I Hate This Book.

Discussions like this can be so interesting. I love discovering what works for who, and why. But it’s equally easy to descend into variations on Oh, that was a stinker.

No writer sits down thinking, Okay, I’m going to give up months, maybe years of my life to write a stinker.

Every novelist has a story to tell, and the chances are pretty good that somewhere out there is a reader who resonates with that story. When I was growing up, we were pointed at a small coterie of critics who told us what was literature and what was trash. By the time I hit my college years, I discovered that my tastes seldom intersected with the critics’. It took another few years to realize I did not have to apologize for my tastes.

Now, we’re living in what the Encyclopedists dreamed of in the eighteenth century: the people—anyone who can get access to a computer and some kind of Internet connection— voice their opinion on art.

The first thing I noticed when I began reading online reviews by ordinary folks is that there was no universal definition of a stinker. When I talk about books I couldn’t read, my context is usually I’m not the reader for this one. Because a stinker for me is someone else’s fave.

Why?

Aside from taste factors—entirely subjective in themselves—sometimes a book and I meet at the wrong time. When my oldest was a teen, she gained a scholarship to a boarding school, which meant living away from home. She was thrilled. It was I who suffered separation anxiety. The night after we returned home from dropping her off, I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. I sorted through my latest batch of library books recommended by friends. Many had said The Accidental Tourist was cozy and funny and warm. I start reading . . . And what do I find? A couple lying in bed in the middle of the night, stunned and grief-stricken by the senseless death of their teenager, following which their marriage tanks. I threw the book back on the pile and have never looked at it since.

Then there are the historically related novels. The problem with these —with anything, really—is the question of familiarity. A sophisticated reader who has never traveled to the East Coast of the USA  can read a book set in New York City in which Central Park is located somewhere around where the Twin Towers used to be, because their idea of New York is a jumble of tall buildings, whereas those familiar with New York are likely to get bounced right out of the story.

Finally there are the stories that seem to be rehashes of very familiar tropes. I remember that first when the Belgariad came out, and I tried it, but I couldn’t get past the opening because it seemed a rehash of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, without any of what made that trilogy resonate with me. But I met people who read the Belgariad first, loved it—and some of those later read LOTR and disliked it. “Not enough women!” “Difficult prose!” “Too much poetry!”

That’s happened with several books of sudden popularity since then, the latest being Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing. I started reading it, thought, this is Ann McCaffrey’s Dragonriders crossed with Hunger Games by way of Dark Academia, and I could predict every plot turn, almost every conversation. But some young readers enthused about it, claiming it the Best Book Ever. The book clearly spoke to them.

I’ve long since come to the conclusion that literature is always going to be like that, a long conversation with social evolution, certain bewitching tropes being reinvented for each succeeding generation. Will these new, hot things last? Who can tell? The old gold is still there, and a few still work to fire the imagination and lift the heart: the Iliad and the Odyssey, Arthuriana (which was a shared world across Western Europe for a thousand years), The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West. Mahabharata. There’s room for both!