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The Works of Vermin F: A Certain Je-ne-sais-quoi
And then finally there's that F-Factor, that special something that elevates a book to wow territory. This is hard to define, but it might be a really compelling Big Idea with implications I never imagined, or maybe the book can be read in more than one mode or some other transcending wow factor. If you've seen these modern tier lists that are popular now, it's the thing that elevates a book from the A tier to the S (special) tier. Usually books have it or they don't. Did this one? Can you name another book that did have the F-Factor for you?
Comments
I kind of paused with this one while I thought about it. One of the (many) great things about the club is that we often differ amongst ourselves as to whether a particular book has this factor or not. Some books we all agree either do or don't, but in most cases we are split amongst ourselves... a recent case in point is Ammonite which I thought fantastic, but several others of us didn't.
And of course not all books are going to be fantastic, even if they're a fun read, especially depending on our mood of the day. If I'm worn out then short trashy space opera or fantasy is just splendid, but I don't think I'd ever say they had the wow or F factor... it's just right for the occasion.
With The Works of Vermin I can't ever imagine it being a book that I would pick up for fun, and I'm a bit perplexed that it has received such good acclaim. I guess someone somewhere at Tor likes it
This book has landed in the same pile as Vajra Chandrasekera's Rakesfall which I also thought was a confusing mess and yet had people raving about it being one of their favourite books. I think I have come to terms that books that have high mental loads are probably not for me unless they are more on the harder science fiction end of things. If the language of the books are what is preventing me from getting into it then I really struggle. Perhaps it's a function of not really taking a lot of post-secondary English (I think I took a little bit of intro Classics and a Science Fiction course) and so I didn't learn how to stretch that part of my brain. I am guessing I would not do well with a book like Finnegan's Wake for that reason either. I have Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury on my TBR coming up as well, and I am worried it will land in that same bucket.
The more I read, the more I realise that certain sub-genre's are not my favourite either. The New Weird is one. Cyberpunk is another.