George Orwell, in his essay “Confessions of Book Reviewer,” wrote that “until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.” He saw this mostly despairingly, with the professional reviewer wasting precious time and words on unworthy books and ultimately “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.”

Joe Queenan, however, views the ever-growing pile of crappy books as something to be celebrated. In an essay in The New York Times, Queenan contends that bad books should be seen for what they are: the life of the party in an often solemn and overly serious field.

Most of us are familiar with people who make a fetish out of quality: They read only good books, they see only good movies, they listen only to good music, they discuss politics only with good people, and they’re not shy about letting you know it. They think this makes them smarter and better than everybody else, but it doesn’t. It makes them mean and overly judgmental and miserly, as if taking 15 minutes to flip through The Da Vinci Code is a crime so monstrous, an offense in such flagrant violation of the sacred laws of intellectual time-management, that they will be cast out into the darkness by the Keepers of the Cultural Flame. In these people’s view, any time spent reading a bad book can never be recovered. They also act as if the rest of humanity is watching their time sheets.

Such prissy attitudes are neurotic and self-defeating. Bad books are an essential part of life, as entertaining and indispensable as bad clothing (ironic polyester shirts), bad music (John Tesh at Red Rocks, Phil Collins anywhere), bad trends (metrosexuality, not using toilet paper for a year in order to “help” the environment) and bad politicians (take your pick). I started reading extremely bad books as a boy, when my beloved but slightly unhinged Uncle Jerry lent me the classic Reds-under-the-beds screed “None Dare Call It Treason,” and have been reading them ever since.

Of course, even Orwell admitted as much, in another essay entitled, appropriately enough, “Good Bad Books”:

All of these are definitely absurd books, books which one is more inclined to laugh AT than WITH, and which were hardly taken seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do so. All one can say is that, while civilization remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, “light” literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power.