I mean keeping up with personal deadlines, following through, re-reading your work just to make sure you don’t sound foolish, may seem to a passerby like easy stuff. But to the girl sitting behind the screen, the blue-light engraving itself in her skin at night, having to keep up with her blog as well as a senior in high school keeping up with all her college application deadlines, maybe the passerby who passed will turn back and realize, it’s not that easy.
But oh well, I’m not here to write about deadlines. I’m here to write about a theory I had in books. This is something I wrote back in July. But because I was unsure of my writing, I held it back. Now getting over my fear, I’m glad to be able to share it with you.
I also want to point out here that I’m using “good” and “bad” with broad strokes. A book can be a spectrum of shades, and no book is one-dimensional. I’m using this generalization for the purpose of this blog.
With that said, enjoy!
Does the title “Bestseller” actually mean anything?
I walk into my local Barnes and Nobles, and the first thing I see slapped across a plethora of different rectangle sizes, colorful fonts, interesting graphics, and mysterious pages is the banal phrase #1 New York Times Best Seller. I have nothing against the New York Times, nor do I not like books that are popular. But at one point three years ago I got so sick and tired of seeing that same phrase on every book, I thought to myself, maybe I could be missing out on a whole side of literature, only because I overlooked the books without the phrase.
So I made it a mission to read a book that was highly sought after, and a book not so highly sought after. Those books were A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet, who was the Pulitzer prize finalist and National book Award Finalist (you can’t miss it, it’s all over the cover) and #Murderfunding by Gretchen McNeil.
In conclusion, I didn’t like either.
For Murderfunding I just skimmed the last pages to have solace that I finished it, and for AChildren’s Bible I didn’t even bother finishing. And apparently I couldn’t stand AChildren’s Bible so much that I can’t find it anywhere in my house anymore; maybe I stored it at the bottom of a box, gave it away, or it ran away from me after it found no affection in my quarters.
I won’t bore you with the details on why I found each book to be this and that, that’s not what I’m here to discuss today. I’m here to talk (or write depending on how you see it) about what makes a book actually good. We’re looking at the little lower level of what it is to feel good about a book, and say “Hey I don’t care what anyone else thinks, I like this!”
In my English class, sophomore year, my teacher asked the class, “how do we qualify a good book?”
I answered in my head: the reader enjoys it, there is some deeper meaning in the text, it is a timeless piece, and the writing is unique as well as strong. But even though I already had an answer, this question followed me around for a week. It made me realize how I perceived other works of literature. Was I automatically labeling them as good when others were stamping their five stars on it? Were there too many good books in the world, or not enough? If every book is a bestseller, how can we know which one is actually worth our time? Why are we obsessed with best sellers?
When I see a book covered with “BESTSELLER,” “THIS AUTHOR SAYS SO,” “SOOO GOOD!!,” it feels a bit much. A good book, at least to me, doesn’t need to call attention to itself. Like the wise words of Sean O’Connell in the movie A Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 version): “beautiful things don’t ask for attention.”
But, why would a book have to prove its worth? Well, I’m speculating, in a system that profits on the number of readers, a good book to the business, is a book that sells.
But it’s also, like many things in life, not just one person’s fault. As a consumer myself, when I see a book void of stickers validating its price, I feel a little skeptical.
Although I didn’t go back to re-test my hypothesis with a new selection of books, my failed experiment, however, did yield something somewhat fruitful. Challenging a book’s status on the market reminded me to not be so naive. It made me question the effort and craft the author put into writing, and made me more observant. I valued my time more, as not every bestseller equated to a good-time spent.
