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…
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