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Browsing around Goodreads, I noticed something interesting. In a discussion on a famous novel, someone asked: “Is this book good? Or is it boring?” I must admit, I was taken aback quite a bit by this question. I have seen questions like this before, as I have seen questions like “do you like my poem?” or “Is this a good photo, do you like it?”

This is a fundamental error that can lead to some serious misunderstandings. More crucially (and depressingly) it tells me that the average person doesn’t really understand anything about art. Perhaps partly because they were never taught how to. Our “education” systems promote not critical thinking but regurgitation of ideas; not compartmentalized meta-thought (multi-layer thinking about the process of thinking) but repetition. Welcome to the wonderful world of mediocrity…

“Is This Book Good” – what kind of question is that (literally)?

To ask “is this book good” and, more still, pairing it with the question “or is it boring” reveals to me these two things about the person who posed the question:

• The person doesn’t understand the nature of art and expects an objective answer to an inherently subjective question.
• Even so, they immediately pose a second, subjective question (“is it boring”), but one still predicated on the same, supposedly objective query!

To understand how silly this pair of questions really is, picture someone asking you “Does Indian cuisine taste good? Or is it too spicy?” You might even initially not find anything weird about this question either – that’s how programmed our minds have become. But if you pay a little more attention, you’ll begin to realize why it’s an inane question.

(And if you still need help, read about qualia!)

What Makes a Better Question than “Is This Book Good”

Good questions about a book are either questions that can be answered objectively, or questions that convey the understanding that the question is a subjective one. Let me explain that with a couple of examples.

Questions about Books that Can Be Answered Objectively

Instead of asking “is this book good”, you can ask “Is this book about parent-child relationships?” Even this isn’t a question that can be answered in an entirely objective manner. Still, it’s much better than “is this book good”.

If you’re looking for questions that can be answered objectively, those would be of a more technical variety, such as “Is this book written from a first-person perspective?” or “on average, approximately how many pages per chapter are there in this book?”

Understanding a Subjective Question

Usually, it is much more productive to ask subjective questions, provided you recognize them as such. An example of a good such question would be: “in your opinion, is this book less or more suspenseful than [previous book from the same author]?” Another example: “how long time did it take you to finish reading the book?”

Notice how, when asking such questions, you can learn more not by the answers themselves but by the way they are given. For instance, someone might reply to you: “It took me three days to finish this, which is pretty fast by my standards. I guess I wanted to reach the end as soon as possible, it was gripping.”

Of course, asking such questions entails that the person asking them knows what to do with the answer. Which brings us to the most depressing part of the discussion.

And why We Don’t Know how to Ask Proper Questions

Apart from selfishness, one of the recipes for mediocrity is the unwillingness to dedicate some time and learn about something. Lack of patience, in other words. Actually, come to think of it, perhaps this is an expression of selfishness after all. “I’m too important to be bothered about this.”

As a result, we get questions like “Is this a good book? Or is it boring?” because the person asking the question doesn’t want to be bothered. God forbid if you began to read a book (a book! Not a tweet! OMG, I have to read?!) and then find out it wasn’t something you would enjoy.

And so, people ask inane questions trying to find the short way out. Presumably, the person asking such a question would like to hear something like “No, it’s not a good book. It’s boring” or “Yes! It’s an excellent book, it wasn’t boring at all!”

We live in a binary world, it seems…