What makes a novel ‘good’?
How can you judge whether a novel is good or not? How can you find good novels to read? Obviously, it’s very subjective and it’s hard to know until you’ve actually read a book whether you [will] like it or not… but how can you know what to look for in publishers’ blurbs and reader reviews to identify whether a book is good or not? In other words, whether it’s a good match for you?
Let’s dig down to figure it out.
Imagine you’re browsing a bookseller site or reading reviews. A novel you think you might like catches your eye …
Tip 1. Pay attention to the book’s categorisation, but dig deeper. And don’t get hung up on whether it’s marketed as ‘literary’ or ‘commercial’ fiction.
Everyone has preferences for the categories of books they like. I like novels about women’s lives, but I don’t like ‘romance’, for example. I like fantasy, but I want realistic speculative fantasy, not space opera. I like ‘historical’, but that means, for me, based in Europe anywhere between 980 and 1980 but preferably in 19th century England.
So, identifying the category helps you hone in on a good book, but it’s not enough to really decide if a particular book might be right for you.
And while some categorisations are helpful, others are less so.
Notably, whether a novel is marketed as literary or commercial fiction doesn’t really help you decide if it’s a good read or not. Not all good novels are written by ‘literary’ authors and not all ‘commercial’ authors write bad novels. In fact, having spent decades reading thousands of novels, it’s now clear to me that:
For example, I was 40+ years old before I discovered that Stephen King is a terrific writer. You may not enjoy the genres he writes (horror/fantasy and, more recently, crime), but technically he is a suberb craftsman. I did not know this, because I had not read his books, having dismissed them as ‘supermarket trash’. My bad.
Let’s dig into another example. This article started out as a review of a dystopian novel, Whether Violent or Natural, by Natasha Calder. There’s nothing I like more than a good apocalyptic, end-of-the-world scenario novel, so I had grabbed the opportunity to read an ARC of this, interested in its premise: a world where antibiotics have failed (a plausible scenario). It’s an interesting case too because it’s genre fiction (usually considered ‘commercial’) but promoted as ‘literary’ and ‘intelligent’ [which somewhat suggests that commercial fiction is not intelligent — d’uh]. So I guess [in publishing terms] you could consider it a crossover between genre and literary. I’m very open to crossover fiction!
But oh was I disappointed with this. As I wrote my review, it got me thinking about why I didn’t like that novel, which is being promoted as ‘literary’ fiction.
If you’re a fan of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, you might like Whether Violent or Natural. I am not, and I don’t, for much the same reason: I’m not a fan of the sort of elitist approach to fiction that positions one novel as ‘LITERARY’ or ‘intelligent’ and another as ‘popular’ or ‘commercial’ fiction, based pretty much solely on the former using what are hardly more than literary gimmicks, such as overblown language or an unusual narrative voice.
So, note publishers’ and reviewers’ categorisations but be wary of them too. You’ll need to dig a bit deeper to find your next good read…
Tip 2. Look at how readers describe their emotional reaction to the novel
A good novel has an emotional punch. It gets under your skin. When reading reviews of a novel, look for indications that it:
- builds a world convincingly
- suspends your disbelief
- nails your attention
- stirs your emotions or even gets your heart pounding
- pushes you to reflect on the human condition
- portrays or hints at deep emotional complexity, at least in parts of the novel or selected characters.
Tip 3. Look for hints that tell you if the novel is well written
‘Well written’ doesn’t mean fancy language. It means that the book has:
- a clear narrative structure (i.e., you can easily follow the story without feeling lost)
- a well-constructed plot (i.e., the storyline or plot makes sense and is revealed in an interesting way)
- convincing dialogue
- vivid scenes and settings
- well-rounded characters (i.e., they are not simplistically all one thing, such as all bad or all good or all kind or all angry…, but have some complexity, like real people)
- CORRECT English — ideally plain English, not poetry
- a narrative style that ebbs and flows and is pleasing to the ear.
(Whether all that is thanks to the author or a good editor is something a reader never knows. Every writer has different skills and an editor’s job is to compensate for the ones the author lack.)
Tip 4. Read between the lines: think twice about the clichés in the blurb
There’s a funny meme of ‘translated’ book blurbs that went the social media rounds a few years ago. (I can’t find its original source but this version came from here.)
‘Enchanting’ means there’s a dog and ‘heartrending’ means the dog dies. And so on! Publishers obviously only feature positive reactions to a book. Often, you’ll need to think about what reviewers are really saying to figure out if this is a book you’ll enjoy or not.
In the case of Whether Violent or Natural, I confess I was warned. I should have expected the overblown prose, the lack of clarity, the weirdness and all the self-indulgent rambling, had I paid more attention to the blurb that called it: ‘strikingly original’. I should have known that that translates to ‘a bizarre writing style that’s hard to read’.
Tip 5. Look for like-minded readers
In everyday life we use all sorts of social cues to navigate relationships and choices about what we will do or buy or support. We look for clues that tell us whether or not something is right ‘for me’ by evaluating who is telling you about it. Tune into this social awareness when reading book reviews. Ask yourself: who’s writing this review? Do I feel any kinship with them? Do they seem to share my way of looking at the world? Have they reviewed and liked other books I know and liked? Trust your gut!
So there you have it. 5 tips to find the next good book to keep you awake reading into the early hours!
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