What makes a book great?
Liv said at lunch today that it was writing style that made a book great. Writing style doesn't improve as a book continues, so bad writing style are her grounds for quitting a book. Plot and content aren't cause for concern: a book which seems to have a boring/lacking plot at the outset may get better later on; characters which are difficult to identify with, irritating or just unbelievable may later redeem themselves.
Plot and content are different. For example, the plot of
Madame Bovary runs something like:
Girl marries man. Man is boring, girl has affair. Affair is boring, girl has another affair, and another. Girl realises the futility: kills herself.
There: 350 pages condensed into two lines. But this doesn't convey anything of the content of the book: Flaubert is trying to convey the feelings of restlessness and boredom, possibly due to depression, of Madame Bovary, who never quite attains what she would like.
To me, writing style isn't a priority. I can overlook bad writing if the content keeps me interested (Is that a coded way of saying I have a short attention span?!). I recently finished '
We' by Zamyatin. It is so badly written that critics have termed it a prose-poem, to cover up for the awkward, melodramatic sentences. On the other hand, the world he constructs throughout the book is believable and well thought-through. George Orwell used it as a source for '1984'. Although it did not directly inspire Huxley's 'Brave New World', there are many striking similarities between the books. His dystopian vision, envisaged before ubiquitous technology in the 1920, was of society as a machine striving for efficiency. Individuality is superfluous, people are given numbers. Members of the society are assigned tasks, which have been mathmatically analysed to eliminate inefficiency. Humans are taught to see their predetermined path through life as defined by the equations assigned to them. Feelings are eliminated.
There are millions of books out there in the world. You'll never be able to read them all. So judge them by their covers. Pick any arbitrary way of doing it. Only read books with red hardback covers.
Read, and if it's not telling you anything, move on. Don't read beautiful, literary daytime television. Read something that influences you and makes you think.
