Slightly OT, but I’m reading something predictable now – The Rift by Walter Jon Williams. Not pap though. It’s better than it needed to be. The characters are stock but not cardboard stock, the author did his research, and the dialogue is realistic.
But it’s a simple, easy read, and might have been written to fit into the best seller genre, sub-genre apocalyptic.
I guess my point is that books written to a formula have different levels of quality. The Left Behind books are at one end of the scale, The Rift is on the other.
I don’t mind formula books, even predictable ones, as long as the writing is competent. I just wouldn’t want to read them all the time.
Actually, if the average American only buys one book per year, then it’s possible that most of the book buying is done by the small number of people who buy more than one book a year. I don’t think the Ludlums, Left Behinders, Rice, King, et al. are making it on one book a year people.
I’m going to be the fly in the ointment and say that the excerpt was a perfectly good piece of writing: it may tell us nothing about the character, but just by itemising her day’s itinerary it shows a great deal about her. Admit it, by the end of those paragraphs you have an excellent mental picture of the character - who she is, what she does, what she cares about, even what she looks like - and yet the author has done it all by a glimpse of her thought processes. Nowhere, by the way, does it indicate that we’re meant to like her or sympathise with her: no authorial omniscience here. It’s not Elmore Leonard, sure, but the technique isn’t a million miles away.
I have to give the crown to LaHaye Jenkins, two authors who, in this millenium, are apparently unaware that the phrase “Things are going haywire” is no longer part of common, everyday speech. Of course, I’m not considering Terry Goodkind to be a contender for this award, because though he may be a bestseller, he’s not an author. Authorship requires the creation of material, not merely photocopying from the work of a real author.
Christine Feehan - She has a whole series of buttheyreallyaren’tvampire books. Plah!! Enough story line to fill a comic stip, used to glue together badly written “romance/sex” scenes. The woman doesn’t even have a large enough vocabulary to write a good sexy scene.
There is actually something similar to Soundscan now - Bookscan. It’s not perfect but I guess it is slightly better than the old method. Here is a recent Slate Magazine article that tells more about Bookscan that you might be interested in reading.
I once read a Danielle Steel novel. (At the time, I was 19 and babysitting a newborn cousin, and spent a lot of time on the couch with a sleeping infant on my chest, and it was the only book I could reach. It was there because my aunt (who would never have had it in the house voluntarily) had had the book given to her by a relative who told her she couldn’t just reject an author without ever reading her.)
So anyway. It was so, so, so bad! The writing was painful. Her favorite word was ‘incredibly.’ Every so often, she would throw in a long word and use it three time in two pages, evidently having looked it up in a thesaurus so she would seem smarter. The word would then disappear, never to be seen again. And I couldn’t believe how shallow it was, either.
I don’t care for any of the other authors listed here, but all of them look good compared to Danielle Steel. And, amazingly, Joan Collins is supposed to be worse!
I’ve only read Interview with the Vampire, but AIUI Rice is in a class all of her own just for that toys-out-of-the-pram incident where she said anyone who didn’t think some book or other of hers was worth the money could mail it straight to her for a refund…
Ted Bell. Oh my fucking gawd is this shit awful. Run screaming if you see his name. Assasin. Bleech. It’s worse than a mindless 23 hour flight entertainment piece of dreck. Arghhhh. I’ll fucking kick his ass if he ever is in the same physical space for torturing me on a transpacific flight.
Danielle Steel is who I came in to suggest. I agree wholeheartedly with Clockwork and Candy re: King, Koontz & Brown, tho I also agree that they are Steinbeck (at least King is, maybe) compared to Danielle. Who keeps publishing her books and WHY?
The only thing I can say in defense of King is that his very early stuff was at least comparatively refreshing for the time, and thus novel enough to keep my interest for a while. Do I still fill myself full of Koontz’ and King’s generic-brand, same-old-same-old scribblings occasionally? Absolutely. But completely without serious intent!
Though I’ll never read another Danielle Steel, no how, no way!
I came in to say Danielle Steele as well. I read one of her books and it was so sloppily written I didn’t even connect it with a made-for-TV movie of it until weeks later. (Yes, the one with John Ritter and Polly Walker.)
I have to respectfully disagree with the esteemed Mr. Keller though. I like an escapist romance novel as much as and probably more than the next person, and it doesn’t have to be good literature. However, it does have to have basic coherence and her book didn’t (I refuse to try another to try to figure out the appeal). So I am left confounded as to why she keeps getting paid for this.
Stepohen king: all of his stuff reads like it was computer-generated. just change the names a little, and a different evil, and you have a new King novel. This was OK for “CUJO”, but its wearing thin now.
Louis L’Amour: dead now, but cranked out hundreds of western novels. They are incredibly childish-most seem to be written at a 8th-grade level of english.
John gresham; incredibly boring plots, same theme-"honest’ lawyer joins crooked law firm-defeats crooks.
I’ve been going through a lot of audio books in the last two years, ever since I took a new job with a 40 minute commute. So, I get through 80 minutes of book a day. In that time, I’ve listened to some quite good books, and some quite bad ones.
The worst one I’ve encountered recently is Terry Brooks. Yikes. Just yikes. I cannot fathom how the books keep coming. I made it through the first two Shannara books, thinking it would get better. By the start of the third, it was clear that it wouldn’t.
I can’t find a cite for you, now. My Google-fu is bad today. I may be wrong with that figure, but I don’t think that the implication is mistaken: The majority of the book market is being supported by people who don’t buy that many books individually.
I see that several people have lumped King and Koontz together in their “bad writers” list. I’ve read a lot of both and to me there is no comparison. I get a kick out of Koontz but I’m under no illusion that he is a good writer. Oh, his stories are okay but it’s all just fluff.
King, though, when he is on, can write. He has written some crap, but IMO he is not a crappy writer. I do think he is much better at characters than plotting. I guess it depends on what you are looking for. He even wrote a book “On Writing” that seemed spot on to me.
Anyway, my contribution is Clive Barker. I read 4-5 of his novels and he seemed incoherent most of the time. Like “making it up as you go.” Didn’t care about the characters much, could not get into his fantasy worlds. I kept reading thinking he would get better with the next book. He didn’t.
