What Makes a Bad Book?

“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.” - Aldous Huxley

In my opinion, a bad book is one that’s impossible to follow, has unbelievable characters, or a plot that never develops. According to The American Book Review and their Top 40 Bad Books List, there is so much more involved in the selection. The bad book reviews were given by a variety of college professors. I admit some of the reviews were way over my head. I had no clue what they were talking about.

Though I don't necessarily agree with their comments, I've listed a few of my favorite remarks about the authors and books that made theTop 40.

Ian Fleming’s novels consist entirely of clichés, coordinating conjunctions, and appositives. No renaissance man, commander Bond is nobody, a super zero (“a neutral figure,” Fleming calls him) who lives to advertise a watch—set, as they are in magazines, to ten past ten. He’s a “secret agent” who tells anyone his name. Being an agent, he cannot act for himself, and going everywhere, he has no real home and lives in a no-man’s land where every side has another side, a third side that can be the second side of the first two sides, so that the opposing sides often find themselves on the same side. (With Ian Fleming’s great success, I don’t think he’d care that his name appeared on this list.)

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates - Why is it bad? Because it’s tricked so many into thinking it’s good. (Though depressing, I didn’t think of this as a bad book so I’m one of tricked readers.)

Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence “It’s like someone put a gun to Nietzsche’s head and made him write a Harlequin romance.”

Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852)—so extravagantly mannered as to be barely readable, and yet so exquisitely conceived, so archly comic that you can emerge from its pages at last and think that the whole assemblage is pretty good; somehow the fact that the book is bad becomes either irrelevant or else important in a whole new way. (I don’t know about you, but that makes me want to add this one to my to-read list.)

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992) comes immediately to mind. I think of it as a romance novel for men, his trilogy included. Like all good romance novel writers, McCarthy uses clichés and derivative characters to sell millions of copies. He gives men a romanticized view of manliness. McCarthy wraps his characters in half-truths and idealized anecdotes, much like Jackie Collins does, only his are about the Lone Star State, the border, and its cowboy myths.

Frankenstein is a book made great by its badness. We cannot do without it.

If badness is related to perceived greatness, then I offer The Great Gatsby (1925) as the worst novel in American literature.

Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874)—that’s my pick for a bad book. His friends told him to hide it away, not to publish it, and while it’s tempting to romanticize any negative reception of a great artist, in this case I think they were right. It just isn’t a good book.

But is anything as bad as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003)? This formulaic knock-off of fascistic conspiracy theories is a trite study for a film script—and no wonder the movie was also bad. I love the chapters that are only a couple of lines long. Again, it is a book whose publishers flooded the preview/review market with thousands of free copies. Yet for many of my students, it is the book that brought them into the English major. For others, it is the only book they’ve ever enjoyed reading. IS it possible that even a Bad Book can do Good? (I admit, I've enjoyed all of Dan Brown's books.)

What constitutes a bad book to you? Do you have a book you think should be on the Top Bad Books list?

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Huxley, American Book Review, Top 40 Bad Book List, Ian Fleming, D. H. Lawrence, Frankenstein, Great Gatsby, Dan Brown,

Great Expectations

“Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.” – Charlotte Brontë

After reading Monday’s post by Helen Ginger, “The Lost Book,” on Straight From Hel, I found myself wondering what it must be like to be Dan Brown, his agent, or his publisher this week.

As a fiction writer, I think I have a fairly good imagination. However, I simply can’t conceive of how it must feel to have a book released to such fanfare. The book became available on the 15th and has been a regular news item on local and national stations both before and after the release. Some bookstores opened at midnight so people could grab their copy immediately.

Is Dan worried that with all the hype his book won’t live up to readers’ expectations? Does it keep him awake at night? Since it’s already a best seller, and will probably stay that way for weeks if not years, does he care about whether or not he meets someone else’s expectations? Has he already put this book out of his mind so he can work furiously on his next blockbuster? Maybe if he had his own blog, I could find the answers to all my questions, but my limited search did not come up with one.

The article, “Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol’: Why is the book biz so scared?” appeared in EW.com last month. The following is the first paragraph.

"There’s been much fulminating in the books world lately that The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, is bad for publishing. This week, former Publisher’s Weekly editor Sara Nelson even dubbed Brown a “Book Killer.” The theory is that Brown’s readers will only troop into stores (or go online) starting Sept. 15 to buy Symbol, probably at a deep discount, and they won’t buy anything else. Worse, the critics argue, the hubbub surrounding Symbol will drown out media coverage of other books — and eat into sales of those books too. So publishers have supposedly been shuffling the release dates of various titles so they don’t have to go head-to-head with the Dan Brown juggernaut."

I agree with Thom Geier, the author of the article, when he went on to say. “It doesn’t take a Harvard symbologist to see that this is mostly sour grapes and a whole lot of hooey.”

I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code and I plan to read The Lost Symbol, but I didn’t feel the need to stand in line at midnight to purchase it. Actually, I can’t think of anything I’d stand in line for at midnight. I take that back, I can’t think of anything that could get me out of the house at that hour line or no line. Besides, I have a feeling the book will be around for quite some time.

Did you venture out to be one of the first to own a copy? If you bought it, did you buy or look at any other books? What do you think of dubbing Dan Brown as a “Book Killer?”

Thanks for stopping by.

Tags: Bronte, Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, Helen Ginger,