You Should Read Terrible Books
It occurred to me when I was four chapters into Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls”. I was bored. Hemingway bored me. Critics had told me that this was a “must-read”, but for some reason, I found myself slowly nodding off to sleep…
We all do it way too often. We defer our choices to so-called “curators” to choose what we read, and in it, we sacrifice our own judgement.
We bore ourselves, because we read what we’re told is good, not what we think we’ll enjoy… In fact, we’re not even given the opportunity to find out what it is that we enjoy.
I’m a strong believer in the power of curation. I curate a story every morning for the thousands of readers of Morning Short. That said, I’ve found that as a society we’ve become too dependent on lists like “100 Great Books to Read In a Lifetime”, and services like mine.
That’s why I wanted to offer three simple word of advice: Find your books. Not my books. Your books.
Form your own damn opinions. Curation has a place, but that place is not as the sole and absolute dictator of your reading habits.
Don’t be afraid to read books that others call “terrible” — In fact, I encourage you to read “terrible” books, because doing so will help you to realize where critics are dead wrong (or entirely right). Write your own reviews of everything you read. Your opinion matters as much as that guy in the tall building in New York writing for The Times.
Here’s a fun way to find your books: Make a checklist of genres, try a book or two in each genre, and write down the genres and authors that you love.
Give each book 15 pages to engage you. If you’re bored, stop reading it. If you’re in a hurry, read short stories instead. You can learn about a new genre through three 20-minute stories just as well as you can through a 651 page tome.
Remember: Reading is meant to relax you — to immerse you — and if a book/story isn’t doing that for you, it’s time to give up on it and find something new to read. Anyone who says he/she doesn’t like reading simply hasn’t found his/her perfect genre yet.
One last tip: When you find a few favorite genres, get more specific. Try out sub-genres. For example, if you’re a fan of fantasy, explore the bizarro-realism of so-called “low fantasy”. In any genre there’s enough great material to keep you immersed for a lifetime.
