I enjoyed this article.
I am certainly glad that when I hate a book, I can stop reading it. I would not much want a job that required me to actually finish reading a book I hated. And Lev Grossman’s feelings about this book — that the author is being artificially made into a phenomenon even though his books are actually not good — well, I would REALLY hate feeling like I was part of the machinery that made that happen.
My favorite bit:
“I’m telling you, this book: it’s like the sentences are dead tennis balls, no air in them, no fuzz on them, coming at me across the net with no spin on them at all. No verbal energy, no humor, barely even the occasional stab at a mot juste. It’s so. Very. Earnest.”
Isn’t that a great description of a book you would never, ever, ever want to read?
Though Grossman is certainly careful to note that statistically, somebody is certain to love this book.
As an added and quite appalling tidbit — there are links in this article to a different article on a completely different phenomenon I never even imagined. Did you know people are re-writing classics like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice, sexing them up, turning them into erotica? Like, adding a bondage / s & m component to Jane Eyre?
Ooookay. I don’t think I’m particularly prudish, but that’s just . . . that’s just . . . well, that’s just really disturbing. Comments?
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I saw a similar article about the rewriting of classics of English lit as erotic last week (in the WSJ, most likely). eeewwwwww! And yuck.
The ‘after Pride & Prejudice’ books which include some sex scenes were bad enough, but at least they weren’t cannibalizing the actual work.
Also, some books have a completeness or integrity to them that doesn’t allow for additions (or sometimes, IMO, fanfic, either) – many of the targeted classics are in that class. So this isn’t just yucky, it’s breaking the book.