but I worry about her. What I adore about George RR Martin is he creates a broad range of characters with a broad range of body types. Brienne is a character I haven't seen in any fantasy that I can recall. She's big boned, giant of a woman, who can fight. And is constantly told how ugly she is to her face.
Yet she is warm-hearted and genuine and truly beautiful inside. The exact opposite of Cersei, which makes Jamie's relationship with both fascinating.
And yes, before anyone says it, I agree that Martin needs an editor. But I personally think they all do. Even the minimalists. What did the publishing industry do? Fire all the copyeditors and editors, and only keep the acquistions editors? It's gotten to the point that whenever I see an author thank their editor in the acknowledgements, I think, for what? Not editing the book??
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).
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
From Bad books are unreadable books, in my view, irrespective of what they say. Hard-core literary theory of the 1980s must be responsible for some of the most impenetrable and jargon-ridden prose of the past quarter century: "The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere" [sic]. This is actually from one of Jacques Derrida's essays, Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, but any of his books would do - along with any author who dares to call George Eliot's Middlemarch "an autonomous signifying practice". As for novels, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings every time ("'Ware! Ware!' cried Damrod to his companion. 'May the Valar turn him aside! Mûmak! Mûmak!'").
She's spot on about Derrida, I agree he is unreadable. But I beg to differ about Tolkien, that's fantasy - you figure out the meaning within the context of the paragraph. This may go back to what the guy above was saying actually.
From Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick:
Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (2006). This book demonstrates the asymmetry of academic standards. A book by a theologian speaking this ignorantly about biology would never have been published, let alone become a best-seller. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work the other way round.
LOL!
Overall the article made me happy that I decided to get a JD instead of a PH.D in Celtic Mythology. (The writer of the article is a professor of Celtic Studies. And there are a lot of poor resources in that field. I had to go to Wales and study at the National Museum of Wales to get any decent material.) There is actually someone with my full name, beginning, middle, and last, who is a Doctor of Folklore and Mythology in Wales, specializing in Celtic Mythology. I find this highly amusing. She's even published a book on the stuff. I sort of envy her - one of my three favorite places on the planet is Wales.
Beautiful country. Forget England and Scotland, hightail it to Wales. Think the rocky New England Coast, with the weather of San Fran, and Castles! (At least that's how it looked in the 1980s..it may have changed since then.) I may retire there. The rest of my family and co-workers wants to retire in Florida or South Carolina. I want to retire in Canada or Wales.
The moral of the story (besides the bit about not becoming a starving mythologist in the US) is everyone has an opinion about practically everything and they rarely agree. One person's bad book is another's best one ever. Just put those two people in a discussion thread and stand back and watch the fur fly. You don't have to go far - they are doing it on Good Reads as we speak. And you thought political discussions get mean and nasty fast.
It's sort of like taking out a group of dresses and showing them to a room of friends to see which one you should wear or keep. You'll get ten-fifteen different opinions, none are the same. This is true of books too. I've had various people read my book and none of the opinions are the same, what I'm doing is ignoring the one's that conflict, and paying attention to the one's that are in agreement. And see where I can go from there.
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.
In the chapter, she punishes Tommen by forcing him to whip his servant and playmate Patel, and if he doesn't agree to do it, he'll watch Patel get his tongue torn out. I cringed.
Tommen's crime? Being angry at his mother for stating that she wanted to tear out his wife's tongue. Cersei is starting to remind me of the evil Queen in the Snow White fairy tale. She's afraid of a younger, fairer woman taking her power away and has decided that's Margery. (No, Cersei, it's Dany...but you don't know she exists, so never mind. Cersei's problem is she is so short-sighted.)
Meanwhile, Brienne continues to be my hero, but I worry about her. What I adore about George RR Martin is he creates a broad range of characters with a broad range of body types. Brienne is a character I haven't seen in any fantasy that I can recall. She's big boned, giant of a woman, who can fight. And is constantly told how ugly she is to her face.
Yet she is warm-hearted and genuine and truly beautiful inside. The exact opposite of Cersei, which makes Jamie's relationship with both fascinating.
And yes, before anyone says it, I agree that Martin needs an editor. But I personally think they all do. Even the minimalists. What did the publishing industry do? Fire all the copyeditors and editors, and only keep the acquistions editors? It's gotten to the point that whenever I see an author thank their editor in the acknowledgements, I think, for what? Not editing the book??
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).