The hard thing is you can have good writing undone by a bad ending or similar. For example His Dark Materials has great world building, but the blatantly anti-Christian themes end up coming across like a petty tantrum.

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Yeah, you can tell when an author just has a lot of stuff on his mind unrelated to the subject of the book.

Though in Moby Dick, you can forgive the author for using a quarter of the text as a sperm whale encyclopedia cause he's just really into them.