How does a "great" piece of writing serve society if hardly anybody reads it? How "bad" can a book be if it engages, and encourages more reading in people that otherwise might not read at all?
Motokid I'm not ignoring you - or by silence agreeing with you!! - but these points have been gone over ad nauseam in the Mainstream Blockbuster thread you linked to earlier. In brief however:
What's serving society got to do with it? It's not the writer's fault if a great book isn't widely read: it could be the fault of the publishers for not promoting it, or readers for not making the effort to engage with it. Only now, on my fourth attempt, am I really getting something out of
Love in the Time of Cholera. That's not Márquez's fault for writing a book which requires more attention than most of the stuff I read; it's my fault for not being prepared to make the effort before now, and for expecting the book to conform to my usual reading requirements.
As for Rushdie, it's interesting that he scored so highly in the list because he is of course the most famous literary writer around, although sadly for non-literary reasons. My take on his stuff is probably elsewhere on the board, but he can be difficult (and his
The Moor's Last Sigh, one of his most highly praised novels, is another one that I have attempted and failed a couple of times; next challenge after Márquez then?), but immensely rich and rewarding to read when he is on form.
There also seems to be a presumption in the points by muggle, Poppy1 and Motokid that only crappy formula fiction can get people interested in reading. Why would this be? There's plenty of highly accessible great writing out there, from Adams (Douglas or Richard) to Chandler to Fante to Greene to Ishiguro to Wells to Wodehouse to Wyndham to Yates. None of them writes difficult books structurally or linguistically.
As for becoming rich through writing, that's more a question of luck than judgement. In Rushdie's case, bad luck.
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