Thoughts on Bad Books

Is there such a thing as a bad book? If so, what separates a good book from a bad one? Does the quality of a book matter, or am I too picky?

These are some questions I’ve been thinking about a lot this week. Sadly, a few of my recent reads have been disappointing, which always causes me to start thinking about this subject again. One of the books had been suggested by someone I really admire in the reading world, but turned out to be written in a way I couldn’t enjoy, and another one annoys me because the writing is so wonderful, but the story is just not something that fascinates me at all, making it a frustrating read.

Not enjoying a book you thought you were going to love is disappointing. While half of me wants to quit the book and move onto something new, there’s still a part of me hoping it will turn around and surprise me. I’m left hanging on the edge of my seat wishing for something to happen that never does, or if it does happen, I’ve still spent the whole first part of the book unhappily anyway.

I think the subject of bad books is something most readers come across from one time to another. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it isn’t really something that has black and white lines marking right and wrong. I couldn’t possibly answer every question about this subject, and I considered thinking of something different for this blog post altogether.

But I decided that, whether I could cover everything to be said on this or not, it was worth sharing. This may be a little more rambly than usual, but I hope you find my thoughts on this interesting. There isn’t an overly large amount of them, and they are a little bit out of order and disconnected, but I did try to make all of them easy to understand.

Two Kind of ‘Bad Books’

When discussing ‘bad books’, we have to clarify what that means. What categorizes something as a bad book?

I was thinking about this earlier, and I realized that there are two different types of bad books.

The first is a ‘bad book’ because it is not a good fit for you. It may be that you simply have a different preference from the author, or maybe you are not the right age for it yet. There are several reasons a book might not be good for you in particular, and I think that is common and okay. It is good to remember that in this case, just because a book is not good for you does not make it bad for everyone.

The other kind of ‘bad book’ is the sort that is simply poorly written (this is the type that I’ve mostly had in mind while writing this post). These are the books that feel as though the author slapped them together in a month and barely bothered to edit them before seeking to be published. I find myself more annoyed than anything while reading these types of books, because if an author is going to publish their book to the world I feel strongly that they should work to write a quality story for their readers to enjoy.

Should All Books be Good?

This is something that I am very passionate about. If you’ve talked to me at all about books, you’ve probably been forced to listen to my angry rants about low quality books with poor writing and cringy scenes. Nothing annoys me more than a badly written book, especially one that’s marketed as Christian.

I want to be careful with how I phrase this. I am not saying that we have to give a perfect offering at all times, because God can absolutely work through whatever we have to give. After all, it is by grace through faith we have been saved, not by works (Ephesians 2:8-9). Writing a book does not make or break our salvation.

BUT. We are called to worship God in everything we do. Even the act of writing a book is a way to bringing glory to the Lord, and I think that a lot of Christian authors (and authors in general) don’t understand the gravity of that. Books can be little flames of light in the darkness, and they have the power to influence someone for the better. We have to take this seriously. Saying our books are written for the Lord should not give us reason to do the act halfheartedly; it should inspire us to write the story to the very best of our human abilities, working for the Lord and not for man (Colossians 3:23).

And the same is true for all books, not just ones by ‘Christian’ authors. All books set an example in the world, and an author should do all they can to make a book the best it can be for their readers.

So yeah. 😉 There’s my little rant. If you ever want to know why I hate poorly written books, now you know.

Final Thoughts

I hope this little ramble of thoughts was interesting to you. If you’ve ever struggled with bad books in your reading life maybe this can be a little bit of something for you to think on. 🙂