In general, there is a pretty strong correlation between a novel’s sales figures and its real literary quality.
But…not always.
I’m curious what people might suggest as the worst best-seller that comes to mind.
The best I can do is “Clan of the Cave Bear,” which…wasn’t really that bad. It had some severe problems, but it was an “okay” page-turner.
The Da Vinci Code?
Valley of the Dolls?
Fifty Shades of Gray?
The Bridges of Madison County - Read it, then tossed it into a wood burning stove.
50 shades of grey, hands down worst book I’ve ever read.
Clan of the cave bear is, as you say, not great, The DaVinci Code is standard suspense fiction supported by faux “controversy”, but 50 shades is simply poorly written through and through.
I challenge anyone who suggest other best sellers to actually read 50 shades and not change their mind.
The Clansman helped bring back the KKK. That seems pretty bad.
I liked Clan of the Cave Bear. I think a lot of its bad reputation comes from the sequels, which devolved almost immediately into a mix of trashy romance and Tom Swift novels.
The Da Vinci Code was a fun, cheesy thriller. I think a lot of its bad reputation comes from the eye-rolling attempts in the media to base some sort of philosophical discussion around it.
I haven’t read 50 Shades except for a few excerpts my gf read to make fun of, but its seems like its main point is to sexually titillate people. And judging by the people that bought it, they were indeed titillated. So I have trouble calling it “bad”, since it set out what it meant to do, even if its not necessarily what a lot of people are interested in in a novel.
Ding…ding…ding…
My vote.
Edited to add: I haven’t experienced the other novels mentioned. Which may be a good thing.
Highly recommended by Oprah, of course. :rolleyes:
I didn’t read the book, but saw the movie. It’s the only Meryl Streep role I couldn’t stand.
Battlefield Earth, hands down.
It’s L. Ron Hubbard, decades after his peak writing ability, churning out latter-day Space Opera infused with his philosophy*, and without any editor gutsy enough to ride herd on him. This allowed the book to balloon to an absurd length with unchecked style** Finally, it’s pretty much taken as a given is that the only reason the book got on the bestseller list in the first place is because Hubbard deployed his minions as a Tactical Buying Squad, making sure enough copies were bought in bookstores that counted so that it’d get on the list.***
*The book doesn’t explicitly push Hubbard’s Dianetics or Scientology, amazingly. But it still shows Hubbard’s thinking and attitudes. It couldn’t help but do so.
**Bridge Publications was owned by the Church and by Hubbard. The editor was his employee and, most likely, a member of the CoS. He’s going to be awfully intimidated about criticizing the word of his boss and his religious leader.
***Mad magazine cynically suggested that unscrupulous publishers might get their books on the bestseller list by sending out people specifically to buy lots of copies of the books. This is the only case where I’ve heard people saying that they thought anyone actually did it.
Of the ones I’ve read, easily The DaVinci Code.
Waitaminute…didn’t this give us the classic John Travolta opus?
How dareya sir…
Daggers at dawn…
Oh, wait; I’m not in a LRH novel.
Carry on.
Cite?
Quality and popularity are independent variables. You can be popular and good, popular and bad, unpopular and good, and unpopular and bad. And most best sellers don’t really stand the test of time. Look at this list, for instance.
RC’s beaten me to it, but… seriously? No.
I get the gist of what I think you might be trying to say - that a book has to be pretty good on some level to sell a lot of copies, especially over time and es-especially through more than one era. But no, a lot of very fine books remain micro-sellers and a lot of abysmal crap can’t find enough trucks to get copies to stores.
Big sales these days have a lot more to do with the publisher’s investment in an author, which is driven by the simple naked belief that this author/book/trilogy/series will sell like flapjacks. Authors and books aren’t anointed in this process because they’re the next Hemingway or Faulkner or even King; they are chosen through the most cynical possible process because they might be the next Rowling, Collins or shudder Patterson. Or Clancy/Crichton/Cussler if we’re lucky.
My biggest problem with The Da Vinci Code was that people seemed to be too stupid to realize it was a work of fiction. On top of that it didn’t take long to realize that Dan Brown was a trick pony; and that all of his stories are generically the same story.
This is going back a bit, but I can recall when everything Danielle Steele wrote made it to the best seller list. Dreadful lowest-common-denominator writing.
I found it boring and unreadable. It just wasn’t something i had any interest in, and the plot was (laughable) absurd.
Tom Clancy novels-after “Hunt For Red October” (which was very good), all of his stuff became similar-it was like a computer just scrambled a few words around.
The John Travolta opus was fully up to the quality of the novel.
Although it did give us a scene with Kelly Preston (Travolta’s wife) with a long CGI tongue and some side-splittingly bad dialogue. We can always thank it for that.
No, its bad reputation comes from the fact that it’s mind-numbingly bad. The writing is horrible, worse than some really shitty self-published novels I’ve read free on my Kindle. The dialogue is laughably bad, the plot is ridiculous and what are presented in the novel as facts are ludicrous. I can’t think of a single positive thing to say about the book other than I got it as a free download on special from Amazon.
Twilight is the only example I’ve had any experience with. That was truly a godawful book.
Sigh. Don’t kids today ever read the classics anymore?
I don’t read many books I expect to dislike, so I have not read many of the books listed here. However, I read Twilight when it was emerging as a popular book, not knowing if it was any good or not. I am an English teacher and thought perhaps we had something big here.
Wow, it really was bad. Very, very bad.
I did finish it and I kind of liked the last little confrontation between the villains and the main characters, but it was badly written and way overlong. I also assumed he would “vampify” her at the end of the 1st book, but apparently that doesn’t even occur until much, much later in the books.
Anyway, it’s the worst popular book I’ve read.