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Friday, November 13, 2020

The Limits of a Poorly Written Book

    Poorly written books can be fun, they can be entertaining and they can be the perfect way to pass the time on a long flight or a rainy day. But a poorly written book will always have a ceiling, and that ceiling is levels below great. Nothing can overcome bad prose.

    Luckily, bad prose can usually be sniffed out within the first few sentences of a book. And at that point, readers can choose to enter at their own risk. [Well-written books that are boring are often passed off--wrongly--as great.]

Andre Aciman, The New York Times Book Review, November 3, 2019

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