In my oppinion, no book is crappy. Crappy is in the eye of the beholder. We CAN say a book is crap, but we SHOULDNT because it is only our OPPINION that it is crappy. Why should one persons oppinion be the beginning and end all to the book? I know the term "not my cuppa tea" has been bagged as too soft, but isnt it the truth of it? One, two, millions of people didnt like it, but it was a master peice to one, two, millions of others. Bad writing is bad writing, yes. Style, composition, etc etc, but isnt that also subjective? There are books that were canned for their informality back in the day that are now classics. Maybe thats an evolution of style? Granted, there is obviously some bad writing out there, but there may be those who still consider it great. That is all that matters. We do not have a responsiblity to bag a book because we dont want the next poor sap to have to read it. What if they LOVE it?

Reviews serve one perpose only: They express the fact that a book was either someones cuppa tea or not, whether they like that term or not. It is oppinion, not an act or responsiblity, sheilding unknowling eyes or - man I hope there are not people who do it for this reason - discouraging the author from writing again.

One mans rubbish is another mans treasure, right?

Can I just insert the point that Hilaire Belloc made in discussing Wodehouse's work (I'll admit my bias here, I love both Belloc and Wodehouse's work so give attention to their examples/opinions) - part of definition of good work is that it doesn't draw attention to technique? I happen to agree with that, and that's a reason I would give for loving (for example) Into the Wilderness and Jeeves novels, and for considering that The God of Small Things, despite receiving many literary honours, is pretentious and self-conscious. I couldn't get into the story because I kept getting distracted by the language, etc - I felt like the author kept tugging on my sleeve, saying, look at me and what I can do! Interestingly, I didn't feel this with Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which may reveal how subjective my evaluation is! what do people think?

deborah -- well, sure. That's one way to approach things. Beth has been arguing that it's not useful, and not intellectually honest. The extreme analogy: if somebody holds out a spoon and says, taste this, I just made it. What do you think? And it tastes like salted soap to you.

Really, gagging bad. What do you do? Try to smile and say: um, just not my cuppa tea? Or maybe: sonny jeezuz on a pony, what did you put in there, it tastes like crap!

The first response is relativistic, kind, and dishonest. The second one may at first surprise the cook, but in the end, it's far more useful than the hedge.

Sheena --

I think that you've pointed out something important, another element that goes into the evaluation of how a piece of fiction works. I personally prefer work that is less self-conscious, but then not everybody does. My sense that in this case we are not talking soap (in the sense I used it above) but cilantro. That is, something that tastes of soap we might call universal crap (is there any culture out there in the world that likes the taste of soap?) and something that tastes of cilantro, a matter of opinion.

But it's late, and I'm sleepy. This may make no sense.

Sara - yes, you're right, and thinking about my post I realised that I didn't make myself clear about my point. Which was, does ostentatious use of writing techniques count towards a flaw in the work, or is it just another case of not being my cuppa tea, with me being extra picky about the flavour of my tea? It is true, the kind of works of which I have this complaint are otherwise what I consider well-constructed and answer the other criteria you mention. When this is not the case, other things about them (an inconsistant plot, poorly developed characters, clumsy syntax, etc) usually irritate me far more! It probably follows that an author must have a good handle on literary techniques or at least visible knowledge of some in order to overuse them, so to speak, which is different to not employing them at all.

I think the point that Deborah was trying to make (to continue the analogy) was not that you taste what's on the spoon, think it tastes terrible, and say "Oh, just not my cuppa." Rather, you taste it, say that you think it's terrible, but that your saying so doesn't make it truth. There is nothing dishonest about that.

Please feel free to correct me if I misinterpreted this, Deborah.

Books that manage to miss everyone of those bells? That's my personal definition of crap.

That's pretty much where I stand too. Except I think if a book misses several of them (horribly researched AND terrible dialogue), or even just one Very Important one (every character is cardboard), then it's crap. One interesting qualification, though, and what is to me the gray area from which the best book discussions come: when an element or elements are baaaad, and yet the book overall is good in spite of it. The author may write the worst nookie scenes ever, but everything else is briliantly done - some people can get past the bad nookie, but for other people it ruins the whole thing.

That's another reason I think it's so important to be honest. If you can say "I don't like X but I love Y and Z so much that I could ignore X." Or if you can say "X is so bad that it ruined even Y and Z for me, which is a shame because Y and Z are just about perfect, but X turns this book into crap when it didn't HAVE to be." Isn't that SO much better than saying, "This book is just not my cuppa"?

And one man's trash is not always another man's treasure. Or you know, if it is, then you should be able to say, "I treasure this maggot-infested head of lettuce I just pulled out of the dumpster, but it is by definition GARBAGE."

Elisabeth -- I don't know if we really want to get into a discussion of truth, which is a very sticky concept, after all.

Seems to me that you're worried primarily about the interpersonal relationship between the cook and the person with the mouthful of salty soap. You are arguing that if the taster must give the cook bad news, it should be couched it in a way that will make it possible for the cook to choose to ignore the taster's opinion. Which of course, they may do anyway.

So you can say: Holy crap, this tastes like salty soap, sonny jezuz on a pony, man, what did you put in here? Of course, that's just my opinion.

Which reminds me of this kind of thing you hear all the time: "I'm sorry, I'm just not going to apologize."

I think that some of us have lost sight of the fact that there are degrees and shades of crappiness. And to beat Beth's analogy into a bloody pulp again: a maggot-infested head of lettuce is usually viewed as garbage; at the very, very best, it's compost material, unless you're one of those eccentric artists who likes to preserve dead, discarded things and then throw an art exhibit consisting of nothing but jars of rotting food scraps suspended in formaldehyde. Which still doesn't change the fact that artistic merit notwithstanding and despite whatever message it may impart, the exhibit still consists of bits of rotting garbage.

But that's not the only kind of garbage there is, because there are other assorted bits of crap, some of which tread the fine line between non-garbage and garbage: cracked Precious Moments figurines, velvet paintings of Jesus blessing a truck, a scratched-up armoire with a wobbly drawer, an old teddy bear with most of its stuffing ripped out and one eye missing, etc.

The value we assign to something is independent of the value the rest of the world may assign to it, and I think that when it comes time to pass judgment on the crapworthiness of a piece of literature, we are, in fact, assigning value. This is worth your time and money. This isn't worth your time and money. This judgment call is entirely subjective. But the fact still remains that if you really like surrounding yourself with bits of a maggoty head of lettuce for whatever reason, like, say, it's the head of lettuce Clay Aiken touched in the supermarket and you REALLY REALLY REALLY LOVE Clay Aiken and you're never tossing that head of lettuce, never, you should be able to admit that you're fondling maggoty lettuce instead of, say, the finest lace mantilla from Seville. And if for some reason you HATE lace mantillas, it's also much more useful for you to categorize it as such instead of calling it a maggot-infested head of cabbage.

Sorry for invoking Clay Aiken on your blog, Sara. I'll try not to do it too often.

Also, apologies for transmogrifying the head of lettuce to a head of cabbage by the end of the post. I blame Clay Aiken.

You can come over and transmogrify anytime, Candy. Funny, thoughtful stuff always welcome.

Do you think it would be difficult to come up with a list of markers for good crafstmanship in writing in general, or just in Romance? Because it seems to me in Romance you have the basic hurdle of drastically different reading intentions, with many of those differences shaping what constitutes a "good book" (as separate from, say, well-crafted prose).

I'm trying to decide whether the contentions over the idea of good writing versus crap writing carries over to literary studies. You could argue that the attacks on the canon for not including enough literature by non-whites and women reflects a pejorative definition of good writing as WASPM, but even in literary studies, it seems to me that you could come up with a more coherent set of conditions for good craftsmanship. But then again, maybe we're back to intention, since in literary studies, the quality of writing is one of the way in which lit fic books are judged. Although I've yet to hear one rational argument, from any perspective, that Shakespeare wasn't an absolute master of the written word. I truly think that even in Romance we could come up with some bright line rules (like "starting every sentence with 'suddenly' is not good writing). That doesn't mean that a book that breaks some of those rules won't move us, but does that have to mean its author is an outstanding writer, per se?

Personally, I'd like to see writing as a craft (I hestitate to say "art," but that's sort of what I mean) be more prominent in discussions of Romance, if only to encourage publishers to take a chance on well-written Romance that may not fall into well-trod paths of plot, setting, characterization, and conflict. And for those readers who care not one whit about the actual sentence construction, word choice, use of metaphor, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum, the story is always there to enjoy (or not).

But, in all honesty, I think we need to recognize that one of the reasons Romance has been the object of scorn and distrust from some sectors of the reading and writing universe is that it's been largely approached and viewed as a product rather than as a craft at which some are clearly virtuosos and others clearly are not (and that sales numbers should not be the determining factor in marking the distinction). And if we care about that, we might start looking to how we view Romance writing when we talk about Romance novels.

Robin, you clever person. Excellent questions, all around.

For my part, I haven't been focusing exclusively on romance in sorting out my thoughts. Everything I've said I think of as relevant to fiction of any genre, including the literary genre. Though your post makes it clearer to me that genres tend to value some elements of craft/storytelling over others. The literary genre values characterization over plot, and beauty of prose over everything. I would say that crime fiction values plot and voice most highly, and romance tends to value plot first, characterization second, and voice third.

I agree with you completely that the romance genre has a better chance of improving its reputation over all if we can start to have honest discussions about craft. Which really, is what all these posts have been about, starting with Beth's review of ABOSA, moving over to Smart Bitches and here, bouncing back and forth. Unfortunately we are a small group talking about big changes, and this is going to be a hard sell for some of the more traditionally oriented romance writers/readers.

". . . genres tend to value some elements of craft/storytelling over others."

But your oh so important point is that we're talking about -- or SHOULD be talking about -- "elements of craft" here, not whether we want to boost everyone's self-esteem along with their sales. Whether it's depth of characterization or intricacies of plot, or power of the actual language (I'd substitute that for beauty, only because I think a lot of literary language is not particularly beautiful, but it's very very powerful), there is skill involved in translating ideas into articulated wholes that we read as books. Just the fact that some writers really work to hone these skills over the course of their writing careers makes it impossible for me to dismiss the idea of objective standards for evaluating the craftsmanship of writing in ANY genre. Now we might emphasize different aspects of the craft depending on the genre, but I definitely think we could arrive at a comfortable consensus that shifting tense four times in one paragraph with no good reason is NOT the height of authorial mastery. Why is that bad? I may happen to like a book better than another book that is better crafted, but what's so bad about realizing that my attachment then lies elsewhere? What if I value the way one author thrives in her charcterization while another author rocks when it comes to world-building, and that on Tuesdays, I'm more into world-building? Or what if I'm willing to argue that a book that excels in, say, 4 out of 5 elements of craftsmanship doesn't move me like a book that excels in only 2 out of those same five elements? At least in these sorts of discussions we'd actually be focusing on the book as a piece of writing -- which to me is the height of respect one can pay to any genre.

"Unfortunately we are a small group talking about big changes, and this is going to be a hard sell for some of the more traditionally oriented romance writers/readers."

But the discussion has to start somewhere, and I really, really believe that the Internet has created a whole new activism in Romance, even if it's only in the nascent stages.

Robin, I agree with you in principle on every point, but I stand by my contention that it would be next to impossible to come up with a list of objective criteria by which to judge a piece of fiction, which is subjective in its very bones.

On the other hand, what we can and should be doing (as you've pointed out) is have a thoughtful discussion of any given book's strengths and weaknesses in terms of all the things we've been talking about. That's what Smart Bitches do on their blog, and what Beth does when she reviews, and there are others out there as well. I have done less of it because this wasn't conceived as a review weblog to start with. I might do more, though from the discussion over the last week it's clear that I risk alienating my readers.

"I stand by my contention that it would be next to impossible to come up with a list of objective criteria by which to judge a piece of fiction, which is subjective in its very bones."

You may be right, Sara; I may just be unduly influenced by years of teaching writing and literature in an academic (i.e. more objective) setting. I don't, however, think that there's a critical mass of interest in even investigating whether or not it's possible -- at least in terms of mainstream Romance reviewing.

"I might do more, though from the discussion over the last week it's clear that I risk alienating my readers."

I truly, truly understand the feeling that analyzing a Romance in a more critical way (as in critique, not necessarily criticism) threatens to take away the magic of reading sometimes. There are some books I like that I am not anxious to subject to that kind of scrutiny because I don't want to look more closely at their flaws. Some books I actually come to love more because of these kinds of discussions. In a nutshell, I just wish the Romance community, as a whole, would be a little less suspicious of these discussions than it seems to be.

I truly, truly understand the feeling that analyzing a Romance in a more critical way (as in critique, not necessarily criticism) threatens to take away the magic of reading sometimes.

Do you think that's why certain people who read this weblog (or, used to read it) reacted so badly to my venture into this wider discussion? Because there are some pretty angry readers out there, who think that it was simply wrong of me to even raise the subject of critical reviews of work other than my own.

You may be right, but I find it hard to believe that my personal position on one book or another would so interfere with somebody else's enjoyment that they feel as though I've somehow robbed them, and must pay for that crime.

"Do you think that's why certain people who read this weblog (or, used to read it) reacted so badly to my venture into this wider discussion? Because there are some pretty angry readers out there, who think that it was simply wrong of me to even raise the subject of critical reviews of work other than my own."

All I have is my wobbly opinion (no authorizing studies or long-term, comprehensive patterns of analysis of the Romance-reading community), but FWIW, here's what I think: first, this discussion has been brewing on other blogs, so in part it may be cumulative effect. Second, Romance encourages an incredible personalization of the author (Nora Roberts is "Nora," for example, but James Joyce is NEVER James or, god forbid, Jimmy), which, perhaps, encourages some conflation of the writer and the person and an overidentification or projection of hurt feelings. Third, related to this are the comments of some authors who really DO express feelings publicly of being insulted when readers question or critique their work, magnifying potential issues related to #2. Fourth, the fandom thing. I can't begin to even explain this, because I don't have that much automatic respect and adoration for ANYBODY (not that this is a good thing, mind you), but it's there, and I think it's fed by both the author and fellow fans, who comprise a really tight community that sort of morphs into a clique, creating codes of loyalty that seem almost feudal at times. And fifth is my point about some readers not wanting any real critical analysis of books that tap into their particular fantasies. And yes, I think this is a real, and really powerful force in Romance. I think the resistance is connected to the whole personalization issue, but I also think that in some circles, critical attention seems synonymous with negative criticism. And I do really think there's a hesitation about looking too closely at stuff we accept (even embrace) in Romance but that would bother us in real life (i.e. fored seduction). I feel this way sometimes, too, but I'm too much of a digger to let anything lie for very long, either in my own subconscious or that of a particular text.

One thing about this last item, though, is that I have seen people forcefully resist the idea of critical review of Romance with arguments about how it's impossible, how it's illegitimate, how it's a mark of people not enjoying or knowing how to enjoy a book, how it takes away from the entertainment value of a book. THEN, they will go on in careful detail about the characters from a particular novel as if these were real people with real problems it's our job to understand and solve. The textual command is sometimes incredibly impressive -- I mean, these folks can cite stuff passage and verse from their favorite authors and remember huge chunks of narrative detail. The discussions are no less analytical than the more formal "critical" ones (and often they're no less critical of certain characters or characteristics of certain books), but since the view is from inside the book rather than outside (from a "loyal fan" perspective), somehow THAT analytical detail can be distinguished for these readers. I personally think the exercise is substantively THE SAME, but it's not seen that way.

All I mean is, what's crap to one person isn't necessarily crap to another, and no amount of thoughtful reviewing will make it so. Your truth isn't my truth, end of story. So it seems pointless to me to try and argue that crap is crap.

This has nothing to do with how I view the author-writer relationship, which is another discussion altogether. I'm not interested in spoonfeeding anything to anybody.

Edited to note: in regards to writing. Of course, crap in real life is just crap. But writing is something else altogether. :)

I'm always looking for thoughtful, intelligent criticism on books. Period. Inside or outside of the genre. Because good criticism has persuaded me to admire something that, previously, I didn't see the use in. It has led me to read authors whose works I wouldn't have known about otherwise. It has also confirmed the reasoning behind my emotional, knee-jerk response and clarified my often jumbled thoughts about something that I've liked or disliked.

But sometimes, it's drawn away my attention from the work in question to simple jaw-drop (fear & admiration combined) at the spectacle of the critic's brilliance or force of personality or even his or her cruelty. (Dale Peck on Rick Moody, and Randall Jarrell on a heck of a lot of lesser poets, and Pauline Kael, to name a few.) What I worry about, is when the critical piece is less about the work in question and more a sort of dominant display, of the critic's personality. That can make it a really entertaining piece of writing, but maybe less useful to me in forming my own standards.

There's a really, really fine line there. I have to say, I admire most the critiques who sort of totter on that line, the witty, well-read bullies, with solid reasoning skills, far more than those who stay well away from it. Maybe that's human nature?

I have to say, this is a great discussion.

sherryfair made the argument I would have used in defending the necessity of honesty in reviewing that extends as far as the 'crap' statement.

I recognize that Elisabeth and I are not going to see eye to eye on this one, but my bottom line on this topic:

a review can serve many purposes. It can inform, cajol, lecture, illustrate, shake a finger, praise. A good review will leave the reader thinking. Maybe not agreeing, but thinking. Maybe considering a point s/he had rejected. A good review doesn't say: you should think the way I think but: this is how I read the book, this is what it made me feel and think, this is my bottom line. Use it as you see fit.

You may be right, but I find it hard to believe that my personal position on one book or another would so interfere with somebody else's enjoyment that they feel as though I've somehow robbed them, and must pay for that crime.

Interesting point, Sara. I have to say, though, that I think the feeling isn't so much analogous to being robbed, as the feeling an overprotective mom gets when any aspect of her child or childrearing methods is criticized. There's the same sort of defensiveness going on, the whole "HOW DARE SHE, it's not HER baby, she has no right, oh, I bet she's never even HAD A CHILD," yadda yadda yadda. For some people, their favorite book is theirs as well as the author's, and their favorite author belongs to them, too, and both are to be defended fiercely.

Sherryfair said: ...witty, well-read bullies...

OK, can I just say that I LOVE that phrase? Ha. Makes me think of Mark Twain shaking down James Fenimore Cooper for lunch money while using big words.

Thanks, Candy, and yes, you know that was one of the critiques I had in mind, as a thing to admire. (And also Byron doing it in satirical verse, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.") The critique that is so fierce, so insightful that, in itself, it's a work of art. It's a scary, thrilling thing to read. Even if I feel the reviewer's overwhelmed the subject, I can't help but get caught up in it. But it's best perhaps when the reviewer and subject aren't overmatched, when it's David aiming at Goliath, rather than Godzilla stomping Bambi.

IMHO, writers who write these critiques get an unparalleled opportunity to articulate to themselves their own aesthetic standards. Their own goals in their art become clearer to them as they indirectly write a manifesto on what they believe in. Writers within the romance genre who don't do this may be losing out on something that could offer them a lot of insight. A lot of writers saying: "I believe this, and this is where I stand on this question" -- how can that not be healthy for a writer's work & for the genre as a whole?