Since the semester is over and Christmas break is here, I have found myself with pleasantly little to do, and as happens in such times, I am beginning to thirst for a good novel. As I was looking for one, I came to realize that there are many things that make a good book that people tend to overlook. While everyone rushes in to praise character development and plot, there are a couple other things that are just as important.
The first thing a good book needs is tone. The tone is the theme music of a book, it should always be pulsing on in the background like the Imperial March. It is what makes an experienced reader put down a bad book and a non-reader pick up a good one. It should affect the reader without them noticing. A good book must be filled with situations and emotions that the reader gets carried away with. If you don’t feel like you are standing in the same room as the characters, you just won’t enjoy the book as much. People experience books by feeling that they are inside of them; if they do not have this feeling, they will read a book as if it were a newspaper. Where a tone comes from is hard to pin down; many times it can be chalked down to an author’s specific style. Sometimes books by the same author can have different tones, though. Tone is not only important for novels, because even some reference books I’ve read made good use of tone.
Another very important thing that is often overlooked is the resolution. I can’t tell you how many books have been ruined by a bad ending and how many of them were redeemed by good one. The readers should feel that the solution at the end of a book isn’t hurried or came early and too easily. Many times I would be anticipating with impatience the peak of the climax only to be disappointed (and disgusted) by a mild and unreal solution to a dramatic problem. I’m not saying that everything should make sense or that all problems should be solved. Sometimes it’s fun to have to work things out on your own, but the ending of a book should not leave the reader unsatisfied because of its poor quality. A book should end either by wrapping itself up fully or leaving its reader hungry for more.
Of course, there are other things that you need to make a book good, and the requirements are different for everyone, but the standard will remain the same. A good novel is one that draws you into its atmosphere. A good book is not only a book that you can take off the shelf on a rainy day, sit down in a comfortable chair, and enjoy with only the dull symphony of raindrops on the window in the background. It is one that is so entangling that you can take out of your backpack on a long car trip, squeezed between a snoring four-year-old and a two-year-old screaming for no good reason, and enjoy just as well as if you were in that chair.
