Good Bad Books

Cafe Society
1

Since I have been reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin on audio (for the first time ever), I had a look at criticism about it, and stumbled upon George Orwell’s evaluation of it, in a 1945 essay entitled “Good Bad Books”. Here’s what he had to say:

perhaps the supreme example of the ‘good bad’ book is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other.

…

“I would back Uncle Tom’s Cabin to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore, though I know of no strictly literary test which would show where the superiority lies.”

Orwell defines a “good bad book” as “the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.”

Other examples he gives include the Sherlock Holmes and Raffles stories, R. Austin Freeman’s stories The Singing Bone, The Eye of Osiris and others, Max Carrados, Dracula, Helen’s Babies and King Solomon’s Mines.

Well.

I don’t think I agree about his judgment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a “Good Bad Book”. What he takes as “preposterous melodrama” and the unintentionally ludicrous seems to me pretty essential to the book.

It’s more his other examples – Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, King Solomon’s MInes – books I’ve loved and re-read more than once. I have this awful feeling that most of the things I like he would classify as “Good Bad Books” or, more likely, simply “Bad Books”. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery – pretentious melodramatic claptrap. I’m not sure the “classics: I read would fare much better – Steinbeck? Voltaire? Hemingway? He seems to approve of Dickens, who can be even more sentimental than a soap opera, although he does accuse him of Intellectual Sprawl”. What about Mark Twain?

What do YOU think are Good Bad Books? (or Good Books, for that matter, or Bad Books) What authors managed t escape that particular Hell?

Here’s the full essay, by the way:

2

I wonder what he would think of Stephen King.

For my money he’s the best character writer since Dickens, but few if any of his books have literary pretensions, and one of his stories involves a guy eating himself. Not exactly high brow.

But I bet you people will be talking about him for centuries.

3

I remember being assigned Tarzan to read in 10th grade English. I wasn’t half a dozen pages in when I realized the teacher had assigned a “bad” book. What else could explain why I was enjoying it so much?

4

I don’t think you should have an awful feeling at all. I read this essay as mostly an indictment against pretentiousness and against people of his time who would dismiss most fiction - and certainly all science fiction - as wholly unserious.

Orwell is saying that these ‘unserious’ books and authors may not conform to convention but that they’re better able to strike emotional chords, tell the truth, and - most importantly - be fun

5

When I read Fritz Leiber’s ERB-estate-approved Tarzan novel Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966) I really realized just how deficient Burroughs was as a writer. (And Leiber’s book was a novelization of a movie!)

Burroughs had a tremendous imagination, and could crank out potboiler stories by the metric ton, and he’s fun to read, but he had his limits.

My real revelation of Burroughs came when I tried to read all the Tarzan novels in one summer. I couldn’t do it – it was like trying to live on a diet of whipped cream.

6

I think Ready Player One is considered a good bad book. It was popular amongst a certain set of geeks, it even got turned into a Spielberg movie, and the writer wrote a sequel. It is not fine literature, but it was a fun read.

Same would go for the DaVinci Code books, maybe?

7

It’s my prejudice showing, I’m sure, but I’d classify Dan Brown books as simply Bad Books.

To show that it’s not strictly prejudicial, I’d throw Clive Cussler books in that category, as well (along with his many collaborators) and Doug Preston and Lincoln Childs, either together or separately. If any of these authors composes a novel in which don’t say “Oh, come ON, now!” at least once, they haven’t done their jobs.

8

Me too. I would also add JKR’s Harry Potter series – full of cliches and borrowed plots.

9

I’ll nominate most of Lovecraft’s work. The writing is mediocre at best, and the racism is very cringeworthy, but the atmosphere and sense of cosmic horror make them very compelling.

10

Interesting–in that same vein, I’d put Dungeon Crawler Carl. I’m in the distinct minority that it made my skin crawl, but even folks who adore these books admit that they’re not great literature; and even I, who won’t read anything else by this author, admit that I devoured the book in a few days.

11

I think there’s a distinction between a “good” bad book and a “popular” bad book.

Ready Player One was a bad book that was very popular. I didn’t care for it myself, but the discourse around it was mostly about how it had all these cool pop culture references, and not about it being particularly meaningful or memorable in any particular way in its own right. And ~10 years later, nobody is really talking about it anymore. It came, it entertained, and it went away. It was, ultimately disposable.

Harry Potter is, to my chagrin, more of a “good” bad book. Reading those books was a formative experience for millions of people. It’s full of stuff that deeply resonated with a huge chunk of the population, and it’s still (tragically) culturally significant today. The books suck, but they’re important in a way a lot of “fine” art could only dream of.

12

Yeah, I have to agree. When I read them I found three things really disappointing about them:

1.) They’re hugely derivative and just not that great. The world-building was particularly bad, even for books for adolescents.

2.) None of my various geeky friends for whom this was the first foray into adolescent fantasy literature seemed to recognize this, which I found a profoundly frustrating affront to my own geekery. “Philip Pullman may be an asshole, but he’s a much more interesting writer” or “You really give Lloyd Alexander a try” were met with disinterested shrugs and then back to pining for the next HP release. Goddamnit.

3.) I read them all and found them a little entertaining, as critical as I am of them. I blame no one but myself :confused:.

13

It sounds like Orwell is describing what I’d call just “good books”. Literary pretension, when it occurs, disqualifies a book from being “good”.

Lovecraft never did any of that. To the extent that there’s cosmic horror in his books, his readers put it there, not he himself. He never described anything horrible; he just basically said “OK, imagine the most horrible thing you can think of”, and some of his readers had very lively imaginations indeed.

14

“A Confederacy of Dunces” might be the ultimate example of this. It just stumbles along with little or no real plot or strategy, but it keeps you laughing when you’re not gasping with horror at the passive-aggressive damage being done. And decades later I still find myself thinking of it now an again.

15

There’s a barista at my usual coffee shop who’s always reading thick hardcover books (with the book jackets off, so I can never tell what she’s reading). Here I was crediting her with a hard-won intellectualism, when I heard her gushing about the latest plot twist with a customer. “Oh, what’s the book?” asked I, hopefully.
“Dungeon Crawler Carl! You’d love it!” My expression said that I didn’t.

I had to out myself as Hopelessly Non-Millennial by saying “Sorry, I’ve tried four times to read it, and I just can’t.”

The two of them quizzed me on other series of nerdy books I’ve read, and I guess I liked enough not to be shunned.

But I’m not included in their “Funny Fantasy” clique. Which is fine.

16

Someone talked my husband into reading that and he was not enthralled.

I never read Harry Potter. I was told the writing is not that great, and it wasn’t a part of my formative years, and now, well, I don’t want to give Rowling money.

17

I’m actually relieved that Harry Potter is considered - at least by you guys - as bad literature. I’m not really a sophisticated reader, but I was in all the elevated English classes in school, and when I checked out the first HP book, I was 18 or 19, I was like “what is this shit?”

But other people my age loved it, and of course younger kids looooooved it, so I just chalked it up as something that’s not for me, or maybe I was missing something, or maybe it’s better if you’re 12.

18

I’m a huge fan of what I usually refer to as “well written junk,” usually in the mystery/thriller genre. I’m referring to books that are good, in that the writing, pacing, plot, and character development are expertly crafted, and add up to a thrilling read. But they aren’t trying to address deep life questions, so they aren’t really “literature.”

JK Rowling becomes more repulsive by the day, so I dislike defending anything in the Harry Potter franchise. However, I will say that while the early books were not very well written, she got a lot better with practice. Also, it was clear by the last book that she had had a master plan all along, so the events and characterizations are admirably cohesive. There is subtle foreshadowing that one doesn’t appreciate while reading book 1 or 2 for the first time, but which becomes clear toward the end. So I’ll give her a bit of credit for that.

19

I’ll agree that the later books are better written than the earliest ones and she does pull off a story arc. However she did suffer from that common affliction of popular authors who become powerful enough to ignore editors - bloat. Her later books meandered quite a bit. A lot of extra page count to not much effect.

20

No argument from me about the “bloat,” but I’ve never been sure what the root cause is. Definitely it could be the author, but I’ve also thought maybe the publisher asks for thicker tomes because people want fat books, and/or you can charge more. I have no idea if that theory is even faintly credible.