From TV Tropes:
Half an hour after the show is over, a random viewer is staring into their refrigerator, vaguely bemused by the fact that their six-pack of beer has somehow become a two-pack of beer. Rather than work out how this might have happened, it occurs to them to wonder how in the hell Sydney Bristow went from Hungary to Melbourne, Australia, then to LA, all within 24 hours. Or maybe it occurs to them that they’ve never met anyone who actually named their dog Fido. It didn’t bother them during the show. It wasn’t until they discovered they were running short of beer that it became an issue.
When China Mike Glyer picked up my post a couple of days ago, I was skimming over the comments and saw one that said, in effect, “every book deserves to be read.” At the time, I thought “well, that’s obviously stupid” and moved on, but last evening I had a moment of fridge logic, almost exactly like TV Tropes describes (minus the beer, since I don’t drink).
Every book deserves to be read? Really? Prove it by reading the Bible cover to cover. And the Book of Mormon. And the Doctrine and Covenants / Pearl of Great Price. And the Complete Journal of Discourses. And every General Conference report going back for the last two centuries. Heck, even as a believing Latter-day Saint, I don’t think there’s anyone alive who’s read all of that.
Or how about Mein Kampf? Does that deserve to be read?
(I happen to believe that it does, but in a “he who knows himself and the enemy does not need to fear the outcome of a hundred battles” sort of way. And no, I haven’t read it yet.)
Seriously, though, how insane do you have to be to actually believe something like that? “All books deserve to be read.” That’s not the sort of thing that a person comes up with unless they’ve been programmed to think a certain way. Like, “all women deserve to be believed” (except for Tara Reade, of course).
Now, I don’t believe that there’s a nefarious conspiracy to deliberately program people like this commenter to read crappy books. But there is a lot of propaganda out there that follows the formula “all _____ deserve to be ______.” Case in point, believe all women. What probably happened was this commenter, who has already been programmed by this sort of propaganda, tried to reformulate it in a way that would make me look bad. As in, “Vasicek is such a heartless monster to DNF so many books. All books deserve to be read.”
Here’s the thing, though: books are inanimate objects. They don’t have feelings. They don’t care if you read them or not. But readers do care if a book wastes their time. Time is a scarce resource for all of us, and there are more books in the world than can be read in a thousand lifetimes. So if you want to have any chance of finding and reading the best books, you need to be discerning—and that means acknowledging that some books just aren’t worth your time.
This is why I’m such a firm believer in DNFing books early and often. There’s nothing I hate about reading more than slogging through a book that isn’t working for me, only to find that I should have DNFed it a hundred pages ago. That’s why I was so frustrated with Stranger in a Strange Land. I love many of Heinlein’s other books, especially his juveniles, but some of them really misfire for me. So now, I assume that the author needs to prove themselves with every book.
But Joe, doesn’t it bother you as an author that people are DNFing your books? Not at all! Reading is an act of collaboration between the reader and the writer, which means that everyone’s “best books” list is going to be subjective. Some of the elements that make a book good can be measured objectively, but those elements are going to hit differently for different people—and that’s okay. Besides, even Jesus gets one-star, “did not finish” reviews. Who am I to think that I’m better than Him?
I used to worry that I was DNFing books to easily. But over the course of this last year, I’ve come to trust my own tastes. One of the things that I do test this is to skip to the last chapter of every book that I DNF, and read that. In 9/10 cases, I find that yes, there really is something objectionable about the book, and I made the right choice. And in the 1/10 books where that isn’t the case, something about it usually sticks with me, so that I end up coming back and reading it later. One of those books for me now is Deadhouse Gates, which I am thoroughly enjoying.
But you can’t learn to trust your own tastes if you adopt this insane idea that “every book deserves to be read.” In fact, if I still believed that I needed to finish every book that I started, I probably wouldn’t be much of a reader right now, just like most Americans.
So no, not every book deserves to be read. And at the end of the day, it isn’t about the books at all: it’s about the readers.
