Three questions to ask yourself when you finish reading a book

Bayles and Orland shared a simple framework from Henry James. I haven’t read The Art of Fiction (yet), and wasn’t familiar with his three questions to evaluate an artist’s work, which are: 

1.     What was the artist trying to achieve?

2.     Did he or she succeed?

3.     Was it worth doing? 

 

The first questions are objective; they don’t involve personal taste at all. You don’t need to like a work to identify what the artist was trying to achieve, and if they succeeded.

Ah, but the third question: this is the one that “opens the universe,” the authors say—because it invites you
to respond to the work, to assign a value to it, to weigh its worth.

 

“Critical reflection of some kind is inevitable, so it would behoove us to do it well. The best guide I know to readerly judgment is our old friend Auden, who graciously summed up a lifetime of thinking about these matters in a single incisive sentence: 

“For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”

 

On what I should read next, I’m often pointing out the difference between whether a book was well-written and whether it’s to your taste. The second question is easy to answer; the first, much harder. Perhaps these three questions will give you another way to think about how to assess the quality of a book—or a painting, sculpture, or Netflix show.

 

How do YOU evaluate art? What questions do you ask yourself? How do you decide whether a book—or any work of art—is “good”?

Source: https://modernmrsdarcy.com/three-questions-to-ask-yourself-when-you-finish-reading-a-book/