Name a "Mainstream BlockBuster" you actually like!

[Kookamoor]

I just don't understand the need, or the desire to crucify an author who simply wrote a story.

Amen.

I just don't understand the 'holier than thou' attitude that is comes across sometimes, both in this thread and others on the forum. I understand that sometimes people want more out of a book than just a story. But just because a book may be written in a simplistic manner, does that necessarily mean the story is bad? Heck, Harry Potter can be read in a few hours, has no deeper imagery and the writing isn't beautiful. But it's a great story! Why is that such a bad thing?

If you want to be critical of a book for whatever reason, you have every right, but don't bring down others for enjoying a story. The reason spinoffs work is because the audience is looking for more. Sure, it's a marketting ploy, but it appeals to a large number of people. You can call those people a market, or the masses, but they are an audience nonetheless, just like you and I. If you don't like a book, don't read it. It's just that simple.

 

[Kookamoor]

By the same token, would anyone really claim that Jeffrey Archer is a better writer than Anton Chekhov? Some books are better than others.

You do realise that 'better' is a subjective word, right?

 

[bookclubnazi]

ooooh, thanks to all who contributed-- i've really enjoyed this thread so far).

my 2 cents (maybe 4 cents):

unless a book has some morally-uplifting or society-improving point, than it's all just entertainment. many of the books i've enjoyed the most have made me say "oooh, that was a beautiful passage" or "ooooh, that was wonderfully written." literature is generally enjoyed for its own sake. even the ones that do have one of the above-mentioned points (for example, i just finished reading catch-22 for my book club) could make the point far more clearly by simply writing "war is bad" (or whatever) on the front page.

if literature is read for its own sake, it should be done by as many people as get something out of it. as such (sorry, can't work 'by and large" into this post) --as such, who am i to tell you what you should read and what you should enjoy? if something is popular, it is so because a lot of people enjoyed it. i may not have liked "the five people you meet in heaven" ( ) but if my mom did*, all power to her, she can have it!


*true story. off-topic footnote: i read it for book club and hated it. i lent it to my mom (it's a my-mom kind of book) and she loved it. she says i'm too young to "get it".

 

[Shade]

I agree entirely that there's a difference between "I don't like this book" and "This is a bad book." For instance I have never much enjoyed the books of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, but I can see their qualities and would never call them bad books. Indeed I would call them good books but just not to my taste. By the same token there are books I like that aren't all that great, like some late Graham Greene or off-form William Boyd.

By the same token people should be able to see that even though they like something, it can still be a bad book, eg Dan Brown.

I would never claim that Harlequin Romance novels are just pure crap

Whyever not? They're written proscriptively, to a tailored end. The very principle of them is the antithesis of imaginative literature.

Kookamoor, I'm sure you're playing devil's advocate when you suggest that there are no objective examples of what books are better than others. (ref: Rick Gekoski quoted earlier) Not all opinions are equally valid. Say someone has read the Dan Brown quartet and nothing else; is their opinion of a new book they read to be considered of equal evidential weight with that of, say, a widely read literary expert like Prof. John Carey? Yes, as Morrissey almost said: Some books are better than others.

 

[Wabbit]

By the same token people should be able to see that even though they like something, it can still be a bad book, eg Dan Brown.
.

Alright, there I can agree with you. There are certain books that I like and I know they are crap, but still I like them and the same goes with movies also.

It's just that, I find, a lot of people are elitist and if you don't read literature or enjoy the "bad but fun" books then you are an idiot. That's a real shame.

 

[Kookamoor]

Kookamoor, I'm sure you're playing devil's advocate when you suggest that there are no objective examples of what books are better than others. (ref: Rick Gekoski quoted earlier) Not all opinions are equally valid. Say someone has read the Dan Brown quartet and nothing else; is their opinion of a new book they read to be considered of equal evidential weight with that of, say, a widely read literary expert like Prof. John Carey? Yes, as Morrissey almost said: Some books are better than others.

Nope, I'm not playing Devil's Advocate at all. I am saying that 'good' and 'bad' depend on the reader, and I think that it is elitist and insulting to try to force one's version of 'good' and 'bad' onto others. I think it is fine to point out attributes of a book that lead you to find it less appealing, but to try to say that that defines a 'bad' book for all is quite simply ridiculous.

I have placed in bold the part of your quote above that I particularly disagree with. Everyone has a valid opinion. Everyone brings to a book their own experiences. It seems to me that you think the only reviews out there should be by literary experts. While a literary expert may have a lot of reading and research behind them, how much of that is common to the everyday reader? A variety of opinions is best so that one gets a well rounded idea of the book from a variety of viewpoints. That's what I like about TBF most. You hear from people of all walks of life about various books. Are our opinions somehow not valid because we aren't literary experts? Are you going to look up someone's profile, see that they are a stay at home mother, or an accountant and assume that they don't know what they're talking about, or discount their opinion about a book as "not equally valid".

To quote from you earlier:

Motokid: Is it better to have them reading Dan Brown type stuff ... or more than likely not reading at all?

Shade: Not reading at all. There's nothing magically enriching about the act of reading itself - we do it all the time when we look up a phone number or study the ingredients on a food packet - it's what's being read that matters. In literary terms, reading Dan Brown is about on a par with sitting on a park bench with a dog on your lap.

I beg to differ. The act of reading is using our imaginations and our intelligence to formulate imagery in our head. It is a wonderous thing to be able to communicate the stories of others and feel their emotions and their fears simply by looking at ink marks on a page. Somehow I just don't experience the same thing from a phone book.

It seems to me that if you had your way, all the books that you deem to be 'bad' would be removed from the bookstores and libraries of the world and those who didn't like what remained would be simply left empty handed. After all, it is better that they read nothing than to read something that you don't happen to like. Where I come from, that's called censorship.

 

[novella]

Along the lines of defining what's 'bad' and 'good' there's a new book out called something like Everything Badis Good for You. The main contention is that watching television, playing video games, multitasking on a computer, and other newish forms of entertainment strengthen peoples' ability to solve problems quickly, to focus and navigate complex environments. The book's getting serious reviews, mostly saying the research backs up the author's thesis. I'll find a link and post it.

Point is, maybe these value judgments are outdated, based on some Matthew Arnold-ish idea about educating the mind. There was a time, after all, when the Western world considered reading and writing in anything but Latin substandard.

Here it is:

Everything Bad is Good for You, a new book getting press

 

[Martin]

Thank you, Kookamoor, for saying exactly the things I wanted to say, but couldn't formulate properly.

Cheers

 

[Motokid]

Since the analogies I made earlier were brushed off as not very good comparisons to artistic things like books (but I did notice the analogy of McDonalds was agreed with as right on ) I was thinking about the same type analogy senario, and music comes directly to mind.

To me, it appears Shade would be into the classical vein of Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin and Bach. And while none of us are professing that classical music is a waste of time, Shade seems to be of the opinion that those of us that are possibly into Jimi Hendrix, Led Zepplin, Metallica, and/or Nirvana are not capable of realizing good music when we hear it. Or, that we are possibly wasting our time listening to Tool, or Eminem, and that we'd be better off not listening to any music if that's what we want to listen to.

Since these anaolgies are very closely related to one's personal opinion on what's "good" and what's "bad", I wonder where, or if Shade will find fault with this comparison?

 

[mehastings]

Since the analogies I made earlier were brushed off as not very good comparisons to artistic things like books (but I did notice the analogy of McDonalds was agreed with as right on ) I was thinking about the same type analogy senario, and music comes directly to mind.

To me, it appears Shade would be into the classical vein of Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin and Bach. And while none of us are professing that classical music is a waste of time, Shade seems to be of the opinion that those of us that are possibly into Jimi Hendrix, Led Zepplin, Metallica, and/or Nirvana are not capable of realizing good music when we hear it. Or, that we are possibly wasting our time listening to Tool, or Eminem, and that we'd be better off not listening to any music if that's what we want to listen to.

Since these anaolgies are very closely related to one's personal opinion on what's "good" and what's "bad", I wonder where, or if Shade will find fault with this comparison?

Since I was the one who made the McDonalds analogy in the first place, I feel I have to disagree here. This isn't at all what I was saying at all. You want music to compare with McDonalds and Danielle Steele? Lets go with the Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, or other similar mass-marketed, low talent cookie cutter acts. Just because something isn't an "old classic" doesn't mean that it has no value. At least, that is not what I was trying to say here. There are a LOT of modern authors with tremendous talent.

I'm really not sure where you were going with comparing Jimi Hendrix (commonly referrrred to as one of the most talented guitarists in history) with some of the low talent authors (and our favorite fast food joint in the world) discussed in this thread. I think you could easily have made a good comparison using music, but you choose poor examples here.

 

[bobbyburns]

I love eminem. especially that song where he's like, "I'm cleaning out my clooooooooosssettttttt."

 

[Stewart]

If they are around to stay then they are valid. Brahms, Chopin, Hendrix, and Nirvana are still here and are valid. I doubt Brown will remain valid.

 

[Shade]

Everyone has a valid opinion ... While a literary expert may have a lot of reading and research behind them, how much of that is common to the everyday reader? A variety of opinions is best so that one gets a well rounded idea of the book from a variety of viewpoints.

You mean, from the viewpoint of someone who knows nothing about books as well as from the viewpoint of someone who knows something about books? You may have a point there. Or Douglas Adams may disagree:

I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me "Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian Beaver Cheese is equally valid" - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all.

Shade seems to be of the opinion that those of us that are possibly into Jimi Hendrix, Led Zepplin, Metallica, and/or Nirvana are not capable of realizing good music when we hear it

Not at all, though I don't need to add much as mehastings has summed it up pretty well. We're not talking about old books v new books, although it's true that one thing you can say about old books is that they've stood the test of time, which in the end is the only one that matters. Of course there were blockbusters, or at least wildly popular books written as entertainments, in the 19th and early 20th centuries too, which have stood the test of time. The difference between them (say, Dickens, Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells) is that they were entertainments written by intelligent people who could write well, not desperate scribblers who should never have given up the day job.

 

[Motokid]

Oh, I'm more than quite sure there's plenty of classical music fans that would never own up to Hendrix, Page/Plant, Cobain, Marshal Mathers or any rock musician having any talent at all. There was widespread histeria around Elvis when he first came out and same with the Beatles. There was a huge portion of the worlds population that condemed all "that" kind of noise as about as far from worthy of being called music as a piece of bellybutton lint.

Just as there are huge portions of the population that would never accept any kind of RAP as art, or music.

Sure the Spice Girls might not carry the same historical weight as Nirvana, but that does not mean that the Spice Girls should never have been allowed to make a recording. And it does not mean that no kid should ever have been allowed to listen to the Spice Girls. And it doesn't mean that those who bought and listened to them were wasting their time and money. Obviously there was a huge audience, and there was a demand for it.

The point of this whole thread is that I find it funny, and a bit hypocritical that true lovers of reading would vocally condem anything, anything that helped get people into reading. No matter what the literary value is, and no matter how silly it might appear. While you may wish that all those ga-zillions of people would read Catch-22 instead of The Da Vinci Code, that's not going to happen. But you never know what some of those ga-zillions will be reading a few years from now. Maybe some will end up here at TBF and start reading something you recommended.

Millions of people reading, that otherwise would not be reading, is a good thing in my opinion. I don't see how that's a bad thing.

 

[Toadal]

Nope, I'm not playing Devil's Advocate at all. I am saying that 'good' and 'bad' depend on the reader, and I think that it is elitist and insulting to try to force one's version of 'good' and 'bad' onto others. I think it is fine to point out attributes of a book that lead you to find it less appealing, but to try to say that that defines a 'bad' book for all is quite simply ridiculous.

I have been following this thread with some interest and continue to be flabbergasted at some people's ability to miss the point entirely. The quoted post above, stating that "good" and "bad" in literature depends on the reader, is utter gibberish, and a classic example of the nonsense of relativism. I doubt that Shade is proclaiming himself as being the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes good writing. What Shade is saying though is that through reading quality books on a regular basis he has learnt how to recognise some examples of good writing. Does he know more than John Carey? No. Does he know enought to recognise that Cloud Atlas is better than (say) The Da Vinci Code? Yes.

The notion that one person's opinion is as equally valid as anyone else's is a nonsense, and is a deeply harmful one. 'Good' and 'Bad' are NOT subjective terms. As mentioned before, whether or not one has a personal liking for something is subjective, but the actual artistic merit of a book can and should be objectively recognised. And it isn't necessarily true to say that people who look for standards in their reading are snobs, or eltitists, or whatever: some of the best books of recent months have gone on to be commercial successes too: Small Island, Cloud Atlas, The Shadow of the Wind.

Finally, the charge of elitism is a false one. Anyone who can read can read quality literature just as well as they can blockbuster dross. It's just that they choose not to. Fair enough, that's their look-out. But don't then start having a pop at those who actually try a little harder.

 

[Shade]

Thanks for saying that once again, Motokid. I think we're in danger of getting circular here and on the brink of having to agree to disagree. However:

This thread was never about getting people to read. It was about whether or not the very highest-selling multi-billion-unit-shifting blockbusters were likely to have any literary value, in the eyes of what you termed "bibliophiles" and "those of you who dislike Dan Brown's stuff." I felt I fell into both those categories which is why I responded.

Getting people to read is entirely different. I started off as a kid on Enid Blyton, and as a teenager on Terry Pratchett. I wouldn't touch either of them now but I enjoyed them at the time for what they were. I still like (to cite the subject of another thread at the minute) Ben Elton's book, though I can see they're not terribly well written or likely to last. They're not, in that enduring sense, 'good books.'

Kids listening to the Spice Girls (or reading Goosebumps) is also not the point. Of course they shouldn't be restricted, nor should we wish them to be. But tastes develop as you get older, which is why more kids like sugary sweets than adults do, and why more adults than kids like Graham Greene's novels. I am not "condemning anything, anything that helped people get into reading." Just some things. The really inexcusably bad ones.

Obviously there was a huge audience, and there was a demand for it.

Well now, surely we agree that sales and popularity are entirely unconnected to quality, otherwise The Sun would be the finest newspaper in the world.

 

[novella]

I agree with Shade and Toadal.

Just as an aside, positing all classical music versus the best of rock and roll is a false dichotomy, as any decent musician or person with an ear and a soul recognizes real music in all its forms and genres. You really would have to go pretty far to find a serious listener who doesn't recognize Jimi Hendrix as talented. If you don't know that, you don't know musicians very well and are too close-minded to fairly hold this discussion.

The comparison might be made between good music and bad music/ good books and bad books, but wouldn't you put the 'music' of Britney Spears or Cher more readily into the 'bad' category?

 

[Motokid]

"This thread was never about getting people to read. It was about whether or not the very highest-selling multi-billion-unit-shifting blockbusters were likely to have any literary value, in the eyes of what you termed "bibliophiles" and "those of you who dislike Dan Brown's stuff." I felt I fell into both those categories which is why I responded."

Actually this thread was originally about finding out if there was ever a worldwide, blockbuster success that people like Shade, Toadal, Stewart and Novella actually liked. And Like is the word I used, which is totally subjective.

Things changed a bit when Shade stated that people would be better off not reading at all than reading something like The Da Vinci Code.

 

[Shade]

To be accurate, Motokid, this was the last sentence of your post which opened this thread:

Or is every book that 100's of millions of people like destined to be plagued with the bibliophile's wrath of "not worthy of the pages it's written on" type scorn?

...and as you can see from my first post, it was this aspect specifically that I first responded to. If asking whether something is deemed to be "not worthy of the pages it's written on" isn't asking for it to be viewed with objective assessment, then I don't know what it is.

EDIT: And it was you, Motokid, in your second post, who specifically raised the issue of whether people would be better off not reading at all than reading Dan Brown. You raised that issue, not me.

 

[novella]

"This thread was never about getting people to read. It was about whether or not the very highest-selling multi-billion-unit-shifting blockbusters were likely to have any literary value, in the eyes of what you termed "bibliophiles" and "those of you who dislike Dan Brown's stuff." I felt I fell into both those categories which is why I responded."

Actually this thread was originally about finding out if there was ever a worldwide, blockbuster success that people like Shade, Toadal, Stewart and Novella actually liked. And Like is the word I used, which is totally subjective.

Things changed a bit when Shade stated that people would be better off not reading at all than reading something like The Da Vinci Code.

Yo, why are you grouping me with the naysayers? I said right out in the very beginning of this thread that I loved Jaws and The Hunt for Red October, two of the bestselling blockbusters of the past several decades.