What makes a bad book bad?

What makes a bad book bad?
American academics have been grappling with this question and rounding up some unusual suspects
“Unfortunately, some of my colleagues judge everything by how close it comes to Joyce’s Ulysses, which they reread annually,” he reveals. “A friend of mine was at an academic conference session about Ulysses. Someone on the panel referred to an episode where a character in the
novel had coffee at a restaurant. The rest of the panel turned on him, and one of them hissed, ‘It was cocoa!’ Now do you see why this ridiculous list came about?”