Good Books and GOOD Books

Have you read a book and said to yourself, 'Hey, this is pretty good'? Maybe you thought about a friend or whomever who may like the book, and maybe you even suggest it to them, or loan them your copy. To me that's a good book.

For me, an example of this has been Stevenson's Treasure Island. It's really good, and Bob Stevenson is a heckuva writer.

Then, maybe, there's a book that once you start, you find yourself consumed by, where, once you get really into it, it starts to take on your non-reading time. It encompasses your brain activity when you don't have the book in your hands, and then all you can think of is getting back to it. Once I got back to it, this book engulfed me during a Farm trip a few years back:

Once the main character Daniel get's going on his trainings, I struggled to put it down. Full disclosure: I picked this up years back, and only on a plane ride to Texas when I got three hours of solid, uninterrupted reading time that I ended up getting to the can't-put-down portion.

If you look close to the cover above, you can see who wrote the introduction: our own Thomas Pynchon. It was through my international Pynchon people that I heard about this author in the first place. And, if Pynchon is a writer you're fond of, this book will be for you.

So far I talked about capital-G Good books, and even italicized capital-G capital-B Good Books. Now I want to talk about a different kind of GOOD book, a type of super-book. My most recent example:

I joked once that there are good books (you like them and they're enjoyable, and you talk to people about them), and then there are good books (you think about them when you're not reading them; they may begin to overtake your waking, non-reading brain real estate), and then you have a super-book, an all caps GOOD book. 

For me, the distinction between these books is this: the GOOD book not only takes over my non-reading waking hours, filling my stream-of-consciousness with it's characters and themes and scenes, but it makes me lament not spending my time writing. What the hell am I doing with myself? I should be writing! Books like Shadow Country exist!

That's the distinction.

• Good books you tell other people about;
• Good Books you obsess over when you're not reading them;
• GOOD books you obsess over when you're not reading them, but when you do read them, you're so inspired that you figure you should be writing instead of reading.

It's funny in a certain way that the second book is Shadow Country by Peter Mattheissen. While Thomas Pynchon wrote the intro for Jim Dodge's Stone Junction, Mattheissen was one of Pynchon's favorite authors. And, while Pynchon remains one of my favorite authors, I can't say if I've for sure been so inspired to write while reading his books. Both Against the Day and Gravity's Rainbow have inspired me to do different things...and maybe being older adds to the drive...but still.

Finding inspiration to act from reading a novel is pretty great. Yay literature.