This Book Sucks

If all we can say about a book that we read is that it sucks or it was good, then we've failed.  Nathan Bransford talked about The One Question Writers Should Never Ask Themselves When Reading this past week, and while he was specifically talking about writers-as-readers, I'm mostly going to talk about readers in general.  Got that?

NB's question to be avoided was "Do I like this?"  Readers in general can ask themselves that question, sure, but they owe it to themselves to give more than a yes/no answer.  "Yes I liked it" or "no I didn't" is different from "it sucks" anyway.  The first two are statements about your reading experience.  The other is  a judgment that you pass on the writer.  We tend to use the two interchangeably, but we shouldn't be so sloppy;  we don't like our writers to be sloppy and careless, so we shouldn't be that way as readers.

It's a two-way street.

Even as a non-writer reader you should be able to articulate why you liked or disliked a piece of writing.  You should also be able to admit that your feelings were not all one-sided:  you didn't like the ending, but wished one of the minor characters was available to be your best friend, say.  There's something of value in everything we read.  If we can't see it, it's because we're deficient somehow.  We're blind, deaf, ... dumb.

And even if you loved a book, you have to be honest about its failings.  And it's got failings -- nothing's perfect.

As writers we can learn from what worked for us in someone else's work, and what didn't.  Did the story seem to be all setup until halfway through when things finally started to happen?  That's what I'm finding with "The Windup Girl".  I'll be sure to guard against that in my own writing.  The author manages a huge cast of diverse characters.  Too many for me to keep track of, almost.  But all those characters packed into a sweltering, teeming, sweaty city of decaying slums add to the claustrophobic setting of the book.  I never thought of the cast complementing the setting in quite that way before.

As non-writer readers, it makes sense to notice the same sorts of things.  If you stop reading when a story drags, you'll never hang tight and finish any of the books whose action doesn't kick in until the second half.  Reading with a critical eye gives a deeper experience.  The writer didn't bang out that book in a week or two, so you can take a few minutes during your week or two of reading it to examine it.  That way, even if you read a book that sucks, you'll still have profited by the reading.