To love a bad book

I'd like to add my appreciation for the bad book. Not the trashy book. This love is for the kind of book that is maybe a first draft or maybe a final draft, but realistically in need of twenty more revisions to get it shiny. The idea is so good (fairly good), but you are a beautifully monstrous thing, quietly living your mess in public. It's damn bold.

I know you, book. You're the feeling of coming up for air and sunshine this summer after a year and a half of deep pandemic and political darkness--and then getting shoved right back down only a month and a half later, still more or less feral. You're the book that gets lost in the endless plot of the political throw down, and never quite settles into the moment. Or the book that is desperate to birth a new, imagined world, but then forgets to let real people live in your realm. You're lists of characters who immediately die painful deaths, pointless facts, grudges and furtive personal ambitions laid over inscrutable characters. Most of all, you're a beautiful mess of humanity, even at your longest, dullest, most cliched string of adverbs. You are my kind of book right now. Utterly real.

I love you, bad book. Let's be unresolved together.