Slow Reading of Bad Books

or it could have been yet another masterpiece had Bram Stoker had more time

I am not a good cook. These are the first words my mind threw at me when I, sipping an ocean of morning coffee, was thinking about my new newsletter. Playing with words and ideas, meandering desultorily on the lanes of my subconscious that were cozily hiding in the shadows of lavishly green, gigantic trees, I took my time, the only precious thing I possess now.

I let my eyes glide from one miscellaneous object to another that had found home on my desk. Never will I ever be able to feel the pangs of creativity in decluttered spaces. The scarce drops of my creativity can only sparkle in the darkness of chaotic reality.

So, I am not a good cook. That’s the statement my mind whispered to me when I was ruminating about bad books. Good, bad. Black, white. Left, right. The eternal duality of our temporary existence. Even if we carry with us luggage full of fancy and sophisticated words, able to convey the infinitesimal shadows and nuances of what we are about to say, the nature of our judgments is simple: something is either good or bad. And only after we make a decision as to which of these two camps the nebulous something belongs can we proceed to paint a more detailed picture of our opinion.

I am not a good cook — I repeat this sentence for the third time and hope not to waste any more of your time reading my wordy musings — but that doesn’t mean I cannot enjoy cooking. For the past several months, kneading dough has become my personal sort of therapy. When in doubt, knead it out, you see.

Instead of worrying about the result, which doesn’t exist in the present and waves its hand at me from the ethereal future, I dive into the process of scattering flour. Of savagely chopping chocolate. Of spilling milk over the mirror surface of reality. My whole “I” is in the process of creating. Even if this “I” knows that I am not a good cook.

Recently, I discovered the same kind of process-focusing pleasure of reading bad books. Books where nothing works. Books that limp and stutter. Books whose fire is about to die without becoming an untamed flame.

Of course, the adjective “bad” is subjective. As well as the adjective “good,” I must add. We all know a proverb that states that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. The same goes for books. What I find bad may be good for someone else. And vice versa. (That is, by the way, the reason why I never read book reviews before I set off on a reading journey. Only after finishing a book do I check what others have to say about it.)

And yet, after reading many a great book this year, I see bad books as jewels on my reading list, for when I read a bad book, everything slows down. I can hear the drops of seconds falling on the pages. I hear the voiceless whispers of words. I feel the weight of a hardcover squirming on my lap. Bad books are created for meditation. For thinking about life. And about what good books are.

“What would your good do if evil didn’t exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?” asked Woland in The Master and Margarita. Without reading The Lair of the White Worm, I would never appreciate — as I do now — Dracula and The Jewel of Seven Stars, all three written by one and the same Bram Stoker.

The Lair of the White Worm is great in its brilliant awfulness. It is, if I get back to my cooking adventures, undercooked and overpeppered and oversalted with jam inside instead of meat.

Its first problem is the narration. It jumps from long — and sometimes, let me be honest, useless — dialogues to third-person descriptions, making the story-telling lens all blurred and misfocused.

The characters appear and disappear from the story stage, leaving the aftertaste of confusion behind them. What is their role in the story? Who are they? Whom can I relate to? The characters are so flat that they don’t even pretend to be real. They are just sketches. That’s what they are.

And the novel itself is just a draft that has too many ideas and themes that we, its readers, can’t hold all in our hands and eventually drop them all down. Bram Stoker, it seems, had a very ambitious project for which he didn’t have much time (creative energy?). Published just a year before its author’s death, the novel gives us only hints of its withering literary greatness. If we shut our eyes tight, we can imagine what the novel could have become had the novelist had more time.

But, alas, he didn’t. And instead of keeping this patchwork of ideas and raw, undeveloped scenes in his drawer, Stoker chose to publish it. Which is great for us. Because it proves that even literary geniuses have to work and work hard to turn their ideas into literary masterpieces. No one when it comes to writing can escape the process of rewriting, of killing all your darlings, of filling in all the holes. And only reading bad books can illustrate what good books are supposed to be.