{"id":22651,"date":"2013-10-23T12:46:01","date_gmt":"2013-10-23T17:46:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22651"},"modified":"2013-10-23T12:46:01","modified_gmt":"2013-10-23T17:46:01","slug":"qotd-popular-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/10\/23\/qotd-popular-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Popular fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>[&#8230;] it&#8217;s almost as if there&#8217;s a demon whose special job is maintaining the inverse relationship between quality and sales when it comes to runaway bestsellers. E.L. James would be an example, surely, but her prose isn&#8217;t much worse than Stephenie Meyer&#8217;s, which is middlin&#8217; horrid, while their joint plotting is pretty much entirely horrid, not to mention largely incoherent and ethically vacuous.<\/p>\n<p>Or there&#8217;s Dan Brown, who wouldn&#8217;t recognise a grammatical sentence or a plausible sequence of events if they each wrestled him to the ground and sat on his head. Which I dearly wish they would, if only to keep him away from any keyboard whatsoever and preserve a forest or two from dying all in vain.<\/p>\n<p>By any criterion other than sales each of these bestsellers is plainly a badly inferior example of its genre and of the writer&#8217;s craft, yet they explode while far better things that are no less available (though often less advertised) do modestly. Some of it is a bit like talentless boy bands, an almost purely commercial phenomenon, but one still has to wonder why those particular publishers&#8217; pushes go so viral. And weep.<\/p>\n<p>John Lennard, MA DPhil. (Oxon.), MA (WU) (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/301697.John_Lennard\/blog\" target=\"_blank\">Goodreads blog<\/a>), posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing list (<a href=\"http:\/\/lists.herald.co.uk\/cgi-bin\/mailman\/listinfo\/lois-bujold\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/lists.herald.co.uk\/cgi-bin\/mailman\/listinfo\/lois-bujold<\/a>), 2013-10-22<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[&#8230;] it&#8217;s almost as if there&#8217;s a demon whose special job is maintaining the inverse relationship between quality and sales when it comes to runaway bestsellers. E.L. James would be an example, surely, but her prose isn&#8217;t much worse than Stephenie Meyer&#8217;s, which is middlin&#8217; horrid, while their joint plotting is pretty much entirely horrid, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,831,57,28,41],"tags":[86,134],"class_list":["post-22651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-business","category-humour","category-media","category-quotations","tag-criticism","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Tl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22651"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22653,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22651\/revisions\/22653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}