Grant Finnegan: "Dear Carmen Maria Machado: Bad is Better than Boring"

Dear Carmen Maria Machado: Bad is Better than Boring

 by Grant Finnegan

When I am looking for a new book to read, I will decide to read it if I have reason to believe that it is, or might be, something I enjoy. And I will stop reading when/if I lose interest and become convinced that I won’t regain interest either.

To be more specific, if there is some indication that a text has interesting aesthetic, thematic, emotional, or narrative elements, then I will read it. It doesn’t need to be revolutionary in all of these categories. In fact, it can be lacking substantially in almost any of these categories, as long it still maintains a sense of emotional worth.

For example, let’s look at why I began to read, and continued to read the book series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. I started to read this series because I was told that it had an interesting, well developed world, an ensemble cast of interesting characters, compelling stories, and some interesting themes. All of these are elements that I enjoy in stories. They (when appropriate and used well) increase a story’s emotional impact, and I was happy to discover that Martin uses them well. However, as I read further, I began to notice that while I enjoyed his characters, stories, and world, I didn’t enjoy his sentences. This wasn’t enough to get me to stop reading though, because despite the occasional awkward sentence or cliched description, I was still developing an emotional attachment to the book. And as I grew more entrenched in the series, it got easier and easier to forgive the shortcomings of Martin’s prose.

Not every text is able to make up for its short comings like that though. I can think of several books throughout the years that I have put down without finishing, but I can’t remember a single one of their names. And I think that should be a good indication of why I stopped reading them; they were forgettable. Even books that I actively dislike don’t go unfinished, it’s only the forgettable ones. For example, I think Fahrenheit 451 is almost comically pretentious, but I’ve read the book to completion twice. It’s the only work where I’ve seen such concentrated fear of story-telling formats that aren’t traditional in the west, and that is fascinating to me. That is something that is lacking in the dozen books I’ve started reading that are about a troublesome young child who escapes their mundane life to go on an adventure with a gruff mentor who acts tough but really has a heart of gold, only to discover that adventure is not what they expected.

In my life, I only have so much time to read leisurely. So the surest way a book can get me to ditch it is by being uninteresting. As long as it’s interesting, even if I deeply disagree with an ideology heavily present in the text, I will read it.