I don’t pretend to know what goes on in the minds of other readers, let alone the ones who write reviews. Reading is, after all, a deeply personal activity. Nevertheless, if you want to see what people think of any given book, but don’t want to read full reviews, one of the best ways to get a general overview of a book’s reputation is to look at Goodreads. For those whop haven’t heard of it, Goodreads is a website that allows readers to give a book a short review, but is primarily known for its 1-5 star rating system. It’s not perfect. Goodreads is notorious for the review-bombing of unreleased books. At the same time, there is a general sense that anything under three stars is terrible, and I once knew someone who refused to read any book that had a less than 3.5 average rating.

I have no such compunctions. Which is why I ended up reading a pair of books that have considerably poor average ratings. Would these books, I wondered, be as bad as everyone seemed to be saying? Or would they be hidden gems?

The City Dwellers, by Charles Platt, was first published in 1970, and has an average Goodreads rating of 2.86. Incredibly, I found it to be even worse than this, giving it only one star. You see, The City Dwellers is a part of the New Wave, which you can tell from it’s experimental prose style and obsession with sex. It’s told in four parts, which do not share any characters, but probably share a setting. It hearkens back to the fix-ups of short stories that were popular in prior decades, but there’s no evidence that this was written as anything other than a novel. It’s also only 158 pages long, with the first part being a full third of that, and the other three wedged in afterwards.

The overall plot is that the human population drops, seemingly because the human race universally loses interest (or possibly just capability) for sexual reproduction. As such, a city is abandoned. It’s a thin narrative, and nothing is really done with it. The opening act does still feel relevant in today’s celebrity-obsessed world, but after that promising opening, this is an absolute car crash of a novel.

1980’s Starflight to Faroul, written by Patrick Dearen, has an even lower rating at just 1.75 stars on Goodreads. I think this fair, but I also disagree with it. I actually gave the book three stars. Why? Because this is one of those books that is so bad it becomes good. It’s entertainingly daft, and so wildly over-the-top that I couldn’t help but chuckle as I was reading.

The plot is bonkers, with a former soldier teaming up with pirates and a prostitute to track down a mythical planet. It’s an ungodly mix of tropes from science fiction, westerns (which Dearen also wrote) and fantasy stories, all mingling together to create one glorious mess. The mess isn’t just in genre, though. The opening chapters are riddled with bizarre typos, and even once the editing settles down we fall headlong into instant love, possible angelic bloodlines, and horrific levels of violence. And yet, it’s all delivered with such a serious face that it can’t help but be ridiculously entertaining. Every cry of Faroul! brought me one step closer to hysterics. It’s a bad book, but I had a good time reading it.

I genuinely believe that even the worst book in the world – a book that is objectively bad – will have a reader somewhere in the world who will love it. That reader may never find the book, but if you’re willing to read books regardless of what other people have to say about them, you’ll be one step closer to finding the book that’s perfect just for you.