It's hard to know what makes for a good novel until you read a few mediocre ones...

After a string of books that I put down halfway through, I've been thinking a lot about what makes novels good and what makes them mediocre. It's actually a topic that comes up surprisingly little for me, because most of the books that I read are so self-evidently good that the question doesn't need to be asked.

That's the real answer. A book is good whe…