(no subject)

[the_rck]

Something I've been pondering-- How does one find the line between personal opinion and objective quality (or lack thereof)? That is, how do I know if I was bored by something because I was in the wrong mood, because I don't care for that genre, those tropes, etc. or if it was badly executed? Did I love that book because it's amazingly good, because it was exactly what I needed at that moment when I read it, or because it pushed my narrative buttons just so?

It's not wrong to love something that's crap or to hate something that's brilliant. The problem is knowing which is which. Part of my book and DVD logging right now is an attempt to tease out a little more information in my own head about my opinions. I don't always succeed.

On some level, the difference between my taste and the objective doesn't matter. My taste is always going to have more impact on what I like or don't, and people wanting recommendations will be better served by knowing my taste than by expecting that my enjoying something relates to some universally applicable scale of quality.

Still, I thought I'd ask-- How do you tell the difference between objective quality and your own opinions?

Comments

Not sure if this helps...

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

I do this with music, because I HATE instrumental passages with the hate of a thousand burning suns, but I can usually tell when someone is really good at it. I just don't LIKE it. It could be amazing and powerful and virtuosity embodied, and I won't LIKE it and will kill it from my iPod in a new york second -- I can also tell when someone is crappy at singing, but if I like the song, and this is the only version I can get, I will keep it. And play it.

Re: Not sure if this helps...

[jss]

Excellent point; I feel the same about some of the things I've read: I can tell you the author is doing a wonderful job, using language to paint pictures wonderfully and using great similes, developing their characters with a plot as simple or complex as the story requires, whatever — but I can still hate the story. I can see that it's well done but still not like it.

[ceara.livejournal.com]

I think you can't, always - certainly it's difficult to manage with no more thought than a person is usually willing to apply to contemplation of works of fiction. I find, though, that I can usually recognize good workmanship, even when it leaves me cold. As for how I manage that . . . I'm not sure I know. Now I'm going to be pondering this all day.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming that what you're calling personal opinion here is what I'd characterize as taste. (I'm making the distinction here because opinion to me implies some analysis has gone into its formation: I have an opinion about the mainstream media's response to Obama's comments about rural Pennsylvania voters. By contrast, no thought whatsoever needs to go into a taste -- I don't like beets, and no amount of knowledge of their good qualities is going to have much impact on that.)

And it seems to me that making that distinction, between taste and opinion, helps to clarify this issue. It's possible to see a great many of the fine qualities of a work you profoundly dislike, without that altering the fact that you don't like it. For example, I don't much like Jane Eyre. There's no mystery to why not -- I don't much like sentimentality or high-pitched emotion or the company of people who're too busy having massive angst to be reasonable about anything. But, I know it's a great book. It has a remarkable and powerful internal vision, a sustaining passion, a vividness in every line: it's a great work of art, and I damned well know it. It's a great work of art that I don't much like, but the not-liking is a taste thing, not an opinion thing. I admire the hell out of it, whether I like it or not.

By contrast, we have, say, The DaVinci Code. This is a bad book - flat and stupid in writing, vision, characterization, any aspect of art I can think of off the top of my head. It's a bad book, and I don't like it.

And again, by contrast to that, I might give you The Hunt for Red October. Clumsily written, with wooden characters and a childish vision of the universe as a whole: in many respects it's a ghastly book. But it's full of stuff I happen to be a sucker for, and I liked it tremendously even while experiencing it as not-a-good-book.

All of which is a long way round to say, I don't think it's really that difficult to tease out the difference between what one likes or doesn't like and what's quasi-objectively good or bad. The two really don't, as you say, have much of anything to do with one another, and as soon as one is clear on that, it's relatively simple to see which is which.

[kyrielle]

I think sometimes it's harder than others. For example, I can read Mercedes Lackey's Take A Thief and enjoy it very very much while recognizing it has serious defects (most notably, it blows continuity for other series in the same world rather sharply, and for bonus points the change serves no real purpose in the story!).

But sometimes, you can't know, especially depending on how you read things. I have to say that it sounds like p_zeitgeist puts a lot more thought into reading fiction than I do. I read things, if I don't enjoy them I toss them aside, and I don't really worry about whether it's objectively "good" if I didn't enjoy it. Sometimes it will leap out at me but usually it won't. I do occasionally say "I know a lot of people like it" if I do, but I'm not always sure whether it's good or bad just because it's liked (which can be a taste thing).

Ultimately, I don't worry about it too much, except when I'm identifying a book that I enjoyed that I do realize isn't objectively a "good quality" book as far as writing. If I miss some, oops. That's life. But if I know it, I'll usually put a disclaimer on it so as not to mislead people.

Well, and then there's the occasions where the author descends to a level where you want to enjoy it but can't. I had a great deal of entertainment out of Lackey's Reserved for the Cat but I'm afraid a decent chunk of that entertainment was in deconstructing all its failings....

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's possible to see the world except through one's own personal filters, so I don't think it's possible for anybody to be objective. I think the best anybody can do is say, "I thought X but I think most people would think Y instead."