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.
(Looks at a virtual stack of Apothecary Diaries novels)
Oh those are so good though
I feel like the tendency towards greatest literature EVER or Crime Against Language reviews is (at a minimum) twofold.
The aforementioned popular culture push to hyperbole. (I was going to say “internet” but at this point that’s both insultingly reductive as well as redundant) that leads to nothing but 1 star and 5 star reviews.
I also think that extremes come from the nature of genuinely ground breaking or literarily significant works. If you swing for the fences or are writing objectively literary pieces you are as likely to honk a reader off as delight them. And thus get the same extreme review results.
There are a lot of books (I shan’t name for your same reasons) where I’ve put it down or read to completion never to pick up sequels or the author again not because they were bad at doing what they set out to do but because they were actually quite good at doing something I had absolutely no interest in reading.
Yes, you cannot give a three-star review on something you “just like”. If I like book/restaurant/whatever and I give it a three-star rating, I’m actually hurting it. Better not give any rating than give a mediocre one. Why is that? Three stars out of five is good, isn’t it? Four is above average and five should be the best thing ever. In reality, thanks to internet’s screwed rating systems, I mostly avoid things with less than four stars. The rating has long lost its value. What a pity.
THANK YOU. There are a few book series out there that absolutely changed me fundamentally. As a person. But you know what? I read over 35 books a year (and work in a library), and almost none of them are life-changingly incredible. Most are great! Good! Fine! Worth my time and attention. And more people need to recognize that you can enjoy a book and… that be it. So thank you for saying it out loud!
The problem is that we have turned art into a contest. Good is no longer enough. We have decided that someone or some work has to be recognized as number one. The phrase guilty pleasures’ exemplifies this. I don’t feel guilty about books I like; they are good enough for me. BTW, I DNF the number one (per Modern Library), Joyce’s Ulysses.
I definitely feel this. Not everything is amazing (and if everything was then amazing would be synonymous with average), and that’s okay. Sure, there’s a thrill when you read something that hits you just right, but I find that’s pretty rare and usually written by Ursula K. Le Guin, Kazuo Ishiguro, or Gene Wolfe*. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading all the other solid books. If anything, the multitudes of just plain good books makes the great ones even more meaningful–and really, so much depends on timing, mood, and your individual circumstances and personal history. I read an old school thriller recently that I would say was just plain good and I had a blast. It might not have been a “great” book, but I had great fun, which is all that mattered to me while I read it.
*And honestly, as much as I love those 3 (and various other “greats”), I find I can’t usually bring myself to read multiple of their books back to back as they require a certain amount of energy and focus and I like to break up things up with lighter “good” reads. [Aside: It now occurs to me that there’s some irony in the way Goodreads algorithms encourage/require hyperbole while being a website titled “Good” reads. Heh.]
A wonderful article about the simple joys that reading a “just good” book can bring. Thank you for writing this.
In thinking about the phrase – read this book, what came to mind was the advertising campaign for the movie of the The Godfather way back when. All it said was – The Godfather is now a movie. or words to that effect. Nothing else neede.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
I vaguely recall once reading a comment by Harlan Ellison to the effect that after a hard day of work he didn’t have the energy to watch anything more demanding than Gilligan’s Island. Although being Harlan he naturally expressed that much more colorfully. While I may never have personally worked quite that hard, I understand the sentiment: sometimes I just want to relax with a good book, without needing to have my life changed or my mind blown.
Five-star scales are obviously too reductive. Any linear scale necessarily must be, since books are written for many different reasons and succeed or fail in too many different ways to count. A truly original work would be literally incomparable, since there would be nothing else like it.
I’ve finished both books and series that were not great but were good enough for me to want to find out what happens. Sometimes I shrug and say “well, I’m in this far. May as well see it though.” Anything that is absorbing of attention is worth a read for me. And the occasional wonderful book makes it worthwhile to keep trying.
Agreed! Great points. This reminds me of Tom Shone’s book Blockbuster which came out in response to that kind of obnoxious Easy Riders. Raging Bulls book. Shone’s book was good and it’d be nice to have an update since it came out before even the first Avengers movie.
I agree! There are so many books that are just plain good – not amazing, certainly not awful. Not everything can or should be the greatest thing ever. And sometimes it is nice to just have “good” things.
If it wasn’t for just plain good books, I never would have been able to start reading again after my brain did a hard reboot. If I hadn’t been able to practice reading daily, I never would have immersed myself back into the world of words and discovery. Without Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy or David Wellington’s Monster Island trilogy, I never would have found Scott Lynch, Sebastien de Castell, Martha Wells, or my stack of To Be Read authors who look so promising. Without relenting to my brother’s insistence to check it out, I never would have picked up the LitRPG (seriously!?) series of Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman and found a read that is so much better than it has a right to be.
I loved your comparison to movies that are just fun to watch. With books, I get the same feel from short stories, and I see that I’m a lot more likely to read stories with fewer than 4 or 5 stars. Give me a short story collection by Gaiman or King, and I will read the heck out of it even though some of the stories aren’t that great. Give me an Amazon Collection of short stories, and I’ll find some authors who I want to investigate more.
So let’s raise a flagon of ale to mediocre, adequate stories and the enjoyment they bring!