Not another book review: the good, the bad, and the guilty pleasures

Announcing a new semi-weekly (more if I can) article about what I've learned from my reading list

Jimi Hendrix was a god walking amongst us. What he did with the guitar had never been done before and has never been seen since. (I said it—fight me!) Why am I bringing up the greatest guitar player of all time? Because of something he said.

Hendrix was known to show up at any venue to watch whatever band was playing that night. He loved being around music, even when he wasn’t playing himself. The bands were never as gifted as he was, no one was. And sometimes, they were downright bad. People asked him why he bothered. We don’t have his exact quote, but he basically said he could learn something from anybody—even if it’s what not to do (Jimi loved em dashes).

My reading list is growing every day, and I’m only chipping a book or two off it each week. The majority are classics I’ve always been meaning to read. Some are recommendations from friends. But some of them are … well, they’re bad, and I know they’re bad. Still, I intend to dig into each of them, great, good, and bad alike, to see what makes them tick and what I can use in my own writing.

“But Javi, what kind of bad books?” you ask.

I’m glad you asked.

I’ve never been snobby about the movies I like to watch or the TV I consume. I have just as much fun watching Iron Man as I do Brazil (that movie is weird, but good). Sometimes you want some popcorn. Sometimes you want a rich stew. Sometimes you want comfort food. Other times you’re willing to try a fried grasshopper (tastes nutty).

Why shouldn’t we acknowledge that books are no different?

The “bad” books I’m talking about are books that blow up on Tik Tok but you’d hesitate to read in public. Guilty pleasure books. Comfort food books. Rollercoaster ride books. Empty calorie books. Bestsellers that make you scratch your head and say, “I don’t get it,” or worse, make you angry or discouraged.

I think we all want our writing to move people, to make them think, and maybe to offer a little fun. Say what you will about the quality of the prose, the depth of the character development, or lack of any meaningful theme in some of these books—they sell, and people have fun reading them. Some of these books turn people on. Some make them cry. Some keep them reading until dawn. Some let them watch a train wreck in slow motion. And some just help them escape for a little while.

Let’s find out why together.

What to expect

I am approaching this from my own tastes but primarily from the angle of someone trying to write thoughtful speculative fiction. I’m learning some call this genre literary speculative fiction, though I would think the literary is assumed. Many of the books will be from that genre but I am not limiting my exploration. These essays won’t be real book reviews in that I won’t tell you what to make sure to read or avoid. It will be more like an in-depth, craft focused, book discussion.

I am hoping that each post will reveal some of the special sauce we can learn from in these books.

Please let me know in the comments if you have any books to add to my (already too long) list. Give me anything you think would be fun to pick apart, especially your guilty pleasure reads.

Here is the current list, subject to change (in no particular order):

• A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

• Seven Days in June - Tia Williams

• Água Viva - Clarice Lispector

• Fourth Wing - Rebecca Yarros

• Neuromancer - William Gibson

• The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

• The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin

• Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

• A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J. Maas

• The Blade Itself - Joe Abercrombie

• Fairy Tale - Stephen King

• The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco

• East of Eden - John Steinbeck

• The Enemy - Lee Child

• Book Lovers - Emily Henry

• The Emperor’s Soul - Brandon Sanderson

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

• Babel - R.F. Kuang

• James - Percival Everett

• Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer

• The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

• Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler

• Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

• It Ends with Us - Colleen Hoover

• This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

• Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami

• Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson

• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

• Solaris - Stanislaw Lem

• Roadside Picnic - Strugatsky brothers

• The Road - Cormac McCarthy

• Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

Watch this space …