Life, the Universe and Everything

It would be wrong to generalise and say that it must follow that all bestsellers are well written and all award winning novels are laborious to read. I found both Giles Foden’s award winning The Last King of Scotland and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code to be fantastic: Foden’s book was excellent where as Brown’s book was hard to believe. Of course, The Last King of Scotland was also a bestseller, and The Da Vinci Code also won awards.

What the literary community must not do is adopt an attitude that just because something is popular, then it follows that it is also vulgar and unworthy of praise and awards. Just because it is not a classical novel telling the story of one man’s determination to triumph over adversity and claim the heart of the woman that he loves; but a story so ludicrous that even an atheist thought that the Christians were getting a rough deal does not mean that it should not receive awards. That said, The Da Vinci Code failed my own criteria earlier this year for what makes a good book: I can read any book once - I am proud that I have never left a book unfinished - but to be counted as a good book, I have to be able to re-read it. The Da Vinci Code failed this test and was back on the shelf by page 55! The Last King of Scotland, however, has been read again; and I have bought the DVD and shown that books are better than films: but that really is another story.

Some books have that certain something: unputdownability. This is a word that I think that I have invented and will be asking the Oxford English Dictionary to consider the next time that they look for new words. I do not think I need to expand on the meaning of this word: but I will, as it is mine. It is a book so good that it is read at a single sitting. I can think of a few; Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, Eric Ambler’s The Dark Frontier and - obviously - all of Douglas Adams’s books. That is not an exhaustive list - for a start there were no Bond novels mentioned, but you get the idea.

The main requirement for unputdownability is the cliff-hanger ending too every chapter. Richard Matheson’s I am Legend was - as far as I can remember - full of plot holes; yet every single chapter ended with a sentence that made me actually want to read the one that followed straight away; I could not just slip the bookmark in place and go to sleep. By the end of the book, I had forgotten the plot holes and just remembered that this was a book that I could not put down. (Obviously I did in the end, I have finished it now.)

So what makes a good book? Anything that I have managed to read at least twice and enjoyed second time around. That should narrow it down just a little bit; but that means that the Communist party manifesto, the Book of Revelation and On the Pleasure of Hating all make my criteria. Is that my fault - because I am well read - or your fault; because you think Lord of the Rings is good?