What Constitutes Waste?

As I picked up "Archetypes of Literature" tonight, I noticed one quote out of context that jumped at me: "Criticism, like nature, prefers a waste space to an empty one." As I tend to take things out of context frequently and I have been thinking about this topic from time to time, this quote got some of my gears turning. By Frye's defintion, all words are literature, so does that include literature that we will not be studying in a Literary Criticism class anytime soon? Would he rather it exist than not? perehaps the existence of bad literature serves the purpose of highlighting the quality of great literature. Or Mayb no literature can really be defined as bad. Have these past years of studying the classics just made me jaded toward literature? All summer, I was almost embarrassed to admit the books I was reading for fun, because some were far from Faulkner. They were all good enough to get published and become bestsellers in most cases, but not good enough for me to consider them great. Most of them I considered a waste of my time, though everything I read was very entertaining. lately I have been operating under the assumption that if i understand it on the first try, it must not be "good literature". But as I thought more deeply about my concept of good literature, I relized that my defintion is not nearly concrete enough to classify anything as good or bad. First I must decide what good or bad is. I would consider myself a slight critic of literature, hopefully this semester I will be able to hone those skills. Perhaps I will be able to stop reading books that embarrass me. Maybe I will just learn to stop being embarrassed about what i read for. Hmmm... this post makes little sense, exhausted ramblings.