Saturday, October 30, 2010

What is a Great Book?

What makes a book great? Fred Sanders at Biola College puts books to the test every year as he and others select the books to be read in the honors program. Sanders has some good criteria with which to choose the books. He lists this out in eight steps. And explains them in this article. This is a summarized list. 




  1. A great book speaks from an important original setting.
  2. A great book is written in a way that is relevant for readers today.
  3. A great book is well-crafted.
  4. A great book is one that provokes excellent discussion.
  5. A great book is inexhaustible, so no reading of it is the final reading, and no discussion ever runs it dry.
  6. A great book is time-tested. People from multiple generations have had their hands on it, and have judged it to be worth passing along.
  7. A great book is weird. It’s got angles, edges, textures, and stuff sticking out that you wouldn’t have predicted.
  8. A great book is smarter than the best teacher, but within reach of the average student.
Now I would agree with most of these eights steps and certainly if you followed these guidelines you would end up with some great books. But I must critique and possibly add some elements which I think are missing here. To start off let me divulge the points that I think Sanders gets right. In his criteria a “great book” is one which “is inexhaustible” and “provokes excellent discussion”. I think these two factors are very true and a great book will certainly lead you to a re-read. I myself have read the Narnia series about eight times through and each time I find another “smattering of wisdom” that I missed before. I would also agree that a book has to be relevant and well crafted. If I can digress for a moment, I was just discussing with one of my professors last week about books from the Fathers of America like Ben Franklin and so forth. The interesting thing that he stated was that if you take a book from the 18th and 19th century and compare it to a modern book today, you will see that the words used have become increasingly simple. It’s a sad day when you can’t write a book with words of more than three syllables for fear of “losing” your audience. 
Now for the critique part, one thing I noted in Sanders article was that he stated he was reluctant to pick a book that was newer or modern, he states “Somebody might have written a truly great book (in our Socratic sense) yesterday, but we won’t know for another 50 to 100 years”. He goes on further to say “for all we know they might pass from usefulness before many more decades”. There are two problems with this statement. First, to say “we won’t know a good book is a good book until it is at least 50-100 years old” is bordering nonsense. Furthermore to say a book cannot be selected because it may “go out of style” so to speak, is a flagrant flaw in this criterion. A great book may have been written yesterday and all we can do is let it sit on our shelf for another hundred years? Hmm I think the point that is missing here is that great books inspire people to action. To say that a book for instance, “uncle Tom’s Cabin” isn’t a great book because it only dealt with the issues of civil rights during a specific period would be a major fallacy. 
I think that Sanders might want to broaden his “horizon” a little bit, after all isn’t a great book one that evokes the reader to change, not just discuss? Now I may be wrong, but I think that if a person were reading a book and they got to the last page, looked up and with a happy smile said “now that was a great book”, then set the book down and continued on their day I would have to conclude that the book may not in fact be all that “great”. But if a person got to the last page and then slowly set it down and just simply sat there until you would ask “so how was it?” “Oh it was great” they would reply “but I think I may have to start doing things differently”, Now based on that, I might conclude that the book in question was indeed a “great book”.   
Sure, I could put a list of my “top ten favorites” but that would be a matter of opinion and let us not loose site that this article is a matter of opinion. I have read “great books” in my life that truly inspired me and were profound, but then again what “worked” for me may not “work” for you. I think that we must understand that each individual person has hopes, dreams, aspirations and questions about life that need answering. Now how a book may go about that? Certainly great books can answer difficult questions about life, or at the very least get you thinking. But the criterion for which a book impacts us depends largely on where we are in life. So to say a book criterion is an “objective” way to classify a book would be inconsistent with the reality that great books come in all shapes and sizes. So I won’t divulge a top ten, not even a personal favorite, the only way to find great books is to read one and judge it for yourself. Of course, thats just my opinion.

2 comments:

  1. I think I am going to quote you in my next post.

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  2. Definitely true. I find there aren't many these days - authors are losing the touch.

    Hey, thanks for following my blog. I really do appreciate it.

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