What is a Bad Book?

Okay, I have a number of things to address.

1. In answer the the question Danielle was actually asking:
I'm not sure about Dear Beatrice? I think I agree with Kate, I like Dear Bitches better, but I think I like our present name better than both of them. As for The Fellowship of the Blog, it's pretty okay. I think we should stick with Cool People of Every and Any Nationality unless something cooler and more relevant to us specifically comes to mind.


2. Apparently we're responding to each other's posts now? Well, I sure got the short straw didn't I?
     Subsection A: I agree with Kate largely on the subject of romance, though, I'll admit, sometimes I just   
                           want to read a stupid teenage romance, regardless of literary value. I haven't read The
                           Time Traveller's Wife, so I can't really give an opinion on that.
     Subsection B: Dude, Kate, Divergent isn't that bad. I didn't find it overly predictable either. Maybe your
                           illness temporarily granted you super-human powers of deduction? To be honest though, I
                           mostly enjoyed the world-building in it, not so much the characters or story. Maybe I'm
                           of a DM than an author.

3. The main part, Bad Books.

Now, aspiring author and rampant reader that I am, the idea of a book that is "bad" is sort of unpleasant. I've actually had a discussion on this subject. If books are art, and art is subjective, is there such a thing as a "bad book"? Surely the goodness and badness of books is just as subjective as the goodness and badness of paintings and music?

Well, I'm not sure I can subscribe to the completely-subjective-art way of thinking about books. There is such a thing as bad writing, definitely.

Anyway, I'm going to talk about the decline of a series of books that I enjoyed when I was younger.
Artemis Fowl.

The premise of the Artemis Fowl books was, I think, really good. The idea of the child genius and the fairies and all. It was good. And the story was good. Artemis had something concrete he wanted to achieve and you followed him on that journey. But in the latter books that premise and that concise story structure sort of disappeared. Suddenly Artemis and co. were saving the world all over the shop and he had much less defined motivations.
That's not the worst of it though. Eoin Colfer became awfully fond of his deus ex machina (for those who don't know: god from the machine, or basically just any improbable plot point where a problem is solved by a previously unknown device, character, mechanism or skill).
In the earlier books the magic had very defined parameters and didn't go outside them. In the last book there's suddenly Black Magic. Woooooh, scary. Now Eoin can do whatever the hell he wants and just say, cuz Black Magic.
And that, boys and girls, is bad writing.
You can use basically any means to get your character into a tricky spot and your readers won't mind, chance, incompetence, the efforts of other characters, whatever, but as soon as you use anything other than the character's own skill or intelligence to get out of the situation, your readers will be annoyed.