On Reading Bad Books

I recently had what is a rare experience for me: I absolutely hated a book I read.

I don’t read a lot of contemporary fiction besides fantasy, and I usually pick up books only because of a reliable recommendation, a prior interest, or some necessity for a project. I also have such an immense and ever-growing pile of books recommended by people I love and know and trust that I rarely pick up a book and go in completely blind.

In this case, I recently found a special edition of a book published by Suntup Editions at a used bookstore. If you don’t know, Suntup is a publisher for the most discriminating book connoisseur. Suntup Editions will take a previously published classic (recent selections include Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian) and prepare a range of special prints of that book. They will typically secure a masterful illustrator, commission an introduction or commentary on the work from a known author, and (if the author is still living and willing to do so) have an author’s contribution as well.

They then bind these special editions in a range of options, from “artist’s editions,” to numbered editions (printed in the small hundreds) and lettered editions (a small limited print, each of 26 volumes in an alphabetic range from A-Z). Each of these will have its own special characteristics, binding, signatures from author and illustrator, etc. It’s really impossible to oversell the beauty of the binding and presentation of these books. They are masterful works of the bookbinding craft, and true tributes to the stories contained within. I highly recommend browsing their pictures, if only to drool.

At minimum, Suntup Editions retail in the hundreds. For author’s lettered editions, these extra-special printings begin in the thousands. Despite the exorbitant cost, they almost always sell out swiftly. As I said, for only the most discriminating connoisseur.

So imagine my surprise when I found a copy of a Suntup Editions printing of a book by Ania Ahlborn called Brother at a random store! The edition was signed by author and illustrator, limited to a print run of 500, and wonder of wonders, the bookstore had priced it at a measly $10. Did I know anything about Ahlborn? No. Did I know anything about her novel Brother? No. But it was a beautiful, signed, limited edition book for the price of a Big Mac meal. I was sold

I’ve had this book for several months now, and I finally decided to give it a read. At this point in a standard book review many would say “it did not disappoint,” but I’m afraid that it did. It’s not that Ahlborn is a bad writer. It’s not that Brother is even a bad book. I’m not in a position to make that judgment. I just found that everything about the story (the grotesque life of a boy kidnapped and raised by a family of cannibalistic serial killers) was ultimately repulsive and unsatisfying. It was like combining the most shocking episodes of the entire series of Criminal Minds into a thriller novel with an incomprehensibly evil climactic twist and a rage-inducing conclusion.  

It's not even that I find the subject matter so inherently distasteful that I was unable to enjoy it. I recently finished Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, a similarly grotesque story about a necrophiliac serial killer in the Appalachian hills. I could write a whole post about Child of God on its own, but suffice it to say that I feel I read a deep exploration of the human condition in McCarthy’s rich prose, even though it was treating such an obscene subject. I did not come away from Brother feeling similarly.

One of my students recently asked me what books I had been reading lately, and I confessed that I had read a book that I hated, a book that had actively angered me the entire time I read it. He told me that, as another of his professors had told him, “Life is too short to read bad books.”

In one sense, this is deeply true. I realized recently, watching the internet melt down over Lex Fridman’s barely-ambitious plan to read one significant book a week in the year 2023, that if I only read a new book every week and never purchase another, it will take me something like 10 years just to get through my “unread” shelves. The universe of books I could be reading is so large, the number of truly excellent books I have yet to read or that deserve a re-read so uncountable, why would I even bother reading something unrecommended, unknown, and even suffer through to the end when I feel it’s bad?

My tentative answer is that I simply don’t trust myself in advance to know whether a book is a bad one, particularly without finishing it. I’m not even fully willing to say Ahlborn’s Brother is a bad book. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe there are good and bad books. I do believe there are people with better taste and worse taste, people who could tell me with greater confidence the quality of Ahlborn’s work. There are books I am absolutely confident saying are bad (I’ll tell you if you really must know).

But what I’m not willing to do (yet) is to trust my initial impressions halfway through a work, fiction or nonfiction. I am not (yet) so developed in my taste and knowledge that I think I am capable of discerning within a few pages and paragraphs the quality of a story or argument. I may even find, if I ever choose to revisit her, that Ahlborn’s work has far more to it than I’ve first surmised. In other words, life is far too short to read bad books, but unfortunately one must spend some of that limited lifetime reading bad books to learn to recognize them.

In the meantime, I sold the lovely book, and will aim instead to procure a Suntup Edition of a novel I know I love in the future.