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Quora Post: How do you find and choose good books to read?

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Posted on March 24, 2018 at 4:26 pm, in Essays | The Old Book Blog
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Ed. Note: Quora is a website where people post questions about all sorts of different topics and then anyone who wants to can provide an answer, with the best answers getting “Upvoted” based on popularity. I’ve occasionally written an answer when I’ve felt I had something interesting to say on a subject, and this is my response to the question, “How do you find and choose good books to read?”

The self-serving answer would be read my website and follow my @bookappreciator Twitter handle (endorsed by NYRB Classics on Twitter, one of a handful of fine publishers—along with Pushkin Press, Europa Editions, New Directions, Open Letter, Other Press, Two Lines Press, Archipelago Books, And Other Stories, Graywolf Press, and some others I’m forgetting—constantly bringing out translations of lesser-known classics of world literature) but instead I want to explain what I—an extreme, crazy bibliomaniac—do to find books to read, why my To-Be-Read list stretches to the stratosphere, and how you can learn how to judiciously feed your own Gentle Madness (to cite the name of a classic book on bibliophilia by Nicolas Basbanes.)

Step 1: Decide What You Would Consider to Be a “Good Book” / Expand Your Mind

As the saying goes, your mileage may vary in terms of how useful my advice will be to you, depending on how broadly or narrowly you define “good.” At the broadest extreme, you may be a person who likes one particular genre—romance, crime thrillers, sci-fi, epic fantasy doorstops—and you may be contented with the baseline things an average book of that genre gives you. Or maybe you are one of these people who think judging books is a totally superfluous task because “everybody’s entitled to their opinion, there’s no such thing as good, better, or best, etc.” To those people: you can stop reading right now. Walk into a Barnes & Noble, go to the shelf of your favorite genre, and just randomly pick a book based on its catchy title or cover art. There you go, problem solved.

Now, you used the word “good” in your question, so I’m assuming that to you quality counts. But opinions differ about what counts as good! Doesn’t that Lame-O guy above who says you can’t judge books have a point?

And here’s my answer: If we are fortunate and capable of mind (not a given), then we have been endowed with the ability to experience art. Not all of us experience art in the same ways; our experience is always going to be shaped by our environment, upbringing, gender, ethnicity, politics, etc. etc., but certain aesthetic experiences are relatively consistent and, on some level, ingrained physiologically. We hate the sound of nails on a chalkboard; we like when words come in threes. Other experiences/pleasures, I would argue, are trained pleasures; we are born with the capacity to like certain things—because they parallel something we experience, because they scratch an itch, etc.—and then nurture (as opposed to nature) takes over from there. Over time, people have tended to find Shakespeare’s language beautiful. Can I prove, absolutely 100% to the nth philosophical degree, that Shakespeare is better or even good? Not in the abstract. But if we define good as “something you or a broad mass of people would like,” then we can start the conversation.

“But wait!” I can hear people at the opposite extreme saying, the snobs (like me.) “Doesn’t the average person like a lot of really dumb art? How do I know you won’t subject me to the book equivalent of Paul Blart, Mall Cop?” The difference between high art and popular trash is a long-standing debate. It used to be that novels, as an entire class of literature, were considered frivolous and trashy. Shakespeare’s plays were popular entertainment. Classic authors like Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Charles Dickens have had their reputations among literary critics go up and down over the decades as they were classed alternately as popular or literary.

One critic who was definitely in the camp of snobs was Dwight McDonald. In his famous essay, “Masscult and Midcult,” McDonald separated pop culture into three camps, lowbrow (Masscult), middlebrow (Midcult), and highbrow (the stuff McDonald thought of as great literature).

While we can disagree with the relative value McDonald places on these three groups (along with the idea that books can be neatly sorted into these categories, as well as the implied idea that you are somehow less-than if you like low- or middlebrow art), I think it’s useful to think about how these types of art differ and emphasize different values.

Lowbrow: simple plots and motivations, does the same thing as every other work in the genre in highly predictable ways; explosions, boom! bang! pow! and the hero/heroine gets the guy or the girl. Fart jokes, dick jokes, and other obvious slapstick/physical comedy.

Middlebrow: A frisson of sophistication. Basically embodies the values of most rich and middle class people. Jokes are funny but not biting. Social commentary is simplistic and repeats the same vapid things that have already been said ad nauseum. The characters are all types rather than distinctive, memorable individuals. Nobody’s worldview is seriously challenged.

Highbrow: The characters are distinctive. The author is sneaky/up to something/using style to achieve additional effects. Worldviews are challenged. Minds are expanded. Knowledge is gained. This is not just the world as you know it, but the world as you’ve never seen it before.

(Note: This doesn’t even get into the arguments of Pierre Bourdieu in his classic study, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, in which he argues that traditional ideas of taste are socially constructed based on class and educational background.)

Put aside the idea of high, middle, and low. You decide which of these appeals to you. I’ll come clean: the types of books I enjoy are either highbrow, or incorporate something that’s high-brow into a book that’s otherwise middle or lowbrow (and in fact a lot of high-brow fiction these days plays around with genres that previously were thought of as “low.”) To be perfectly clear where I stand, I want to be challenged. I want to have new experiences. I want to be pushed out of my comfort zone. That’s my bias; your mileage may vary.

Step 2: Find Arbiters of Taste That You Trust

To be perfectly clear, I’m not telling you to find some idol to worship and agree with. Rather, you need ways to filter out the 90% of everything that’s trash (according to the snob viewpoint) to get to the good stuff.

There are a few ways to do that.

A. Read Book Reviews

There are so many websites writing book reviews; The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Books, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Guardian Books, Kirkus Reviews, and Publisher’s Weekly are only the most famous ones. Google “Best Book Blogs” to find many more. Search around. Read some reviews. You’ll learn alot.

To offer one of my favorite genres as an example, Strange Horizons and SFSite are two website which specialize in reviews of sci-fi.

There are also many people writing quality reviews on GoodReads and Amazon.

B. Read Literature in Translation

One of the best ways you can filter for better books is by reading books in translation from the non-English speaking world. Fact: Only 3% of books published in the United States are translated from another language. Meanwhile, Americans represent a mere 5% of the world’s population. That means that the number of books translated relative to the number of books published is miniscule; when you read a book in translation, you are reading a book some editor or translator has already selected as being especially worthy of the effort to translate; the chances that it is a better than replacement-level book (to steal a term from baseball analytics) are significant.

Websites that specialize in reviewing literature in translation include Words Without Borders, Asymptote Journal, The Complete Review, and Open Letters Journal.

C. Find Obscure and Forgotten Authors with “Indicators of Greatness”

I have a secret for you: the classics, as great as they are, aren’t the only old books that matter. Here’s another one: the list of books considered to be classics is constantly changing as authors of great books that aren’t part of the traditional canon get “re-discovered”. (The list is also much longer than you’ve been led to believe.)

At my Twitter account, @bookappreciator, I try to do my part to facilitate such rediscoveries. Every day I go to a site called OnThisDay.com and see which authors were born that day. I usually just retweet a post about the big names that everyone knows; they aren’t what interest me most. Instead, I look at all the obscure names. I research each one and see if they are in any way notable or potentially interesting to a modern audience. If so, I write a short bio on Twitter including a picture, a “hook” to tell potential readers why this author is interesting, and maybe a link or two to free online texts of significant works if I can fit them in there. (I find these texts primarily through Archive.org, Gutenberg.org, HathiTrust, and Google Books.) I also mention if the author’s work remain almost entirely untranslated; because why not do my part to give more ideas/work to hardworking translators?

Here are some examples of these tweet-bios:

Based on the pace I been able to maintain of writing these tweet-bios, I estimate the number of “notable”/“classic” writers from before 1920 is closer to 1000 than is is to 365 or 100.

 

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