How often have you been in the shoes of the nameless, hypothetical person below?
A reader grabs their Sunday edition of The New York Times and skips ahead to the famed New York Times Bestseller List. At the top of the list is a book the reader heard their friend Dave mention the other day.
“Oh yeah, XXX is totally awesome,” said Dave. “It’s the book everyone’s buzzing about. I thought it was good too.”
The reader is impressed by the glowing reviews from other beloved authors.
“An essential read!” bleats Jane Austen. “Perfection on every page!” cries Charles Dickens. “Made my moustache flutter!” bellows Mark Twain.
The reader is so encouraged that the next time they go into a bookstore (or airport coffee stand), they immediately buy a copy of XXX. However, their reading experience is terrible. The writing is turgid, the characters asinine, and the length stretching to infinity and beyond. How many pages are there in this thing?
They put the book down, disappointed.
What went wrong?
The Boundary of Taste
Let’s not kid ourselves, we’ve all been this hypothetical reader at some point in our lives. There seems to be a book gaining traction in the media and among our friends. We go and give it a read, and quickly realise it’s “not my cup of tea”. Whatever the reason, we don’t like this book and can’t comprehend why anybody else likes it either.
It’s just not to our “taste”, like so many other books we tried to like but didn’t. But what the hell does that mean? Are book judgements only about taste? In most cases, yes. Certain books are clearly written for some people and not others. For example, most children’s books are written for, well, children! Few adults would find any pleasure in reading a middle-grade novel with a twelve-year-old protagonist with a twelve-year-old’s problems. We’re done with middle school, high school, and probably college. But if your teenage cousin needs a book for their birthday, you’ve got no problem buying popular a middle-grade novel as their present.
Adult genres operate in a similar fashion. Books about being in a homosexual relationship might not stir any emotions in straight readers, but it could easily be considered essential reading among the gay community. There’s nothing wrong with this either. Same thing for Romance novels, aimed at women whose husbands are not Carlos Casanova; for crime novels, which interest some people and not others; and literary fiction, which interests wannabe intellectuals and nobody else.
But like my hypothetical reader, our reaction isn’t always this benign. Sometimes, we slam the book down in disgust. “What chowderhead of a publisher signed this book?” When we can’t get with the program, we feel annoyed. “Why do people like this book when I don’t? What am I missing?” And yet, the explanation of “oh, some people just have different tastes” feels totally unsatisfying. There has to be more to it than that.
And there is.
Ask Yourself One Question
When engaging in art criticism, we all have an intuitive sense of what’s good and what’s bad. We hear Miles Davis and think “that’s amazing!” We watch the movie The Room and laugh at how terrible it is. But we can’t really say why this art is good or that art is bad. When eating at a fancy restaurant, we can’t say why the baked potato soup tastes funny. It just does. Nobody except the most expert of chefs would say “this soup tastes funny because the milk in the broth is several months past the expiration date and now I’m going to keel over from salmonella poisoning”. But in both cases, the amateur and the expert are correct: the soup tastes bad. That is an objective fact.
It’s the same thing for books. Subjective taste is one thing, but objectivity matters just as much even if you can’t put your finger on it.
Well fear not, because I’ve solved the objectivity issue. Here’s the only objective litmus test for judging the book you’re reading:
Did you understand what you just read?
That’s it. Did you understand what you just read? If the answer is no, stop reading immediately. A text you can’t understand is an objectively bad book that slipped through the cracks. Just like how the physicist Richard Feynman was fond of saying “if you find yourself saying ‘I think I understand this’, it means you don’t”, failing to comprehend the text in your hands is a damning indictment of the author. It means they have not listened to their editor, not consulted outside sources, and reject clarity of prose for fear of sounding “simplistic” or “talking down to their reader”. Whatever insecurity led them to being incomprehensible, they have committed a grave sin against the idea of civilisation.
Unpacking The Rule
The starting line of book criticism is always clarity. No exceptions. I draw a hard line. If you can’t understand a book, you can’t say why it appealed to you (or not); you can’t interpret any meaning from the text; and you can’t gain any of the benefits that come with reading.
To be clear, you can understand a book perfectly well and be completely bored by it. This is a true matter of subjective taste. For example, one book that was enthusiastically recommended to me was David Epstein’s Range. However, as I laid out in this blog post, I did not end up sharing that enthusiasm with the masses. That book was frustrating to read, but at no point did I find myself saying “I don’t understand this”. I understood every sentence in Epstein’s text, but it didn’t appeal to me. However, that’s not to say that it won’t appeal to you. Nothing wrong with that.
However, my experience reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook was…rather different. First published in 1962, this book is about a woman named Anna struggling with writer’s block in 1950s London. The book is divided into five sections that go in the following order. First is the section (chapter?) called “Free Women”, which involves Anna doing…I don’t know what. Again, I couldn't understand the damn thing. She has a friend named Molly who is divorced from a man named Richard and has a son named Tommy who reappears often in the book. After the “Free Women” section comes the following: Black Notebook, Red Notebook, Yellow Notebook, Blue Notebook. Only because I read the back cover do I know what each notebook is for. The Black Notebook shows Anna’s recollections growing up in Rhodesia, then a British colony; the Red Notebook shows her political (read: communist) beliefs; the Yellow Notebook details her “emotional life” (whatever that means); and the Blue Notebook acts as a diary.
This process of Free Women followed by four notebooks repeats itself five times before giving way to the titular Golden Notebook which, allegedly, ties the whole thing together.
I’ll be blunt: this book made no f&%king sense. Anna is never an active character as the whole book is composed of these notebooks. Adding to the confusion is that she once had a lover who is referenced several times under different names in the different notebooks. Just look at the wikipedia page’s character list. Anna appears in the novel not only as herself, but acts as the basis for the characters she herself has written. So the character of Ella in the Yellow Notebook is actually Anna, but the Yellow Notebook is just Anna’s thoughts and projections meaning none of the characters in these sections actually exist! In other words, not only is there no linear structure to this book, there is no consistent plot thread period. Each “notebook” tackles a different theme in a different order, which throws the reader off balance. The Free Women section/chapters are only a fifth of the book, yet make up the entirety of Anna actions in the present…and still they don’t make sense. I don’t understand it!
The Golden Notebook is a bad book. That’s not a matter of opinion. It is bad, and to say otherwise is wrong. Full stop, no exception.
And now, the real caveats to the rule.
With comprehensibility as the objective baseline for judging your reading material, surely you’d be right in thinking that there are edge cases with fuzzy boundaries. Maybe there are, so let’s explore them.
The first caveat comes from certain non-fiction categories. More specifically, abstract subject matter. It is no secret that I am terrible with mathematics and, because of my autism, am less tolerant of abstraction than most people. So when I read James Gleick’s The Information, a surface examination would yield a negative result to the comprehensibility question. I didn’t quite understand the subject, a history of information, and I still struggle with it. So did Gleick fail the objectivity test?
No, he didn’t. Why? Because my weakness with abstraction is not applicable to the next reader in line. I understood the prose perfectly well, but because I am less talented with that kind of science, I can’t repeat back to you anything about the book except that it was about the importance of Information Theory as well as a general history of information itself. Even me doing that shows I took something away from it. Other more scientifically minded people would have no problem with this book. So The Information fails a subjective taste test. Abstracts subjects are not for me, but I’m glad I gave the book a try and would have no qualms recommending the book to somebody who needs information about…information.
The second caveat comes from age inappropriate reading. Note, inappropriate in this circumstance does not refer to children reading erotic books with lots of drinking and cocaine snorting, but rather children and teens reading any book designed for an adult audience. This is a temporary exception to the rule. If you somehow managed to convince an eleven year old to read Gone With The Wind and asked them “did you understand it”, them answering negatively doesn’t mean it failed the objectivity test. Children are not adults, don’t have the vocabulary of adults, and are still growing into adults. The same applies to teenagers, which is why I think giving high-schoolers books like Great Expectations might be inappropriate in some instances. This is not because I think they shouldn’t be reading great literature, but because I reckon they might not be mature enough to understand those books. That last example is me cheating a bit as I’m drawing on personal experience. I skipped Great Expectations in high school and only read it a few months ago. It was a difficult read, but I understood it perfectly well. Then again, I read a book once every ten days as 22-year-old MA student. I don’t think High School Elliott would’ve been up to the job. That’s also not to say that a high schooler can’t understand Great Expectations. If they understand it and like it, great! No complaints here.
Conclusion
No person has ever read a book that they don’t understand and enjoyed it. Confusion and loathing have an intimate relationship. Filing tax returns is awful because it’s a confusing form (not to mention the feds are taking your money). Setting up a new computer infuriates people as they don’t understand why isn’t working as advertised. Being confused isn’t fun and feeling like you shouldn’t be confused when you are confused only adds to the initial anger. In the literary world, these are the feelings which lead people to walk away from reading.
The baseline of whether or not a book is good isn’t “Did I like it?”. That’s debatable and subjective. Rather, the baseline is “Did I understand it?”. That’s not debatable and definitely not subjective.