The Uniqueness of Badness

Good books are all alike; every bad book is bad in its own way. Take The Secret (2006) by Rhonda Byrne. That's a very bad book, even though it has made me filthy rich by unlocking the great chain of being within my ribcage.

Good books make us smile or think or scream or cry or wheeze ad infinitum. Yes, we are thrilled. We rave about the precious little tomes to friends and colleagues and neighbors and parents and online rating services.

These books wrap us in each other.

Other bad books sit on our shelves and never get read—despite the signatures of our many writer friends—or they migrate to the underside of the couch, substituting for the missing leg. Our butts, to read, should be level.

Or maybe the books we never read are in fact the good books; they can't then reaffirm the way we live the way we think the way we love the way we forgot the way everything happens to us rather than us happening to anything. Books we read happen to us. Take George Orwell's minor work Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), a book about books and bookstores, where the protagonist, Gordon Comstock, puts his ear to the pregnant belly of his new wife—on the final page—and hears the rush of his own blood in his ears.

Oh shit, more of me in the world.

Put another way, there are maybe as many bad books as there are books—hanging onto their hard copy bodies the way a fish might bring its aquarium onto dry land for commerce with the mammals. Taking up space, killing trees, requiring vast resources to print and ship and sell and store and rot and pulp.

Don't get too excited about e-books either: think of the carbon footprint of the technological-microprocessing complex.

Maybe good books need to run green—all in our heads.