I Need More Bad
Like most people, I have a very different relationship with movies than I do with books. I’ve seen many, many movies, in just about every genre and at all levels of quality. I can easily identify a good from a bad movie, and can point to specific reasons why I think a movie is good or bad.
Furthermore, one of my favorite forms of entertainment in recent years has been the Youtube phenomenon of excessively brutal film criticism. These kinds of video essays have become increasingly common in the last five years or so, and in fact I spend more time watching those videos than actual films nowadays.
One reason these videos are so popular is because they play off of an experience that pretty much any film-goer can relate to: spending the time and money to see a movie, only to discover that you basically paid for trash. It can be pretty irritating to go out of your way to consume poorly planned and executed art (if you can even call some of it art), which does nothing to inspire or enrich your life in any way.
That’s why it’s so satisfying to watch someone tear these movies apart, in particular those colossal Hollywood dumpster-fires that by all rights should have at least some merit to them, yet manage not to. In my opinion, sharing in this kind of Schadenfreudal hilarity is one of the few ways to squeeze some societal value out of the bloated monstrosity that is the film industry.
Beyond that, I realized after a while that by watching so many of these videos, I had learned a lot about the art of film-making, and about the film industry in general, so much so that it actually reignited my interest in watching films, which had been waning over the years. I feel like I can appreciate a great film better than I could before, and I can enjoy bad films too, by trying to analyze exactly what makes them bad.
Now, part of me suffers from a deep-seated fear that reading novels from an analytical perspective would kill the magic for me, and I might lose some of my passion for novels overall (more about this in a future post). But in any case, all this experience with film-criticism made me realize how much there is to be gained from looking at bad art, that in fact one can learn more about the craft from bad art than from good art.
And thus, I finally realized that I hadn’t ever read a truly bad book. I’ve read books that didn’t impress me so much, and I’ve quit quite a few books that simply weren’t my taste, but honestly I’ve hardly ever picked up a book that is generally considered “bad”, either by popular consensus or by critics.
Perhaps the one that comes closest is The Da Vinci Code. The author, Dan Brown, is oft cited by critics as one of the worst prose-writers in modern fiction. But even so he is generally considered a good story-teller, and The Da Vinci Code was his most well-received by general audiences. I, personally, enjoyed the story quite a bit, and I was only fourteen at the time so I didn’t have much sense for prose, and that aspect of the book didn’t really affect my opinion.
As I’ve stated before, I am an exceptionally slow reader, and because of that I choose my books carefully. I mostly read classics, and I don’t hesitate to drop a book if I have a hard time getting into it. So my exposure to trashy novels has been extremely limited. Until recently I thought of this as a strength; I figured it meant that my selection process was highly effective, and that by reading only great books it would make me a better writer.
Well, like I said, I’ve realized that this is not how art works. The bad is just as informative as the good, if not more so. And beyond that, my selection habits have probably skewed my perspective, so that I have a hard time appreciating very good books that aren’t quite great, and have no real sense of what an actual “bad” book even is.
I mentioned in a previous post that A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire book 4) is possibly the worst book I have read, but it’s clear to me now that that is a totally unfair judgement. It’s true that the prose is quite repetitive, and the story rather bloated, but by almost every other metric it is a very impressive novel. The characters are deep and complex, the story is unpredictable and full of nuance, the world-building is excellent…
It’s just that my standards are all wonky from reading pretty much nothing but universally-lauded classics. And it’s frustrating because there are so many truly great books out there that one could spend an entire lifetime reading and still barely put a dent in that list. It was for precisely this reason that I chose to focus on classics, years ago, when I started exploring the overstuffed bookshelves in my parents’ house.
But by insulating myself from the books of ill-repute, or simply those of less renown, I have also insulated myself from some forms of artistic progress. As Zen teaches us, the bad is just as important as the good, they are two sides to the same coin, and an imbalance between the two is ultimately always unhealthy.
Soooooo anybody got any bad book recommendations? Preferably on the short side because again, slow reader. But what do you think? Is it important to read a bad book now and again? Is it possible to read all the great classics in one lifetime? Is the Da Vinci Code good or bad? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading, peace!
Fibs
