A good book can be a bad one

"Good" books can be pretty awful sometimes.

Nick Hornby, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt

Just because Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury and Mrs. Dalloway are often considered not just good books but great books doesn't mean there's something wrong with you if you can't get past page 15 in any of them. Nor does it mean that those who do appreciate those books are superior to you intellectually or in any other way. (Maybe they are, but maybe they aren't.) Nor does it mean that those books and others like them are in any way inferior just because you don't like them.

Nick Hornby

It's not often that the preface is the best part of a book, but that may be true in the case of Nick Hornby's Housekeeping vs. the Dirt (reviewed here Nov. 25, "Keeping It Positive"). Hornby rants for several pages about reading books and writing about books (the subject of his book), and it is fascinating stuff. Most fascinating, because of the way they prop up a reader's confidence, are his words about individual reading tastes. We all aren't the same, and it's much better to read what we like than to try to read what somebody else likes and end up getting discouraged and not reading anything at all.

I like the above quote from Hornby's preface, but here are a couple of other gems:

"Turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud."

"Read anything as long as you can't wait to pick it up again."

I have been writing book reviews for most of my life, and one of the conceits of book reviewing is that one should never say or even suggest something like "in my opinion." If you think a book is good or bad, then say it is good or bad. You don't acknowledge that anyone might think differently. But of course other people do think differently, as they have every right to do. And each reader has the right to think like a book reviewer does: Like it and it's a good book. Dislike it and it's a bad book. So there. Yet this isn't actually true, either for book critics or for anyone else.

Fortunately we do not all like the same books. There are many books in every bookstore and every public library. Somebody exerted a lot of effort to write each of them, and each deserves an appreciative reader. But that doesn't mean that reader must be you.