I’m usually reading a few books at once. I’ve been chunking through Fellowship of the Ring for ages, a bit at a time, and I love it but it demands real attention. I read Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett because I needed something a little easier, and my god it’s just a fun read. And I recently finished Morgan is My Name by Sophie Keetch, a feminist retelling of the early life of Morgan le Fay, which I just didn’t find very engaging.

A sensible perspective would be that I probably should have dropped the last of those three and maybe focus on things I am enjoying. Very reasonable, hard to argue with, didn’t happen. In fact, when I look at summaries of my reading for the past month or year, I’m often a little disappointed if my average rating is too high. Now and then I want to be reading stuff I’m not enjoying.

a variety of ideas

Sometimes I don’t like a book because it’s presenting ideas I somehow consider wrong. Sometimes, like with a lot of junky self-help books, it’s simply presenting dubious information as fact. I’ve read a weird number of mediocre books on longevity and, well, you kind of need to read a bunch of them to figure out which bits are actually helpful. Diet with simple carbs and veggies, social connections, active lifestyle? All pretty consistent across books, all pretty consistent with other advice, probably good to follow up with. Random assortments of vitamins and suggestions to have a few drinks a week? Maybe less so.

Here it’s not so much the comparison across books, but the comparison with a broader body of knowledge. I get lots of advice from my doctor, from my therapist, from various studies I’ve stumbled across in other research, from generally looking into different hobbies and lifestyles, and finding new places where that knowledge connects in is helpful with reinforcement of existing information. Likewise, it helps to point out where the authors are probably stretching things a bit - it’s probably not the sake that helps with longevity, but the implied social interaction and the stress reduction.

Slightly different is when a book is presenting ideas that I simply don’t agree with. Last year I read The Art of War, and it was a mixed experience. My translation felt kind of goofy in spots, which never helps, but much of the advice seemed like it was of dubious relevance to modern society and the fact that it is apparently commonly read in business courses seemed questionable. Still, the fact that I didn’t enjoy reading the book, with both middling advice and middling presentation, doesn’t mean I didn’t gain any value from it. Disagreement provokes thought, and especially thinking about how the teachings about deception are taken up in the business and political worlds gave me some understanding of, well, the current state of things.

a variety of styles

I wouldn’t call Ulysses by James Joyce an enjoyable read for me. It’s dense. It’s rambling. It’s generally a bit confusing. I don’t have enough understanding of the politics of the era to understand what Joyce keeps going on about, nor the breadth of reading to understand all his references, nor the skills in Latin or French to understand all the times he slips into one or the other for a sentence or two, nor more than the vaguest clue what half of the words he makes up are actually supposed to communicate.

What it does give me, despite all this, is some of the prettiest prose I’ve ever read, and a view into how an author can present themselves across a broad ranges of styles and techniques.

I like to write. I’m not exactly brilliant at it, but I enjoy writing things and I enjoy working to improve over time and I enjoy seeing how others write their stories. A work like Ulysses, which presents me with something very different, is worthwhile for me to read simply to glean what I can about how Joyce wrote it and what he was writing about. I feel this way about a lot of classics and a lot of literary fiction; no, I may not always enjoy reading them, but they are regarded the way they are because even without that entertainment value they are well-written books.

This doesn’t always apply to well-written books, though. Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff by Sean Penn is, frankly, one of the worst books I have ever read. It is just terrible. It attempts to do something Fight Club-y but falls on its face. But it has a very unique flow to it, heavy on alliteration and run-on sentences, that is almost pleasant at times before it goes on too long and feels overwrought. Seeing where the line is between “interesting prose” and “stop trying so hard” has a value that is hard to find from an author like Joyce who, frankly, is a better writer than almost anyone alive.

a variety of experiences

Kairos is a remarkable book by Jenny Erpenbeck that I found very annoying to read. It’s about a young woman in an abusive relationship with an older man, set against the backdrop of the last years of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first half of that concept isn’t my thing, exactly, but the last half is, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Sure enough, the characters were frustrating to follow and I generally was just annoyed by both the main couple and nearly everyone else around them. But the setting was remarkable. It gave a view of East Berlin, the good things and bad about life there, its contrast with the West, and even a bit of how it contrasts with modern life. East Berlin is juxtaposed against Kat and Hans, highlighting the neglect that the Soviets imposed on Berlin and that the West imposed on the East. I didn’t like the book, but it presented me with a view on history that I had little real exposure to before. Little bits like Kat being confused by the existence of homeless people in West Berlin were eye-opening for me, same with her confusion over the consumerism of her Western relatives, same with the economic shifts and rampant inflation that occurred as soon as East Berlin joined with the West. These new perspectives were certainly enough to justify a few weeks of slogging through annoying story and characters.

There are lots of small and big ways this can present itself. Personal Kanban was about 200 pages too long, but it gave me better ideas on how to organize my life. On Liberty has some weird racist, sexist, and colonialist ideas, but also presents a view on freedom that is only given the barest lip service in modern politics. Soul Boom provides interesting thoughts on the role spirituality has in the world and what gaps have opened up as people have moved away from religion, but I find the suggested solutions to be poorly thought out. All of these give interesting thoughts from different people and times, but I had pretty serious issues with all of them. C’est la vie.

i mean not everything needs to be good

In the fall anime season I was watching a show called Maou 2999 about a demon king resurrecting in a cyberpunk setting after being dead for hundreds of years. It was not good. It was only occasionally entertaining. It was, fundamentally, a waste of time. It was also probably my favourite anime of the season.

I’m not just talking about that difference in my mind between something being entertaining and it being good. Maou 2999 often fails to be either. Despite this, I just enjoy it as a piece of “bad media;” something that kind of just does what I expect it to, is filled with goofy tropes, can’t stay focused on one thing long enough to carry tension, is written or drawn inoffensively so I don’t have to pay a ton of attention. It’s the sort of show that is a lot of fun with a beer and a friend to bounce off of, and I enjoy the book versions just as well.

Morgan is My Name falls into this category for me, although not quite to the same level. There’s a specific vibe to stories aiming to show women as empowered, as fighting against a patriarchal society, that are near constant. The men are all bad, except for the odd mentor figure and maybe a love interest or two (maybe). The women are all lovely, but are resigned to their fate as women. And the protagonist, who also enjoys some manly activities, isn’t content to fulfil the role her society expects of her as a woman (namely, in most cases including this one, to sew and cook and gossip and get married off at the earliest convenience). I didn’t really enjoy it, but I did have fun laughing at the obvious twists now and then, and I had a chuckle explaining my eye rolls to my wife, and it’s fun to see just how blatant the caricatures of men are in the story.

some things do need to be bad

There is another side of this that I think goes underappreciated in that experiencing bad media helps you to identify good media, and sometimes makes the good media more enjoyable. I like thrillers, but I also hate a lot of thrillers. When I pick up a thriller and read the summary on the back I’ve got a pretty good chance of figuring out whether I’ll like it simply because I have read enough bad ones to see the patterns.

I picked out The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz to fill the category “An academic thriller” because I was struggling to find something good and this at least sounded different and quick. But simply reading the description suggested to me I wouldn’t like it; the protagonist sounded like a bit too much of a loser, put in a situation that is his own fault and he deserves, and in reality it’s the sort of problem that can be easily glossed over but he refuses to do so. Lo and behold, I did not enjoy it, and I turned out to hate Jake even more than expected, not because he’s necessarily a bad person but because he’s just kind of an idiot.

Identifying what I disliked in The Plot makes easier to see why I enjoyed other thrillers. Jake’s problem in The Plot was something he should have been able to solve himself if he stopped to think, but Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo puts Alex into situations way outside of her ability to navigate. Jake feels like he’s barely competent and constantly panicking, but Mark from Andy Weir’s The Martian is able to do so many things and is able to stay calm despite his constant crises. The Plot takes an enormous amount of time to set things up for the big twist, whereas Recursion by Blake Crouch has action at a breakneck pace the whole time. The Plot presents problems that are pretty much entirely caused by Jake himself, but Carrie by Stephen King has a variety of external factors triggering the climactic events.

It takes a few bad experiences to really understand what a good experience is. I try not to shy away from a book I’m not enjoying; rather, I want to understand why I don’t like it so I can better appreciate others in the future.

the ones i do drop

Now and then I do actually drop a book because I think it’s bad. Normally I get 20-30% of the way through, it’s taken me a couple of weeks to get that far even with effort, and it’s clear that I’m just not getting anything out of it.

Usually it’s something specific that irks me. When I dropped Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, it was because of the way she sprinkled random French words into descriptions like café noir or café au lait were some fancy French drinks and not, you know, black coffee and coffee with milk. It really got to me when the main character, whose last name was Rossignol, the word for nightingale, was reflecting on her mother calling her and her sister “her little nightingales” because their last name was… nightingale. Didn’t need a whole page to think about that one, it’s sort of just their name, and it was emblematic of how poorly presented the setting felt.

Sometimes it gets forced by time constraints. I get a lot of books from the library, I can usually renew a couple of times, but eventually I hit a point where I have to decide whether it’s worth taking the extra steps to keep going with it. Whalefall by Daniel Kraus is one where it was taking a long time to get going, other people were waiting for it so I couldn’t renew, and I was getting more annoyed with the main character and the writing style as things went on. Rather than put it on hold again, or buy a book I’m not enjoying, or push to read it in a short time period, I just decided that the library due date was enough reason to drop it.

Due-date-dropping isn’t always because a book is bad, though. I was getting interesting information out of books like The Idea Factory about Bell Labs, The Earth Transformed about climate change history, and Global Catastrophic Risks about the end of the world, but they’re also the sorts of books that I tend to read slowly and take notes on, which doesn’t always work with a library return date. I plan to get back to them eventually. Probably.

in conclusion?

Dear god I’m bad at ending these.

Go read a bad book sometime. Or just remember this the next time you read a good personal essay to better understand why you like it. I dunno.