What I Get Out of Three-Star Reads

Book Riot’s excellent “True Story” newsletter, which focuses on nonfiction, recently linked to a piece called “I’m Breaking Up with 3-Star Reads,” about the decision to stop pushing through the just-okay books and to focus instead on finding books to truly love. As a relentless optimizer myself (I know, I know, it’s capitalism trying to brainwash me, I know I’m sorry), I was allured by the author’s plan to optimize their reading by DNFing books as soon as they realized those books wouldn’t be four- or five-star reads. I have led (or attempted to lead) many a DNF-shy friend down the garden path to more liberal DNFing policies, after all! Surely this type of policy would fit me like a glove.

Except I immediately knew it wouldn’t. There are several reasons, I think, why it wouldn’t, but the big reason that jumped out at me right away is that I used to dislike spinach. It is a great misfortune to dislike spinach! Not only is spinach very healthy for you, but it is found in many delicious restaurant dishes and home cooking recipes that I might care to try. So one year, ages ago, as a New Year’s Resolution, I decided that I was going to eat a whole lot of spinach until I liked spinach. “That is crazy, Jenny,” I hear you say, but what I say to that is CRAZY LIKE A FOX, because for one thing, spinach is delicious and green leafy vegetables are the best vegetables; and for another thing, the plan totally worked. I love spinach now. I can’t believe I ever let cultural stereotypes of spinach prevent me from consuming the third-best vegetable there is. (First best is potato; second-best is Brussels sprout; I will not be taking questions.)

What I’m saying is: Sometimes you have to teach your brain how to like a thing.

In 2012, I decided that it was snobby and bad of me to refuse to read romance novels, perhaps in fact a betrayal of feminism. I had read one romance novel in its entirety at this time (The Bride, by Julie Garwood), in the very unpropitious circumstances of reading it onto a CD for my grandmother, who was blind, because she couldn’t find an audiobook of it and she really loved it and wanted to reread it. There are exactly five sex scenes in that book. I am scarred for life. I had also poked my nose into a old-school few romance novels with titles like Savage Desire (the word Savage in the title signified that one of the protagonists was going to be Native or half-Native or adopted by Natives) and found them to be about as retrograde in their attitudes toward race and gender as you’d expect with titles like that. But in 2012, I had heard enough people insist that there were good romance novels out there that I was willing to give the whole genre another go.

Here’s the thing. I did not exactly have to kiss a lot of romance novel frogs before I found my romance novel prince, but I did have to give three stars to a lot of books I didn’t know enough to appreciate yet. Or — a scenario that absolves me a little more — I didn’t know enough to guess whether I’d enjoy a given book or not based on its blurbs and comps and covers. The only variable I was actively trying to control for was feminism. I didn’t know that books could be categorized as angst or as fluff. I didn’t know about the sunshine one and the stormcloud one. I didn’t know about the Chaos Muppet and the Order Muppet. I didn’t know about the Big Mis.¹ I was like, “why are these books talking so much about the heroes being Large?” I did not have the vocabulary to describe a second-chance romance or an enemies-to-lovers romance. I didn’t have the experience to recognize that when the protagonists got to a hotel room to discover there was Only One Bed, it was both a gift and an elbow-nudge from the author.

It turns out that these things are pretty important to the experience of romance novels! There’s a reason that romance readers are fucking voracious, and the reason isn’t just that there are a metric fuck-ton of romance novels out there for us to feed into our hungry maws. The pleasure of reading romance is heavily iterative: it’s fun to discover the myriad of ways different authors have found to play with the same tropes, to subvert them or play them straight, to find new twists on them that make the reader say “oh that’s clever.” When a pair of romance novel protagonists falls asleep on the Only Bed in their hotel room, there’s a specific delight in knowing that they’re likely to wake up twined around each other and feeling some kind of way about it.²

The risk here is that treating a book like an unwanted vegetable course can be a deeply ungenerous way to read, and in the long term, it only works if it works. I have been lowkey trying to brute-force my way into enjoying the mystery genre for like five years now, and I have made very little progress. With a very few exceptions, it’s been three-star reads all the way down. I also haven’t been trying that hard, because it doesn’t mean much to me to be a mystery reader or not a mystery reader. I’d just kind of like to be able to swap book recs with my mystery-loving pals, which I can’t currently do.

By contrast, I was and am a lot more motivated to get myself into World Literature, including but not limited to literature in translation. The wonderful Meytal, founder of Women in Translation Month, helped me to be less intimidated by translated literature, while at the same time her efforts, and those of many others, contributed to producing a richer, more vibrant pool of translated literature to choose from. I used to have to be pestered to death to even consider reading a book in translation, and it was the exact same problem as I had in my early efforts with romance. Other countries, other cultures, other languages simply have different storytelling conventions, and I had to teach myself to understand and enjoy them, as well as how to identify translated works that are most likely to delight me. (I love the tradition of absurdism/surrealism in East Asian literature, but I don’t think I’ll ever love noir, no matter what language it’s written in.) I’ve plowed my way through a lot of three-star reads because the goal I’m pursuing is “comfort with a lot of different ways of telling stories,” rather than “falling madly in love with as many books as possible.”

Do you read to try stuff, or do you read to love stuff? Or something else? Or different things at different times? (Reading to get away from it all has been a significant feature of my reading life, especially over the last six years. Sob.)