when can you consider a written work good?

for fiction, generally, my criteria is how convincingly the author portrays another world. he or she must be able to take me inside this world, involve me in it, and actually make me care about the outcome of the plot, how the characters turn out, etc. however, through all of the elaborate twists and turns, the author must be able to say something true about life, and say it in an entirely new way.. it has to be creative, and it has to be distinctly his style.. after all, books are a sort of escape where anything is possible, but it must still be about something true about the human race, or else, what would be the point?

Hi mermaid911 (porsche lover?), I think a book was worth reading, if only one sentence can give me something for life! An insight, or an answer to a question I struggled to find. 350 pages and I find one sentence, I'm the winner, but normally you can find far more than just one good sentence in a book. It is normally just expected, that the whole book has to be "good". It is this expectation, which can make us blind for the one sentence, which was written for you!(if this makes sense to you). Very rarely do I put down a book, which I haven't finished reading to the end. Even when it appears to be boring, there was a reason, why i picked it up in the first place. ...After all, not the things are bad, just the way we think about them... cheers, Mike & have fun reading...