On Reading Bad Books
March 28th, 2010 at 22:10Over at Justine Larbalestier’s blog, she asks the question: What do you think of the frequently mounted defence of Twilight and some other popular YA titles that no matter what you think of the writing style or content it’s intended for teens so that’s okay. Or at least it gets teens reading?
There have been some wonderful, inventive comments, not overly hamstrung by Justine’s insistence that the relative merits of Twilight not be under discussion in the thread (and fair enough too, it’s one of the easiest ways to derail said conversation).
I commented over there with a blog-length comment, mostly about how I don’t like the way the terms ‘bad writing’ and ‘good writing’ get thrown around (it is actually possible for one person to like a book, another to dislike it, and them both to be RIGHT), and particularly the way that they are used in regards to hugely popular works preferred by women readers. I recall overhearing a young teenage boy informing his mother in a bookshop that Harry Potter was ‘entertaining but badly written’ and I was stunned. Who was he to make such a pronouncement? Was it his own opinion, or one he had heard? How can you possibly dismiss a work as badly written if you find it entertaining?
Surely entertaining is one of those things that writing is intended to do?
After reading all the comments that have come in on Justine’s blog I have been formulating a different response to the question. I understand why people are reacting negatively to the suggestion that ‘it’s okay to let teens read bad books because they’re just teenagers, as long as they’re reading it’s good’ but so many of the responses to that are rubbing me up the wrong way.
Because, you know what? It’s none of our business what teenagers are reading.
Obviously many of us – parents, siblings, teachers, librarians, authors – hope that teenagers will read books, that they learn to love reading, and that they discover and learn to love awesome books. We can help to point them in the direction of the stuff we think is crunchy and clever and just plain fun. We can grab copies of The Demon’s Lexicon or Tender Morsels or Pride & Prejudice and put them directly into their hands. Helping other people find books to love is one of the best things we can possibly do.
But.
If the teen in your life wants to read books you consider “bad” then I recommend that you suck it up. The fact is, the teen years are all about experimenting. It’s about taking in as much input as you can until you hit overload and start thinking for yourself. It’s about figuring out who you are as a person. And if reading “bad” books by the megaton is your teen’s drug of choice then HELL YES SUCK IT UP.
Reading is good. Reading anything is good. Trashy romances, the newspaper, the cereal box, whatEVER. The more of anything you read, the better you get at it. The better you get at it, the more you want to do it. And… the better your skills develop so that when you need reading, it’s there. When you find the challenging work you want to try, you know how to go about it.
You can learn a lot from bad books. Because this is the secret that everyone knows and most people have forgotten: Bad books are awesomecakes. They are the best. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like the experience of reading something that you know you shouldn’t. Whether it’s the four steamy pages of the adult romance novel, the best bits of the illicit textbook on evolution, or one of those witchcraft-inciting teen fantasies.
Then there are the other kinds of bad books. The ones you don’t know are bad because, you know, they’re so brilliant to read and you love them to bits and you reread them, and… hmm. Are we sure we know the meaning of the word ‘bad’ in this instance?
I read a ton of bad books in my younger years. When you don’t have a job or kids, there’s a lot of time to kill. From 10-13 I read teen romances. Jazillions of them. I also read adult crime novels, historicals, all sorts of stuff. But Babysitter’s Club, Sweet Valley High, Sweet Dreams, Cheerleaders, you name it. I absorbed sugary crap in tight jeans like it was going out of fashion.
End result: I have a PhD in Classics. What, these things have nothing to do with each other? No, you’re right. Nothing. Nothing at all. My reading habits of my early teens in no way influenced my later abilities to work on and complete a postgraduate degree. Funny, that. Though I’m pretty sure my fast reading skills did come in handy there at some point.
From 13-17 I read fantasy novels. Zajillions of them. They were thicker than the Sweet Valley Highs, but somehow they got read pretty damn fast. Some of them were awesome, some were terrible. Some I thought were awesome and I now know were terrible. I picked up plenty of other books along the way – crime, and huge Roman epics, and some literary classics, and so on. But mostly I read sword and sorcery.
End result: I wrote a novel. And another. And another. I got sick of the cliches of fantasy and started spotting them in my own writing. I got better at writing. I was published by the time I was twenty.
I’m pretty sure that I took no harm at all from any book that I read in my teens, regardless of whether they were good or bad by anyone’s standards. My reading was no one’s business but my own. My mother rolled her eyes at some of my choices, but never particularly pushed anything on me. When I left home at 18, I left behind bookcases groaning with fantasy novels (never give a clothing allowance to a teen who cares more about books than clothes unless you have ample storage space). She started reading them. She rolled her eyes about my superhero comics. Years later she was borrowing them to see how they drew musculature (she’s a sculptor). My Dad passed me crime author after crime author. Some were awesome (that is to say, I liked reading them), some were awful (that is to say, I couldn’t get past the first chapter). Once I hit adulthood, I started recommending authors to him. He gave me Spenser and VI Warshawski but, dude, I gave him Stephanie Plum.
I wouldn’t take back my history of reading (not to mention re-reading because wow, apparently we had So Much Time To Kill) bad books, not for a second. I have a huge, powerful understanding of how the fantasy genre works because of how much I have read. My friends and I, who enabled each other something shocking, look back and can laugh about loving David Eddings even as we are still proud of ourselves for loving the Mistress of the Empire series, or Tam Lin. We read Laurell K and Tamora Pierce before either of them were remotely famous. But one of my most powerful memories of high school is the long wait for the final volume of the Mallorean… oh boy. We were there. We bought the t-shirt.
I can only think of a handful of books from my teens which really made me think “you are wasting my time.” Time was cheap back then, so a book had to work hard to waste it. The first few that come to mind are The Warden by Anthony Trollope and The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. Grade 12 English had a lot to answer for… But there were a few self-inflicted, too. Book 3 of the Wheel of Time. Jane Eyre. Oh, Jane Eyre was my nemesis. I never could like her, no matter how hard I tried.
I think as adults, time is so valuable that we get scared teens might waste it on anything that is less than nourishing. But mistakes in reading are worth making. They help us create our own road map. Sometimes we have to just grit our teeth and let them read fucking Twilight, because you know what? Maybe it isn’t a bad book. Maybe it’s an awesome book. The people pushing the book on teenagers sure don’t think it’s a bad book. It isn’t a grand conspiracy to waste their time or turn them into a Mormon (okay, probably) or force them to conform to tired old gender stereotypes. Lots of people love the book, and there’s no reason to panic about that. Many of those people will, in the future, look back and go, “WHAT WAS I THINKING?” which is a valid experience, not one anyone should deny them.
Also, many of them will go through their lives continuing to think that Twilight (or Harry Potter, or whatever) is the best book ever. No matter how much a more widely-read reader might wince about that, or wish they had better taste, it doesn’t actually hurt us if they think that. Not even a little bit.
Teen books should absolutely be critiqued, by adults and children alike. But critiquing doesn’t just mean saying a book is bad, and why. Sometimes it’s about defending it.
Teens deserve great books, this is true. But they also deserve to decide for themselves whether a book is great or not. More importantly, they get to decide whether they love it. If they love it, then it’s not a bad book, even if it has been written in crayon or printed without the use of the letter e or even (and this is the biggie) if it sparkles.
So I guess I am in the ‘it doesn’t matter how bad the book is, just be glad they’re reading’ camp after all. I’ll go one better. I support the re-reading of bad books. Maybe after the twelfth time reading the sparkly vampire epic, they’ll be ready to move on to the Holly Black of which you speak. Maybe they won’t. But I’m pretty sure that if that’s what they want to do, we should just get the hell out of their reading light.
Tags: bad books, fantasy, reading, sweet valley high, twilight, YA
March 28th, 2010 at 11:23 pm
My niece is 12. She was a late reader. She hated learning to read. She struggled with chapter books to the point that she preferred non-fiction (no storyline to keep track) then suddenly she’s reading YA and adult fantasy. She’s just finished reading Twilight and is on Eclipse, I think. It’s good that she’s discovered reading is fun. She sits up in bed to all hours of the night reading them. Every night apparently. OK that’s not so good.
What concerns me is teens, and she’s not even that, can take on a lot from what they read. If they’re reading broadly and being exposed to range of ideas, then they’re better equipped to work things out for themselves. But if most of their reading is from books of “dubious content”, I don’t think that can be bad. There need to be good books in there was well.
Now, she knows I don’t like the books. (I would be happier if I knew what was going on in them so I could talk about them with her but that would require me to actually read the bloody things.) I did offer to provide her with some “good” vampire books though, but I don’t know of any. (Help?)
March 28th, 2010 at 11:24 pm
Edit: “I don’t think that can be GOOD”
I should know better than to post things just before going to bed
March 28th, 2010 at 11:31 pm
I only read the first Twilight book and then read the pretty detailed summaries of the other books on Wikipedia – life is too short to read books you dislike! But I was interested in the social phenomenon around the books…
I really enjoyed The Eternal Kiss, which was a recent paperback collection of short stories by some current fantasy authors. I really recommend Sarah Rees Brennan’s The Demon’s Lexicon which is not a vampire book but hits a lot of the same buttons, only with wit and style. Cassandra Claire’s first trilogy is great and has vampires & werewolves which are dealt with in ways I enjoyed.
You could do a lot worse than passing on the first few Anita Blake novels by Laurell K Hamilton. I haven’t read much else in vampire books recently that I could recommend but I’d love to hear some recs from other readers!
I have Claudia Gray’s Evernight on my shelf which I have heard good things about.
March 28th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
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March 28th, 2010 at 11:58 pm
I probably wouldn’t give Anita Blake to a 12 year old. The first few books are relatively sex-free, although there’s still stuff there, and the violence and gore can be pretty heavy, but they descend fairly steeply into some scary sex places pretty quickly.
I read Beautiful Creatures recently, which surprised me by being pretty good – it’s witches rather than vampires, but a similar feel to Twilight (if a bit better written).
The Hunger Games books are good – again, not vampires, but pacy, SF read that is proving very popular. And what about The Graveyard Book – I loved it!
Graceling and its sort-of sequel Fire are excellent, although I wasn’t 100% impressed with the underage sex in Fire. Great fantasy stuff – Graceling has a brilliant book trailer (on YouTube) which might help suck her in
Angels are popular lately – Fallen and Hush Hush are both pretty readable. And then there’s zombies – The Forest of Hands and Teeth is good, although a bit bleak.
For actual vampire books, Evernight is quite good, and the first few of the House of Night series are good (they get a bit draggy after that, and the sex kicks in – what is it about sex and vampires?!).
Outside of the paranormals, I could recommend lots of awesome YA spec fic, but I’ll leave it at that
Good luck!
March 29th, 2010 at 12:05 am
Monica, I really recommend Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse books (now televised as True Blood). I also really recommend that a 12 y.o. *NOT* watch the TV series – the graphic sex and violence is *way* too much for them (despite the 12 y.o.s I’ve known who’ve been cool with Nightmare on Elm Street, which scared the bejesus out of me).
I love Charlaine Harris’ straight crime/mystery novels (particularly Lily Bard in the Shakespeare series), and her vampire ones too. they are definitely for grown ups, but Sookie is often shelved in YA (or fantasy, or horror, or crime, or…), and teenagers I know have coped okay with them, often enjoyed them – and you might enjoy them too, Monica, which would make it easier for you to talk with your daughter about them.
the Southern Vampire/True Blood novels are clever, funny, sexy, well-written (meaning I really like Harris’ style, characters, and plotting) and very observant about small town living in the Deep South. Harris is from a small town in Arkansas herself, and very aware of the racism that’s as real as the neighbourly politeness. also her vampires are scary, powerful, manipulative, and don’t glitter.
the early Anita Blakes by Hamilton are I think less well written (stylistically), but she writes very imaginative characters (human & otherwise) and gripping plots. the second one I found quite horrifying – zombies killing a toddler was about the least horrific part of that book – but the others in the first four or so are less yucky, and do good lust and magic, not much actual sex, quite a lot of violence, and some good philosophical musings on who are the real monsters.
Tanya Huff is another crime/vampire writer who does a good combination of both mystery-solving and magic – again, a fair bit of sex and violence (none of Meyer’s “vegetarianism” or celibacy before marriage), but ex-cop/private eye Vicki Nelson, vampire Henry Fitzroy and cop Mike Celluci are great characters with believable character arcs.
sorry I haven’t read any actual YA vampire stuff that I’d recommend as “good” – Mari Mancusi writes fun vampire YA, a nice light (dark) read.
oh, and your daughter might also enjoy MaryJanice Davidson’s Undead & Unwed series – cross genre chick lit/vampire fiction, with genre-romance style sex (the heroine has orgasms at first intercourse cos the hero’s hot like that) and lots of shoe-shopping. And the heroine is a Republican. not that she votes any more, being now undead. come to think of it, Betsy is at least a female kick-ass vampire herself, not just a human female in lerve with a darkly sexy male vampire.
I haven’t read the Cassandra Clare trilogy yet, but it’s one of the most often cited/gushed over by the teens who write YA fan blogs.
March 29th, 2010 at 12:15 am
Tansy, I love your swapping recommendations with your dad! my mum and I both read Georgette Heyer time and again (she bought them in the 50s and 60s, I started on them at around 10 or so in the mid-70s), and Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise books (oh God what trashy books!! yes, Modesty was the first kick-ass heroine I ever read, bless her, but I can’t forgive O’Donnell for writing a rape scene after which the narrative said the teenage peasant girl would “get over it quickly” and it would make the victim “feel special”), progressing to VI Warshawski and Kinsey Milhone. I introduced mum to Stephanie Plum, my sister lent her a Phryne Fisher, mum discovered Faye Kellerman…
Dad is more into historical crime, and swaps recommendations with my sister (Sister Fidelma, Brother Cadfael), but I sent him a contemporary crime novel by Anna Blundy (her heroine Faith Zanetti is a hard-drinking, cynical war correspondent) which he enjoyed.
my mum was deeply disappointed that I loved Enid Blyton as a kid (very formulaic, said my English language & literature teaching mum), but let me read whatever I wanted and figure it out for myself.
March 29th, 2010 at 5:13 am
Now I haven’t read Anita Blake so I don’t know what kind of “scary sex stuff” there’s in them, but I do remember reading Clane of the Cave Bear (all however many books there are… six?) as a 10-11-12-year old and LOVING THEM. And not for the sex parts. Much.
And God. Sweet Valley. Soooo many Sweet Valley books. And Nancy Drew. And the… what’s it called Fantastic Five? And the books about HORSES. I think I read every book about horses my library had. (It, um, was a small library.) One of them were about a perfect pony that never did anything wrong or was the least bit difficult, and ended up being run over by a truck. Yes, seriously.
I do wish I’d read fantasy as a teenager. I’m just now catching up on it all, and I would’ve enjoyed some crappy stuff (Sweet Valley, I’m looking at you) if I had! And oh, how I wish that I’d had Gracie Faltrain back then. Or any of the awesome sports books I am reading now.
March 29th, 2010 at 8:49 am
Forgot to mention: Marianne de Pierres has a great subtle vampire trilogy for teens coming out later this year called Burn Bright. At least, I think it’s this year… I’ve read the first one and it’s marvellous and thought provoking.
March 29th, 2010 at 10:42 am
[...] So I guess I am in the ‘it doesn’t matter how bad the book is, just be glad they’re reading’… [...]
March 29th, 2010 at 11:02 am
Good post, Tansy. Although, we should encourage teens to read the better quality books over the dross, right?
March 29th, 2010 at 11:42 am
Thanks for suggestions. I’ve got Cassandra Claire’s first book to read for myself so that’ll be a good one to start with. Not sure about Demon’s Lexicon
because it’s a nice hardcover and I worry it’ll get damagedbecause the characters might be a bit old and it doesn’t have vampires.I’ll see how many of the others I can find too. No danger of her getting to see True Blood, it almost had a bit too much graphic sex and violent for me, and this is a kid who doesn’t seem to watch much TV from 8.30 pm, but I’ll look for the books.
Definitely keeping an eye for Marianne’s books.
March 29th, 2010 at 12:21 pm
Alan – while I’m always in favour of encouraging people to read books I consider good, I think you’re missing the point a bit. How do you define quality? Do you only read what you consider high quality books? Do you like books that other people consider to be dross?
There are after all people who think all SF/Fantasy is dross. I know I had a lot of teachers who tried to steer me away from it, and here I am making it my life’s work.
I think there can at times be a fine line between critiquing books and judging the reading habits of others, and while I support the former, I am increasingly troubled by the latter.
March 29th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
For a ‘good’ YA vampire series, I’d recommend Christopher Pike’s The Last Vampire and Meredith Ann Pierce’s The Darkangel. Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps is interesting, but I’m not sure it will appeal in this case.
March 30th, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Hi Tansy,
Thanks so much for posting this. I haven’t read Twilight, but I’ve read tons of critique and find some of hilarious. Most of it though, is critiquing the author’s inefficient use of language, which you do not.
I think a lot of the distinction lies between “storytelling” and “language use.” Most people agree the author is a great storyteller. And if storytelling is something that’s important to you, then great, you enjoyed the book. But if efficient use of language really drives you, then perhaps you didn’t enjoy the book. End of story
Bethany
P.S. thank you for taking the non-prescriptive route and drawing our attention to labeling books “bad” or “good.” When we stop judging language and language use, communication (storytelling) is much better.
March 30th, 2010 at 12:45 pm
[...] easily disturbed teenagers I have a range of conflicting responses. One of them goes very much like Tansy Rayner Roberts’ response: I read Flowers in the Attic and Angelique and many other even worse books as a sub-teen and teen [...]
March 30th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Hi Bethany!
This wasn’t intended to be a critique of Twilight – really, inefficient use of language? The thought of novels being expected to be remotely efficient in their use of language is somewhat baffling to me. Novels are pretty much big fat luxury items and time sinks, tied up in red ribbons. Now tweets, tweets are efficient!
I agree there is a huge difference between readers who prefer story and readers who prefer language – prosemonkeys and storyhounds as I like to call them! It does certainly go to show how important it is to consider the tastes of the critics. If someone says ‘it’s a bad book’ it could mean anything from ‘the sentences annoyed me’ to ‘the story was crap and made no sense’ to ‘I think it’s pushing an uncomfortable gender paradigm on young women’.
Generally speaking, storyhound writers who have the true 100% storyhound gift manage to drag most readers along at a lickety split so that they don’t stop to notice other flaws. But a true 100% prosemonkey reader will still spot those annoying sentences.
I was discussing Ash by Malinda Lo with my friend Kaia and we discovered we had radically different experiences with the book, largely because it took her a week to read and I read it from beginning to end in an afternoon.
April 3rd, 2010 at 6:54 am
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