Beware Literary Snobbery: Why We Should Read Bestsellers

[Jude Hardin]

Nice article by James W. Hall in the Wall Street Journal.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/04/08/beware-literary-snobbery-...

[I. J. Parker]

I confess I didn't read this.  Not enough time.  I read some bestsellers, Lee Child's, for example.  However, my reading tastes generally don't take me there.  It's not always stylistic problems.  Sometimes the subjects that appeal to millions of readers simply do not appeal to me.  I think, for example, that being turned on by vampires is childish and that modern romances cater to rather pathetic wishfulfillment fantasies. 

On the subject of judging a book:  Since my education trained me specifically to do this and do it with examples to support my judgment, I reject the suggestion that you cannot judge a book's quality and that it's all a matter of personal taste.  It's perhaps regrettable that we were only trained on masterpieces.  The options to find something to complain about were usually minimal.

[John McFetridge]

Lately I've come to really appreciate this line from filmmaker and novelist John Sayles:

"I'm interested in the stuff I do being seen as widely as possible but I'm not interested enough to lie."

It always sounds like sour grapes, of course, from someone whose work isn't widely seen but it may still be true. I get advice from time to time about how to make my books more appealing to a larger audience and I try to follow it sometimes but I almost always end up doing what I do.

 

[Dana King]

Word.

I've seen enough of Sayles's movies and read UNION DUES. He practices what he preaches. (As do you, John.)

[Jude Hardin]

Paul McCartney has said that he and John would get together sometimes and say things like, "Let's write a swimming pool today." So I don't think being true to your art and creating something with the intent to sell are mutually exclusive motivations.

Being popular doesn't necessarily mean you're a sellout. In fact, I would imagine most readers recognize the phony baloney bandwagon jumperonners for what they are.

[Jude Hardin]

I reject the suggestion that you cannot judge a book's quality and that it's all a matter of personal taste.

Then why do equally versed critics sometimes vehemently disagree about whether a book is good or not? Why does one say it's a masterpiece while the other says it's a barrel of tripe? If they're basing their opinions on objective criteria, shouldn't their conclusions ultimately be the same?

[Brian Hoffman]

I think of reading a book like a glass of wine.  The really fine stuff shines with good food.  Sometimes a more common wine is called for, like with spaghetti.  But there is no time for crappy wine or books.

I've recently taken a reading side road into reading Urban Fantasy.  Some tastes good, "The Windup Girl", some not so much, and some not worth reading.  My personal belief is to read better writers than I am (of course that's easy since most are) but not to waste time on writers who can't structure a sentence or make a deeper point than just the plot.

[I. J. Parker]

Grumble:  What's with the sign in/sign up nonsense on the site?

 

I don't know of any cases where critics were diametrically opposite one another.  Maybe they were not, in fact, using objective criteria.  Maybe one was in the publisher's pocket?  Maybe the other wanted to make a splash?

 

Conclusions are surprisingly similar when a number of experienced readers select books for awards.

 

I've thought about this today, because I just tossed a book for being overwritten.  No, it wasn't too wordy.  It wasn't a matter of using more words than required to tell the tale.  It was a matter of going overboard in any scene that gave the protagonist either emotional or physical pain.  There is a limit to how far you can milk that sort of thing before the reader is disgusted.  There are, of course, other ways of overwriting:  too much technical detail, too much historical detail, too much description of place, too much ruminating (Joyce's style in ULYSSES is rarely appropriate in genre writing).

 

When I read, I always ask myself what made a book work and what caused it to fall flat.  It's my job to do this, and it makes me (unfortunately) hard on a lot of genre novels.

[Eric Christopherson]

Aro started to laugh. "Ha, ha, ha," he chuckled.

That's an actual bit from Stephanie Meyers' vampire series, New Moon, objectively bad prose. The technique problems here are telling and showing as well as using an unnecessary speaker attribution. There's that most basic advice for authors: "Show, don't tell." Well she "tells" twice here, before and after she "shows" via dialog. Better technique would be to insert a beat and to cut the speaker attribution.

Aro threw back his head. "Ha, ha, ha!" for example.

It's not that hard to identify bad prose with the proper skill set. Readers might not know it, but those who love Meyers' stories love them in spite of her prose.

[Dana King]

At least he didn't chuckle merrily.

[Jude Hardin]

I would probably write Aro started to laugh and leave it at that. Then start up with whatever he said next. I can't imagine that I would ever write, "Ha, ha, ha!" as dialogue.

But Stephanie has her own way, and her own way sells more than my way. Exponentially more.

James Patterson likes to answer his critics by saying, "Thousands of people hate my books. But millions of people love them."

Can't say it much better than that.

[Eric Christopherson]

Sales is IMO an imperfect measure of value. Factors include: luck, timing, marketing, i.e., things that have little or nothing to do with literature.

And consider, for example, Cormac McCarthy. If we were discussing him circa 1991 or earlier, before All the Pretty Horses put him on the map, sales as a sole measure wouldn't done little for his reputation, even though the books he wrote prior to Pretty Horses have since sold very well. (Many think Blood Meridian from 1985 his best book, in fact.) So did he suck and then magically not suck?

[Jon Loomis]

Thank God it's not all about sales. One wants to retain at least a little self respect. And I'm pretty sure that the correct way to write that dialogue would be "Ha, ha, ha, motherfuckers," Aro said. Except I'd never name a character Aro.