Salon: Why we love bad writing.
“Forget peace on earth — there won’t even be peace among the bookshelves after the salvo against popular fiction launched in the pages of the Guardian newspaper this week by the British novelist Edward Docx. Docx, dismayed to find himself on a train full of passengers with their noses stuck in Stieg Larsson thrillers, announced ‘we need urgently to remind ourselves of — for want of better terminology — the difference between literary and genre fiction.’” I haven’t read Larsson’s works at all, but Dan Brown’s ... I could barely make it through “Da Vinci Code.” If I’d turned that in to my high school english teacher, I would have been reprimanded.
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And then Hollywood dumbed down the movie even more - just painful; glowing anagrams fer gawds sake.
My biggest challenge with TDC was I had already read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.
Now I have read more than my fair share of genre fiction, but I think the question comes down to Do you want to read books smarter than you are
Dashiell Hammett was undeniably smarter than I, Asimov too.
Now Dan Brown is clearly smarter than I am since he has his own section of every bookstore and has no doubt about where his rent is going to come from. But the books he brings me are dumber than I am.