How I evaluate books

• Story
• Character Development
• World Building
• Writing Style/Prose
• Longevity/Impact

Most of these categories are going to seem muddled. That is because they are. It is hard to separate characterization from world-building, just as it is hard to separate writing style from story. And the impact a work will have or even does have is sometimes very difficult to talk about, but I will endeavor to do it.

Every book needs “story”. That is just a fact. Don’t confuse that with “plot”, as they are different things. To me at least, you literature majors can argue until you are blue in the face about whether or not that is true in an abstract way. A story includes the way characters fit together, the details that the author chooses to include about the world, the plot, the pacing, language use, and so many little decisions that it can be hard to break down what it means. The story for me is the whole book (even textbooks can have story), the combined whole of what the author put down on paper (or more realistically Word document). This ultimately makes story the most important thing to me, and also the most vague.

Character development is a wonderful thing. It can happen in so many different ways. How a character talks, what other characters think of that character, the way they interact with the world around them (if they do), and on and on. I don’t really think that the way a character looks is a great form of characterization, it’s nice to know if they are taller than everyone else—if their tallness is not relevant, however, why should I care about it? I feel like sometimes new writers spend so much time on what their character looks like that they forget to characterize them in the ways that matter. Don’t get me wrong, I have done this too, but it does not help develop who the character is. I love well-rounded characters that can still surprise me, but looking back through the story I can see why they made that decision.

World-building is the part of any story that makes it believable, or for audiences to be able to suspend their disbelief. A well-defined world will have some culture, lore, history, different subsets of society, and all the fun aesthetic stuff. This can sometimes be hard to capture because often authors are focusing on the characters and plot. While a good story can get away with minimal world-building, I often find those types of books flat and two-dimensional. I need all that extra stuff to fill out why a character might need to do something after years of not doing it or to understand the systems that the characters find themselves in. Not only do I need it, but oftentimes I find that it is some of the most fascinating parts of the story. Take Mark Lawrence for example, his book The Girl and the Stars follows a young protagonist, but the world is filled out with all the different things that her tribe has taught her about the world, as well as, folklore of their society that explains why she acts in particular ways.

Perhaps one of the least important aspects of a book is writing style. An author can get away with not having particularly good prose if they have done well on the previous three aspects of their books, but a book that is well written, with lyrical prose, descriptive language, and unique verbiage will oftentimes be more enjoyable even if the story is lacking in in-depth world-building or characterization. I am a sucker for lyricism in literature. Take Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousands Doors of January as an example. Harrow had me hooked on the first two pages because of how she wrote, the fact that the book was also full of wonderful storytelling and characters was just an added bonus for me at that point.

The only reason I am including Longevity is that I am going to look at older work and would like to have a metric for how books have impacted genres, other authors, and the industry as a whole. Longevity is not incredibly important but it matters when thinking about how Asimov, for instance, has impacted how robot stories were written for decades.

Keeping all of this in mind it is important to acknowledge that not every book needs everything to be good or just enjoyable. I love pulpy fiction. I read (and enjoy) poorly written EMP novels and disaster books, and shitty romances that sometimes don’t make a whole lot of sense. This is because I generally enjoy at least one aspect of the book or want to understand the book’s impact on related literature. On the flip side though, I also enjoy literature with a capital “L”. The highbrow stuff that is taught in college classrooms and is good because a critic has said it is (yeah, sometimes I cave to critic pressure). These types of books typically have great prose, or they are uniquely structured, or something that sets them apart from the rest of the literature that came out during that time period.