How do you not? A book is a book. Some books are great. Some books suck bilgewater. All that is in the opinion of the people reading it. A Confederacy of Dunces was published 11 years after John Kennedy Toole had committed suicide because he couldn't find a publisher. Stig Larssen didn't publish a thing while he was alive because he wrote books for fun; we know about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo because his widow thought we should. We are raised and culturally conditioned to adore the fuck out of Moby Dick, and saying Moby Dick is a boring book is the equivalent of heresy. But you know what? it's a boring book. That's what makes "literature" - shit that people were forced to read, so they insist other people read it. It's like an English department hazing. Half those books we're forced to read because they were crazy popular once. We're required to read Last of the Mohicans not because Natty Bumppo is some paradigm for American life, not because Cooper was a brilliant writer, but because the Leatherstocking tales were the equivalent of the Twilight books in 1826. They're just books. Lord of the Rings is just a bunch of books. I've never read them. I fought tooth-and-claw through The Hobbit in 4th grade and that piece-of-shit book took me three goddamn months. I read Stephen King's It in 5 days three months later. No way in hell was I going to slog through Lord of the Rings. I enjoyed the movies very much... but then, I don't have to read twelve pages of Elvish folksongs to enjoy the movies. Claiming that Tolkien invented "the modern fantasy paradigm" is like saying George Lucas invented "the modern science fiction paradigm." Yeah, he's had a lot of imitators. However, most of the good books are the ones that don't.