“Life is too short to read a bad book”
We kick off this reading season by posing some questions that seem to be easy to answer at first sight but that often leave us brooding in a speechless limbo.
How can we tell if a book is good literature? How do we apply James Joyce’s paraphrased quote, “Life is too short to read a bad book,” and, therefore, commit ourselves only to the good ones?
An idea lingers and is branded in my mind: a book has to be at least twenty years old to be read, and a book must survive the passage of time. I tried to trace this statement back, bearing in mind that it could be attributed to a German philosopher, a rephrase of Kierkegaard, perhaps, but, faded memories turn to be cloaked landscapes of veracity. The wonders of the internet, I came across Clifton Fadiman.
Fadiman was an American intellectual, editor, and literary critic. He seems to have made this statement in his anthology The Lifetime Reading Plan, where he recommended classic books for readers who wanted to enrich their knowledge of literature. The idea behind the statement is that a book's enduring value is demonstrated if it continues to resonate with readers for at least twenty years after its publication.
Apart from the test of time, what makes a book good? Compelling characters? A good opening? A unique style? A remembrance? Visceral emotions? We have puzzled out what we consider gripping books, books we detested, and revisited.
In “The Sound Inside,” a play by Adam Rapp, Bella Baird, one of her main characters, a fictional professor of Creative Writing at Yale University, points out that good writers leave it to the reader to develop characters with very few traits explained in their imagination. Salinger did not expand much on Caufield, and just by referring to his patch of gray hair and height, the reader has “thoroughly formed him in our minds.”
We try to traverse the bridges of reality to fiction and participate in Bella Baird’s creative writing workshop by picturing ourselves as third person characters in books perhaps written by Margaret Atwood, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Margaret Lawrence, Manel Loureiro, Ian Fleming. Only a trait is allowed for the sake of imagining the innards.
Our characters have mouths like floodgates, a passion for rough and grey Galician seas, fond of spy games, eager walkers; our characters will light rooms with bright and cheery dispositions, will be endowed with deceptive smiling eyes, daring dreamers with darker sides, creative selves that keep themselves to themselves in reserved ways; characters that blush at dawn with the ease of a rose kissed by the sun in Shakespearean fashion and cling onto to the nostalgia of bygone times.
(Thanks to Rosa, Salomé, Cheli, Sonia, Antonio, Servando, Mónica, Belén, Paula, Cristina, Marcial…)
This way we kick off, thinking about what makes a good book, some visceral feeling, a unique style, compelling agonistic (from the Greek “agon”: competing) characters, the language, surviving the passage of time, the clawing of it onto the skin, the talking about it, the resonance of it in our selves, the power of language ..
Sources consulted:
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/the-elements-of-a-good-book
How to know if a book is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i52Aqso9Tk
