[atleastoptimal]

Also I recommend reading mediocre books. Especially first time authors. They're the best way to be on the other side of someone reading your first book. It's easy for anyone with a college education to avoid being truly terrible, but the middling eternity of mediocrity is a far harder to navigate out of.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I recently stopped reading such a book. It wasn't terrible and had no blatant flaws, but it also had nothing good either. It was all just meh. Music can also like this -- there is a big gap between being able to make something that isn't bad and making something that is actually good.

[atleastoptimal]

Salieri vs Mozart phenomenon. Listening to Salieri's music, there's nothing ostensibly bad about it. People use labels like "forgettable", "bland", or anything else that seems more like labeling a symptom without analyzing the cause. The cause being, why do two pieces, both without any notable faults and in a music theory sense well-made, have two significantly different reactions and impact in the general musical consciousness over centuries? What defines the genius that keeps people playing Mozart's pieces over and over, and only play Salieri's when they're trying to make a contrived point about him not being that bad?

[tstrimple]

One of my favorite fantasy series is The Dresden Files. The first two novels are awful. Jim Butcher is clearly a new author at the time and making new author mistakes. But in the third book he starts finding his voice and the characters hit their stride. Each subsequent novel he's getting better and better. You're watching his growth as an author at the same time as his characters are growing throughout the story. It starts as a serial noir wizard detective story and ends up being an epic fantasy. I thoroughly enjoyed the ride despite the very rough start.

[Cthulhu_]

For an infinite treasure trove of mediocrity (and the odd surprise), there's fanfiction archives like AO3 (https://archiveofourown.org/).

[Mezzie]

Definitely mind the tags and ratings if you mine AO3 for anything.