Some books are meh. Not great, not life-changing, but also not utter rubbish. These books seem to make up the majority of the books out there, which makes sense–the majority of people don’t want to read dreck but they also don’t want to read truly great books. Because they read purely for pleasure and they think that Dickens or Dostoyevski are going to be more work than fun. I’m not picking on those people, I’m only saying that that’s why most books aren’t challenging.

For those of us who read a decent amount (I think I read a lot, but I have a few friends who read 300-500 books per year, which makes by 100-120 look sad in comparison) the middle-of-the-road books can be a sort of waste of time. They’re not badly written, which is why I don’t put them down (poorly written books don’t get much more than a few pages of my attention) but I can’t remember a thing about them in a year. That’s what I recently realised was my criteria. I’m trying to write reviews for all the books I’ve read that don’t already have reviews and I can’t recall anything about some of those books–not even if it was well-written well or not. Nothing. I figure that means they weren’t written badly (I’d remember that) but they also didn’t stand out in any way. I’m starting to feel that life is too short to read these types of books, as well as the bad ones. Does that make me a book snob or simply aware of the incredibly short amount of time I have on this planet?