Levels of Books

I have a personal belief that books can divided into several different levels of quality and depth. There are good reads at every level, but you get different things out of each one.

In order from highest art form to lowest:

Literature. Big, serious books that ought to be deeply discussed in college courses. But not just books written hundreds of years ago. Some non traditional books I would throw into this category include "Life with Pi", "The Lord of the Rings", and "Dune" by Frank Herbert (the sequels do not fall into this category and the recent stuff by his son falls into the pulp fiction category.)

High quality books: Better than average books with real depth and characters. Examples include "The Time Traveler's Wife", "The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night Time", "Song of Fire and Ice" series by George R.R. Martin, "Cold Mountain", "Memoirs of a Geisha", "Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" by Stephen R. Donaldson, and the Roman series by Colleen McCullough. (The sequels to Dune written by Frank Herbert would fall here.)

Good books: Solid, well-written books. Enjoyable. "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card, "The Stand" by Stephen King, Bernard Cornwell and Robert Harris for historical fiction, "Harry Potter" series, "The Da Vinci Code", etc.


Pulp fiction: Mass produced books read by large numbers of people. Entertaining but little or no depth. Grisham (almost all) and Chrichton fall into this category. (I am not disparaging these books - I read them! But I am just trying to differentiate between levels of quality....)

Crap: Too many to list. Everything by Dan Brown other than "Da Vinci Code" headlines this list. See my topic on books I stopped reading.