Lately I have been reading a lot of books that don’t quite bowl me over. They’re solid, they’re nicely written, they’re entertaining, they have things to say. They are, in a word, good.
But they’re not great. They’re not mindblowing, excellent, outstanding, beyond compare, brilliant, or any of the other hyperbolic words that feel, sometimes, as if they’re required when discussing art we love—especially online. These books are not redefining what a book or a genre is; they are not changing the world. They are kind of like the basics in one’s closet, which sounds a bit like damning with faint praise, but I mean this entirely positively: What would I do without my black jeans and tank tops? I would stay in pajamas all day, that’s what.
We need basics, or at least most of us do. And I think we need art that’s just plain good, too.
Obviously, this is entirely subjective. A book I think is brilliant might be—let’s be honest, often is—something that a whole lot of other people overlook, or dismiss, or bounce off, or just straight-up hate. For a little while I made a habit of looking at Goodreads whenever I’d discover a fantastic book that I hadn’t heard anyone talking about. Almost without fail, the reader comments there were largely along the lines of “DNF @ 20%” or “I’m not sure what this book is doing” or “The narrative was confusing.” The opposite was true of books I didn’t like at all. It felt like reading responses were some kind of teeter-totter: AMAZING!!! on one side, “DNF” or animosity on the other.
I hesitate to make sweeping generalizations about the internet, this land of sprawl and niche, but I think this is perhaps another kind of polarization bred by social media and the attention economy. A calm appraisal of a book, or movie, or album, gets no views. No one clicks. No one hate-reads. If you want eyeballs, you have to yell, whether in appreciation or loathing. I’ve been thinking about this in terms of language for years, catching myself using extreme terms—hated, loved, incredible, the worst—when really, a lot of the things I was reading or watching were just fine. Good, even. Well-made, if not exactly my jam. Did I haaaaate it, or was it just okay?
But all that grandiose language falls apart in the face of one of the best-known moments in online book recommendation in recent years: The Bigolas Dickolas tweet. The tweet that sent This Is How You Lose the Time War onto bestseller lists and made the words “Bigolas Dickolas” into something approaching a household name, at least for us book dorks. Here’s what the tweet said:
“read this. DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it’s only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it’s only like four hours. do it right now i’m very extremely serious.”
Yes, the “extremely serious” part is hyperbolic. But otherwise, this tweet is pretty mellow in terms of how it describes the book. It’s instructive in a way that is almost without praise. It makes me think of a line from Jess Ball’s Autoportrait: “The best speech about books is just the injunction: read this one.”
Read this one.
What I am saying here is not just that we ought to appreciate books and other art that is just plain good, but that I wish it were more common to recognize it as such. To say just read this one without having to dress up the recommendation in gushing terms that begin to all sound the same after a while. It’s kind of a cousin of publishing’s blurb situation, where every novel comes with a heap of praise that all too often doesn’t actually help a reader decide whether or not they want to read the book in question (except when they do work, which they do! Sometimes!). If we are all shouting about how every book is the best book ever, don’t we all drown each other out?
The flip side of this, though, is that authors in the modern day are in a shitty situation (and marginalized authors all the more so). If readers don’t leave four- or five-star reviews on those dreaded reviewing platforms, the algorithm might punish the book, burying it never to be found by those who ought to read it. If we don’t yell about our beloved books from every mountaintop, will anyone find them in the absolute sea of words available for purchase? One estimate has it that between self-published and traditionally published books, there are probably 3 million books released every year. Or more.
I don’t have an answer for that. If anyone did, maybe authors wouldn’t be in this situation of pleading with their readers to leave reviews, or making TikTok videos even as they dread it, or having to ration their time between self-promotion and, you know, actually writing the things.
But I wonder how many solid, good books get lost in that sea, and how we can find them, recognize them, lift them up for just being plain old good books. I am reluctant to use specific examples here, to be honest; the internet of flamboyant praise means that I worry about sounding as if I’m actually insulting a book by saying it’s just plain good. But to give an example of something I love that is in no way brilliant, world-changing, or genius: I love, deeply love, the Fast and Furious franchise. I love watching this diverse motley crew save the world in increasingly absurd ways that regularly defy the laws of physics.
And I would never in a million years pretend these movies are great. There are marvelous things in them: inventive action sequences, impressive stunts, and astonishing moments in which the actors keep straight faces while reciting some of the dialogue. But the only way you could rank a Fast and Furious movie as a truly incredible work of art is if you were judging greatness based on how many times a film cuts to a shot of a foot on a gas pedal or hand on a gearshift. In those categories, these films are truly leaders. Perhaps record-setters, even.
They’re also wildly popular, which brings me to a last and maybe contentious point: Popular things can also be just plain good. I keep running into a perspective that seems to claim that because things are popular, they’re brilliant, which absolutely does not track. (Neither does the opposite.) Popularity is one thing; quality is another. One is measurable in various ways; one is subjective.
And this is fine! This is good, even! Not everything we love has to be great. I love bad movies, and cheesy bands, and even some books that might, by some mythical objective measure, be rated “not good at all, actually” but something in them speaks to me. Love isn’t dependent on quality. Many years ago, a boy I knew looked at me with scorn when I said I liked a band he didn’t care for, and asked, “Why would you like something that isn’t good?”
Why would you limit yourself, my friend? What I am trying to say here is that it doesn’t matter. I think it would be nice if there were more nuance around praising the things we love, regardless of their entirely subjective quality. It would be nice if I didn’t have to read the gushing tweets that movie studios regularly repost about their most inane output, no matter how much those tweets seem calculated for exactly this effect. It would be nice if everything were a little more nuanced, honestly, and this is, in the grand scheme of things, small potatoes.
But there’s so much out there that’s just good. Just plain good. And we should say so.
