Raindrops on roses. Whiskers on kittens. White copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. Self-published books on Amazon.com. These are a few of my favorite things.

I was thinking about what my favorite things in the world are. Every person has their own; one’s favorite things are what can make life’s rainy days just a tiny bit sunnier. Your favorite things can be something observable: a book, a YouTube video, the way a bee flies through the air. It can also be something more abstract, like an idea or a feeling. I have several from both column A and column B. Although I’d like to discuss every single one of them in more detail, I’ll concentrate on two of them that recently popped into my mind.

The written word is one of humankind’s oldest cultural achievements, arguably predated only by using your hands to shape stuff. In fact, I am relishing that achievement right now as I’m writing this and contributing absolutely nothing to the society. Not only have books and written documents been used to distribute knowledge and ideas, but they have been a way to preserve tales from centuries ago. The Brothers Grimm are a good example of the latter, collecting folktales and printing them on paper, so children and Disney executives of today could still enjoy them. Some people go into great effort to preserve stories by others; Shakespeare’s plays are still being printed to this day, making sure that future generations can enjoy the Immortal Bard as we have.

Then there are people who have gone so deep that they believe everything written down under the sun is worth distributing, especially when, more to the point, they are the original creator of the subject of the distribution. And yes, I know this is the hypocrisy singularity when it’s coming from me, writing this and publishing it on my own website that I have built and host. Trust me, when I say that under no circumstances do I imagine that my words could affect someone’s day to an extent that my writings would be worth spreading. This is what I do for a hobby, for myself and nobody else, okay? Then again, I digress.

If you find yourself bored, I suggest peeking into a fun rabbit hole that I discovered. Did you know that self-published books form an annual market worth over a billion dollars? And that Amazon.com has the grip on the majority of that market? Books are how Amazon started its journey to global villainy, after all, so it is no wonder that most self-published authors can be found there. And oh boy, let me tell you how deep the rabbit hole goes. You start your journey sensible with used text books and Stephen King novels. There is a thick layer of respected third-party publishers. Then comes the second layer of mixed results; you start noticing cookbooks and self-help books with the name of the publisher notably absent, but still, they are all seemingly legit. Then the rabbit hole starts taking a steeper turn.

Your eyes start landing on books predicated on the idea that the movie The Matrix is based on a true story. More and more stories involving dinosaur erotica start coming up. You are surrounded by darkness, the unadulterated stream of consciousness weaved by the most troubled minds of our society. You are in a world of no filters, no second opinions, no second-guessing one’s skills or opinions. The jaws of madness begin to close.

If you are too scared, and I don’t blame you, I’ll give you a good example of the mild variety. True Light is a book that is self-published on Amazon. It is a self-help book, I think. I’ll admit, I have never read it, but don’t blame me until you hear the reason.

In True Light every, single, word, is, followed, by, a, comma.

You think that I am exaggerating, but I assure you, I am not. Go on and have a look at it now. The product page contains the back-cover blurb and it gives you a pretty accurate picture from what I’ve seen. I honestly don’t think this book was written as a joke, and my online peers seem to agree with me. You might think that this all sounds insane and I’d completely agree with you. I didn’t say the rabbit hole was going to be beautiful, but it let’s you gaze into a world you didn’t think would even exist. These kinds of books let you experience the human mind in its purest, in good and ill. However, not all self-proclaimed authors generate such deranged sentences. Madness has many forms, such as a form it can only achieve in a very special kind of a creative subconcious.

There once was an aspiring young writer called Jim Theis. By the age of 16, in 1970, Jim had been interested in science fiction and fantasy, to the point that he himself tried his hand at writing fiction. And so he did: he wrote a preliminary draft of his book, and shipped it to a fanzine of the sci-fi scene for publishing. The short story was indeed published in the magazine, and after a while it caught the eye of a science fiction author Thomas N. Scortia, who was so impressed by the book that he went on to share it further amongst his colleagues, providing it the publicity it enjoys to this day. The name of the book? The Eye of Argon.

It wasn’t Jim’s masterful writing or real-to-life characters who put his story in the spotlight. To put it bluntly, The Eye of Argon is considered to be the worst fantasy novel ever published. I mean, it is miraculous how bad it is. There is absolutely no chance any of it was written in jest; I hold that what makes the book so amazing is the fact that it was written completely in earnest. The book is available for download for free, if you want to have a look. Go ahead, it is online, and it is quite short. If you enjoy bad literature, you can’t get better than The Eye of Argon and its countless typos, misused words and general lack of narrative skill.

I love works of art that have been created in earnest, and fail in such a spectacular manner in what they were set out to do. The Phantom Menace is considered by many to be the crowning achievement of failure on film, but there are people who genuinely enjoy it for the bad decisions that went into its inception. It is fascinating to imagine how a mind that thought Jar-Jar Binks was a good idea works. The Eye of Argon is my Phantom Menace. I would have loved to meet Jim Theis in his prime and ask him carefully if he really thought what he was writing was good enough to publish. Then again, I am glad that he had no breaks on his creative train and now we can harvest the fruits of that wreck. The Eye of Argon is the only work of fiction that has provided me with an experience that leaves me wondering how a person, blinded by their lack of skill and misplaced enthusiasm, overcomes all obstacles and produces something so pure. A very unique experience, and that’s why I love it so. The Eye of Argon is one of my favorite things.