Why “I Can’t Relate” Isn’t a Measure of Good Literature ~ Reading Craft #3
Not all books mirror the readers, yet often, readers expect them to—and this narrows literature's scope, risking excluding stories that challenge, unsettle, or expand our horizons.
Months ago, while scrolling Instagram, I stopped on a book reviewer making a claim:
“Let’s be honest, we really don’t care about the plot. All we’re here for is the characters.”
I stopped scrolling.
That sentence… bothered me, but I had so many unpolished ideas about it that I chose not to engage and move on—yet my concerns lingered, nagging at the back of my mind. They resurfaced whenever I saw a Goodreads reviews of the same kind:
“, characters are more empty and flat than their supposed hypnotic state” (1-star review of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer).
“He went from retarded to genius yet all he could do was to go on and on about his mommy issues.” (1-star review of Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes).
“The main character was an empty shell […]” (1-star review of Embassytown, by China Miéville).
“I legit have no idea what I just read but nice words yknow.” (2-star review of The Garden of Forking Paths, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges).
These reactions are not aberrations; they are symptomatic—pointing to an understandable, yet often incomplete, response.
Truth be told, reading is subjective. For readers who seek emotional immersion, phrases like “I couldn’t care less” or “I can’t relate” represent genuine and honest reactions. For those specific readers, the book in question may have not done its job.
However, “I couldn’t relate” is not synonymous with “this book is bad.” Rather, it reveals more about the reader’s expectations, experiences, or reading habits than about the craft of the book itself. Many great works are intentionally uncomfortable, distant, or centred on lives that particular readers may never share.
Take Philip K. Dicks A Scanner Darkly as an example. This novel explores the lives of drug addicts teetering on the edge of overdose, told from their fractured perspectives. Here, reality is unstable, conversations meander, and events often defy straightforward logic—why would a cop’s head transform into a roach? (That’s precisely the point.) PKD wrote it to convey the experiences of people he knew in real life… but to non-addicts—people with their logic and reasoning intact, with their senses not distorted by drugs—the characters in this book are unrelatable:
“I didn’t really connect with any of the characters. They felt artificial and shallow.” (1-star review in Goodreads).
“If Dick was trying to put the reader into the mind of what a drug user thinks and feels, then he succeeded. Unfortunately, this makes for a terrible read.” (1-star review in Goodreads).
“I didn’t find the characters nor scattered plot compelling […]” (another 1-star review in Goodreads).
It would seem that “relating” is less about true empathy for the character—and more about mirroring oneself.
On the one hand, empathy requires being curious and accepting about someone else’s interiority, even when it is alien, uncomfortable, or opaque. On the other hand, mirroring is a role-playing expectation: readers want characters to react exactly as they would, so that actions—even if unexplained—feel logical and predictable. If that doesn’t happen, then the plot or secondary characters must clearly label and explain everything.
The problem is that if everyone only rated books highly when the characters mirrored themselves, we would lose literature’s ability to expand empathy beyond our own narrow experience. When this expectation becomes dominant, literature collapses into familiar psychologies, known and ‘accepted’ moral arcs, limited and ‘common’ emotional vocabularies.
To further the issue, platforms like Goodreads and BookTube reward an immediate affective response… rather than reflective judgement. A star rating is quick, emotional, and social, so that a review saying “I didn’t connect” becomes a socially safe criticism: it sounds personal rather than not engaged with the text, it doesn’t require analysis, and—worst of all—it cannot be argued with.
This becomes more frustrating when “relatability” is treated as the primary measure of quality.
The truth is that not every book is meant to feel familiar, comfortable, and known. Some books are meant to be a window, or even a confrontation… and “connection” may not always be the point.
When complex or different characters are penalised simply for being unfamiliar, and when “I didn’t connect” replaces any discussion of writing, structure, themes, or intent, then “I can’t relate” polices what’s considered ‘acceptable’ literature. It does so through attrition. Books needing patient, interpretive work, aesthetic distance, and/or curiosity about unfamiliar modes of thought… simply fall into the invisible abyss of books that don’t “rack up” likes and impressions on social media.
That quote that sparked this essay represents the mindset that smooths literature into the limited known. Plot is not just ‘what happens’ in a story; plot is causality, structure, philosophical tensions, the ideas driving the setting—latter being especially true for speculative fiction. To say “we really don’t care about the plot” is really to say “we don’t care about the meaning existing beyond character affect.”
This narrows literature into mere emotional consumption, foregoing the inquiry it enables. A book becomes valuable only insofar as it produces a certain feeling of recognition.
Take Borges, for example.
His work is abstract, cerebral, emotional cool. He didn’t care in psychological intimacy, he didn’t aim for readers to feel mirrored by his characters. He often used his stories to make a covert social criticism (the case of Death & The Compass), or even as a literary response to other authors (e.g., There Are More Things is a critique to Lovecraft).
Borges’ writing defined a new genre. He inspired genre-making authors—yet by the dominant Goodreads metric, much of his work is “confusing”, “unrelatable”, “inexplicable”, “the weirdest dream”, or worse: “Read the Wikipedia first, drop some acid, then attempt this story.” (taken from a 1-star review of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius).
Borges’ value is around the intellectual ‘vertigo’ caused by peeling layers upon layers of philosophical and metaphysical implications. If “relatability” were the sole criterion, then Borges, Kafka, Italo Calvino, Claris Lispector, W.G. Sebald… would all be downgraded as failures.
The danger isn’t that just some books get bad ratings. The danger is what readers are losing because of it.
Curiosity. Tolerance for opacity. Comfort with distance.
Trust in literature that doesn’t immediately please.
Writers, sensing this, write “to market” and preemptively polish down difficulty, abstraction, or strangeness to avoid being labelled as “unrelatable” or “difficult.”
In this way, a society can end up censoring itself—by unlearning how to read beyond immediate recognition.