I probably shouldn't mention the anti fanfic i wrote many years ago (harry pothead and the stoned philosopher) where the basic premise was that having been sent to boarding school harry has set himself up in the drug business using subs brought in by courier owls from his contacts outside... there is no magic, or wizards or anything else happening at hogwarts, these are all hallucinations brought on by the pcp spiked weed that Harry is dealing....
My understanding of the article was that everything she read was presented, polished by 'I'm a writer, y'know,' type bores, earnest in the extreme and irritating after the millionth mouthful. She wanted to read something fucked up, with the words in the wrong order and some [brackets] a couple of adverbs running juicy juicily running, an adverb anyway. She probably likes adjectives as well.
Pulitzer! How much dope can an owl carry? I saw one the other day that looked like it could have lifted me up...
a big owl could probably carry a decent stash - hedwig on the other hand would need to make multiple flights per day to satisfy the demand
I wonder if we could, as a group of reasonably similar human beings (ie. we all enjoy the written word in some form(s)) come up with a list of, say, five books that every one of us would agree was well-written and enjoyable. Like, not well-written in that "yeah, I intellectually appreciate the techniques being used" but in a real "this is great writing that I love" kind of way. I bet we couldn't do it. Does anyone want to suggest one book that everyone here, who has read it, would have enjoyed and would agree was really well-written? (I'll start off by saying Harry Potter bored me to tears, so don't bother going there...)
I agree, and not to get politically divisive, but... I think a lot of the time we're more comfortable being critical of the stupid things that tend to be loved by women than of the stupid things that tend to be loved by men. Tom Clancy novels, caring deeply about sports, The Fast and The Furious franchise, etc.... I don't think any of those things is an intellectually defensible thing to care about, but... whatever. People enjoy them. They're doing their jobs. And the stupid shit that skews more male gets criticized less than the stupid shit that skews more female, IMO.
@BayView I doubt anyone could, to quote an NLP expression, 'there is no reality, only perception'. For example, I'm a big fan of Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant, but I think it helps that I'm part-Irish and Landy has loaded that series with Irish humour (I laughed out loud when I was reading 'Playing with Fire' and Skulduggery talked about how the antagonist probably hasn't forgiven him for throwing dynamite at him) but the thing about any kind of humour out there is that not everyone agrees with it.
So why do we think "there's no reality, only perception" when it comes to identifying "good" writing, but feel free to deal in absolutes when identifying "bad" writing?
Harry Potter was for young people. I read it to my son in front of my wife's parents, all goodness in my eyes. But they corrected my pronunciation of 'Hermion' to 'Her-mi-on-ee.' They destroyed me.
@BayView what about Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie? (I've read neither - I'm just suggesting hopeful candidates that everyone might like lol) Who's "everyone" though - if you made those who must agree together a little more specific, there might be some hope
Well, everyone on this thread, at least. I've only read Hound of the Baskervilles as a Holmes book and that was a long time ago, but... it obviously didn't send me off to read more, so I guess I didn't enjoy it. And I'm not sure I've read any Agatha Christie, to be honest... has anyone else?
I used to enjoy both as a pre-teen and teen, but when I read them as an adult in a fit of nostalgia I was bored to death.
I read a lot of classic mysteries in my younger years - one of my favorite memories was sneaking into the adult section of the library to read Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazines like a fiend. I was also inspired to read Agatha Christie because I loved the movies based on them, like Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express. I was a weird kid.
Where's the thread that bashes Stephen King in all his incarnations? I assume if any of the haters from that thread stumble in here the first one is out. I haven't read The Thorn Birds... 1984 is a weird one - I think I enjoy the memory of it more than the book itself. I remember not being too caught up in the story when I was reading it, but there are so many good/prescient ideas in it that it's useful more as a sociological dictionary than as a novel, at least for me...
How about The Outsiders? No, not the classy Camus L'etranger, but the cheesy SE Hinton teen novel. I haven't read it in decades, so god knows how it would stand up to an adult reading, but as a sentimental favourite I'd stand by it. And maybe A Separate Peace, with similar disclaimers. It was a lot easier to absolutely LOVE books back when I was younger...
I feel it's easier to identify why bad writing is bad writing - the plot makes no sense, the sentences are hard to follow. The kind of stuff that the things people call rules are put in place to try and guard against. But when we're defining 'good' writing we tend to veer toward the things we enjoy which are, as you say, a lot more subjective. Just following the rules isn't enough, it's got to make us go 'wow', at least a bit. And that's going to be different for everyone. I'll throw Night Watch by Terry Pratchett into the ring. Though frankly that one feels like a cheat - if anyone doesn't like the Discworld style, what they're doing reading the twenty-ninth in the series is beyond me...
Let me ask you, what do you mean by 'bad' writing? The purpose of literature is to convey the meaning to its readership. I think it's fairly universal to say that if a book cannot do so it fails in this regard. However, a book that is not to our personal enjoyment is not necessarily a bad book. For example, I literally fell asleep trying to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Try as I might I couldn't find myself fond of the lack of connection I was seeing. On the flipside, I remember reading the first sentence of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, wherein it talked of the Dursleys being proud of being 'perfectly normal' and thinking, 'OK, what skeletons are you keeping in the closet Mr and Mrs Dursley?' and by the end of the first chapter I was hungry to know what happened next.
My love for The Thorn Birds may be colored by my memories of presenting a book report on it in high school. I went to a Catholic school and my English teacher was a nun. They called my mom and she told them that I borrowed the book from her and thus didn't see the problem. 1984 is one of the few books I think that really does stand up as a story as well as a warning bell years later, as does This Perfect Day. I did see that you recently started reading The Handmaid's Tale, which I haven't read since I was a Womens Studies minor in college. I think I may need to revisit that one soon.
