Cheap Thrills and Literary Skills

Something I find fascinating is what different people consider to be noteworthy. I myself have varying standards of excellence, forged slightly by the opinions of those around me but mostly based on how I am made to feel. This is particularly relevant when it comes to film, television and, of course, literature.

Some of my favourite novels are those with beautiful words and deep, thought-provoking themes, such as Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed popular books considered to be literary masterpieces, such as John Green’s The Fault in our Stars and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Yet there are some books that received praise yet failed to capture my attention: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road still stands in my mind as quite possibly the worst book I’ve ever read, despite the fact that it won several awards and was considered so brilliant they even made a movie based on it.

However, the majority of my ‘favourites’ list is composed of books that are just a lot of fun to read. Contest by Australian author Matthew Reilly is a book that went straight to my ‘favourites’ list, not because of any particular literary merits but simply because it was immensely entertaining from start to finish. Even of the classics that I love so dearly, the ones I love the most are the ones with the action: The Three Musketeers series and The Count of Monte Cristo, both by Alexandre Dumas, the Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

I love some of the most popular stuff, like the Divergent series by Veronica Roth and the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, yet never fully committed to things like Harry Potter or Twilight (by J. K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer, respectfully). Yet clearly, with those last two, I am not part of the majority.

For me to consider a book excellent, it has to have one very specific merit- it has to keep me entertained. This is why my favourite books cover such a broad range of genres. I can be captivated by words, characters, actions or themes. I consider the best authors to be the ones that tell an interesting story in a captivating way. I like purpose and logic to a story, and will happily suffer through the deaths of beloved characters if I believe it strengthens the story. I will take all manner of detour before realisation of the main objective if I think it adds to the story or character development, or is just realistically necessary. I will wade through clever word arrangement for the satisfaction of understanding deeper meaning, and have a strong appreciation for metaphors that get me thinking, particularly about things I can relate to.

When I finish a book, I write my own review (via Goodreads) then read the reviews of others to see how closely their opinions match my own. This is quite a revealing process. For example, I recently completed The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. This is a story about an elderly man who spontaneously decides to walk across the country to see his friend, who is dying of cancer. Now, with a plot summary like that you can easily assume two things: firstly, that Harold will be walking for a large portion of this novel, and secondly, that his journey is likely to have a more profound meaning than a man simply putting one foot in front of the other. I myself quite enjoyed it, mostly for the thoughts it initiated and its glimpses at the hidden wonders of humankind. Considering other reviews, it seems that others who enjoyed this novel did so for the same reasons as I. Yet those that were not entertained by this book cited repetitiveness or writing nuances which made me think that these people were kind of missing the point.

But are they?

Perhaps they are missing the author’s meaning, or can’t quite comprehend why something may have been written a certain way. But perhaps it is me reading meaning where there is none, or assuming something to be the author’s intentions simply because of the way I’ve interpreted it.

I think media has become such a massive player in life that we are forgetting that we all perceive things differently. Instead of nurturing learning by attempting to understand the opinions of others, we instead focus on isolating those who disagree with the mainstream ideas. We are forgetting our own voices in favour of speaking the words of the masses. I am not innocent of this, and occasionally find it unreasonably confronting when someone disagrees with something the popular opinion and I agree on. On the other hand, when others agree with me, my opinion feels more justified. (Since when does an opinion need to be justified?)

The greatest thing about the world of literature, in my opinion, is that it is not untouched by the overreaching arm of mass media but is still resilient enough to still produce unique work of merit untainted by popular opinion. This is one of its greatest appeals to me. Books are constantly reliable, producing a brilliant array of literary masterpieces and less wordy but equally entertaining novels that I can lose myself in. Sometimes they will touch on themes that make me wonder how I can apply them to my own life in order to become a better person, sometimes they’ll have me thinking about how I would behave in certain situations (I have concluded that I would be unlikely to survive the Hunger Games).

That is what I love about books.

They’re all a little bit different. Just like us.

But that’s just my opinion.