Bad Books

I began a horrible novel today. (I still have questions as to whether I should feel guilty about making judgments of works that I haven't even finished or read over an 1/8th of for that matter. Should I even refrain altogether from thinking about the book until it is done, complete? Can you imagine what it would be like to be a writer and to operate under such B.S.? To write but not edit?)

It made me begin to think. To think about the best way to discern what is good and what is bad when it comes to literature. For the last, oh I dunno...ten years...I have been fed "good" stuff. And good stuff was all I wanted. Before then I devoured literature. I read books based on the title. I judged them by their covers. And then I began reading good stuff. The canon. Before it was hit and miss, but before I had read for entertainment. Now I was reading to judge.

But as I said reading this bad book after so many years of more or less good ones it made me think. Remember how in math class you would learn some principle and then apply it to a problem? or in English grammar lessons you would learn a rule and they would give you some incorrect sentence to correct? Well something that is lacking in a liberal arts approach to literature is the counterexample. I want something that sucks to give the smack down.

As I was reading along I could have filled a spreadsheet (if I knew how to use excel) with the bad metaphors, the inappropriate phrasing, the authors uncanny and lamentable self-references etc.
All of this to make me realize that I can't tell what is good until I know what's bad (and here's the catch) and vice versa.

Sounds simple enough, right? I mean, was this really worth writing a blog post about?

Well I think so, and this is why. It all made me realize that when it comes to art: If people don't fail, then we ain't got shit.

Tune in next time for: Ranch (dressing), Text (messages), and (Net)flix it