I don't mind bad books. I resent bad movies and bad music, but books are different. Bad books serve a purpose. They take the kind of effort and dedication that make me admire and forgive. Besides, bad books are great education. Whereas a bad record is little more than an egregious waste of time, a bad novel will tell you exactly what it takes to write a good one.
Now obviously there is no shortage of writers I respectfully dislike (DH Lawrence and Haruki Murakami, to name a couple). Nevertheless, there is a certain layer of world literature that annoys me to no end. In contrast to my opening premise, these are the kind of writers whose books I almost find genuinely worthless. Whose pocket-sized philosophy offends my senses and makes me long for the comparatively harmless ideology of Ayn Rand. The culprits include, among others, Paulo Coelho, Carlos Castaneda and Richard Bach.
Back when I was studying at school, Richard Bach in particular was something of a teenage sensation (which is both interesting and sad considering that he was big in the distant 70s). People were exchanging books like Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions all the time, doing it with the sort of heavy and religious breathing that made you open the first page expecting to be blown away. Which you probably were, provided of course that you had schooled your mind beforehand.
The experience of reading those books was akin to having your tooth drilled slowly and painlessly (in retrospect, I would have preferred a brief pulling out with no anaesthesia). Back then, I may have talked myself into liking certain pages of Jonathan Livingston Seagull that came off like the bad parts of The Little Prince made even worse. As for Illusions, it seemed over-serious and masturbatory even for the highly impressionable age of fourteen. There was, however, a thoroughly unhealthy feeling that I was missing out on some godlike truth that would reveal itself in years to come (interestingly, this would only come true once, with The Sound and the Fury).
Looking back, I wonder what it was that we found in those humourless pages that replaced plot with pretentious fudge. I wonder how many seconds it would take me now to detect the pound shop wisdom that seems no better than the one contained in millions of those 'how to become a genius' opuses written by Dale Carnegie wannabes.
I remember how once upon a Christmastime, in England, we were visiting friends on Boxing Day, and I wandered into a spacious kitchen. Oddly, the first item I noticed was a fridge with all sorts of crap hanging on its door. Among other things, there was the time-table of a local book club. The nearest entry spelled 'Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist'. Christ, it was exasperating. Then, however, I checked out the rest of that month, and the remaining entries were all good. John Banville, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ian McEwan... The sheer contrast was breathtaking. Really, Coelho stood no chance. Coelho would make the excellent Saturday feel like Ulysses.
Which was how I came to realise that even the worst books are, in fact, a gift. A Christmas gift to all of us.
