Books that sell a lot but still have critical credibility

Oh yeah, "The Corrections."

I didn't feel anything of the sort reading those books, but then I get everything from the library so am much less aware of what actually is a bestseller, 'breakthrough' or 'crossover' or whatever.

Anne Tyler

bernard schlink, 'the reader'?

Just going by the thread title there are lots of examples. Elmore Leonard fits the bill. Would the U.K. equivalent of Anne Tyler be Joanna Trollope?

Yeah, but it's a crappy thread title and doesn't really represent what I'm talking about. I was going to change it before I posted but forgot.

Hmm. This seems a very rockist attitude to me! Why should sales and quality be expected to be in any kind of inverse relationship? Why the 'but', in other words? I don't mean to get at you here, Nick - it's very easy to start thinking like this, and I do it myself, but I think it is to be resisted.

I noticed that Underworld by Don DeLillo, which I am currently, reading has 'International Bestseller!' on the cover. It did strike me as a little odd to push that at the expense of highlighting that it may be the most critically adored book - well, ever, maybe.

Another writer I absolutely love who sells very well, but still gets some excellent reviews: Larry McMurtry.

Anne Tyler's GOOD. So is Amy Tan! I also read all of John Sandford's "Prey" books, and all of Tony Hillerman's and Sue Grafton's. All of these sell well, and are just FUN to read. Right now I am reading The DaVinci Code. At the library where I work, that, and Angels and Demons still have hundreds of holds placed on them.

PS The Lovely Bones was a very good mystery book, with an interesting point-of-view

No, I agree, it is a totally rockist attitude. And I guess that's what I'm asking, is whether this passes over to the literary world in general too, or if it's just latent indie guilt that I'm bringing over with me. I mean, I enjoyed Kavalier & Clay and Middlesex, and liked some of The Corrections, and I've got Motherless Brooklyn lined up to read next. But I feel shame reading them on the El or in a cafe or whatever because it's the same thing everyone is reading. I feel bad about buying them because I should be buying Beckett or something instead. It's total rockism and it's insane!

That is insane, St.Nick. Read what you want to read. Although I do understand the impulse. I used to never play the grateful dead too loud in my apartment years ago, because I didn't want people to think I was a deadhead. Hah! Now I don't care about any of that.

Well, in a way, it's the same impulse as feeling guilty after eating junk food instead of vegetables. I should be reading healthy things that challenge me instead of delicious greasy easy-to-read novels.

Yes but of course it's not quite as simple as a food correlation, because most "healthy foods" are universal -- pretty much everyone could use to eat spinach, right? --, but the book that will be "healthy" for you are the ones that will get you closer to whatever the ideal you working towards is, right? So someone might not be "ready" for Beckett (I don't mean "you" in particular) or might not "need" Beckett at this point in thier life, but there are still things to be gained from, you know, Sedaris (gambits for telling an entertaining story, say) or whoever that will make your life "better" or "healthier".

In theory.

I never know where I will find inspiration. So I never discount anything. Or I try not to, anyway.

Motherless Brooklyn was pretty good! But was it really THAT popular? I gave it to my dad to read. He thought it was a little weird. He likes Elmore Leonard and Lisa Scottoline and James Lee Burke.

Or at least I didn't think it was a popular as the other ones you listed. the corrections, etc.

I think the most recent pop/lit book i read was Little Children by Tom Perrotta. He wrote Election.

James Lee Burke is a better writer than about 95% of those who get big play from the literary sections.

Nick, I'm not saying there are better best-selling writers than Beckett, but McMurtry, Burke, Chabon, Tyler and DeLillo, to cite a few mentioned here, are very far from some equivalent of greasy junk food.

My dad turned me on to Richard Russo. He's a fine (and popular) writer. Although I didn't care for Empire Falls that much. (Loved The Risk Pool and Nobody's Fool and his short story collection though.)

But yeah, what Martin said, none of those people are junk food. I'm trying to think of some junk food. Dean Koontz?

was little children any good, scott? i'd picked it up in a book store and liked the first page or two but never got around to buying it. my guilty reads are: scott turow, elmore leonard, ed mcbain, harry kemelman (the rabbi small mysteries), rex stout... i was really hoping that da vinci code would become another, but i hated it! i was so disappointed in the writing, the characterization, even the plotting seemed facile (i imagine a notecard with the words "end each chapter with a cliffhanger" above dan brown's desk). i, like st. nick, am frequently tormented by the thought that i'm not reading the right things, but over the years i've found that "rightness" is almost entirely circumstantial. helen dewitt's last samurai, which i now think is as brilliant a novel as i've read in the past few years, was, the first time i picked it up, utterly incomprehensible to me. and anna karenina, once unreadably dull, became one summer a delight.

The other problem I see with the junk-food metaphor is... reading and enjoying something isn't ever going to harm you, is it, even if it doesn't do you much good? Much less give you explosive mental diarrhea... I guess if you read fifty self-help books in a row, but I can't see ENJOYING that...

Little Children was entertaining. It did feel like it was written with one eye toward a future movie deal though. His characters seemed like they were "cast" in a weird way. I got the same feeling from Russo's Empire Falls actually! I kept trying to guess who they were going to get to play the different parts in a movie version. (we had a thread about this at one time. About books that read like movies/scripts. I probably said some of the same things on there.) I would recommend it though.

Ann, the theory is that you need to "exercise" your mind like you would a muscle, and if you read books that require minimal "exercise" you won't be able to read steep hills of books like, I don't know, "Being Or Nothingness". Do you find that isn't true? You can jump from a month of true crime books to Gertrude Stein, or what-have-you?

There may be sense in that Chris, but I think we shouldn't confuse bestselling/critical praise with mentally undemanding/challenging. There are plenty of praised literary novels that are not at all intellectually demanding, and there are bestsellers that do place demands on the reader. We seem to be assuming that there is a clear inverse relationship between a book's mental demands and its sales, and that obviously isn't the case.

This is where I put in my plug for Janwillem van de Wetering's Amsterdam Cop series of novels and short stories. Laugh out loud funny, philosophical and entertaining as hell. His zen cops rule.

Wait, Martin, no -- we brought up "junk food" writing as something separate from "selling a lot" writing. And that was brought up in order to disbunk NA's instincts towards conflating the ideas of "best-selling" and "being good". So I don't think that anyone is assuming that.

And I was making a distinction between "junk food" and "challenging", not bringing "critical praise" into it at all (although obv that's where some senses of "junk" or "challenge" come from).

That said, Nick, what about Peanuts? Best-selling, critically beloved... Do you feel rockist towards Snoopy?

Fair point - I was assuming your assumption, since it is part of the thread which makes that sales/credibility distinction.

My main problem was more with Nick's "greasy, easy to read" line, where he does make "easy to read" into some flaw, which I don't at all accept.

Hurrah for lonewolf. By the way, Martin Skidmore sounds like a character right out of a Dickins novel! The hero, of course.

But there are two ways something can be "easy to read" -- there is the sense in which something is written clearly, and there is the sense in which something provides no challenges. Sedaris is "easy to read" and "unchallenging" to pretty much everyone who reads, I suspect; "Godot" is "easy to read" but for some people, at some point in their life, it can be very "challenging".

I hope it doesn't feel like I'm picking on you, Martin! ;-)

"This is where I put in my plug for Janwillem van de Wetering's Amsterdam Cop series of novels and short stories."
OH man oh man second that recommendation. Discovered these over the last year, just as I ran out of Patricia Highsmith novels to read. Wish my library would spring for the whole series.

No Chris, not at all - we're just debating. I don't think it's as simple as your distinction. There is trash that I find very hard to read (Isaac Asimov for instance), and great stuff that is easy to read, and things that don't have to be challenging but can be (Pullman's His Dark Materials has plenty of thematic complexity and richness, but can be joyfully read without seeing any of it). Of course I accept that there are things that offer no great demands or intellectual challenge to the reader, but I am resisting what seem to me generalisations; and also the idea that these are necessarily bad for you. They may not be good for you, but you don't have to read to better yourself, you can just do it for fun.

I'm totally nuts for Carl Hiaasen.
I was a big book snob, or my own perverse version of something like that, throughout my adolescent and early 20s, reading very, y'know, what I considered to be literary-type stuff, and then my dad slipped me a copy of Tourist Season one year around Christmas and I was kinda like, "okay whatever, maybe I'll flip through this book that looks like you might have bought it at an airport just so I don't hurt the old man's feelings." And then I adjusted my monocle.
But holy crap, I suddenly remembered that reading could be, y'know, F-U-N. And despite the fact that I would never give my dad the satisfaction, I think my whole life started turning around at that point as I realized that fun didn't mean the death of the brain.
I was very uptight and uber-naive and not having much success with the birds, as they say.
So Hiaasen led to Elmore Leonard, led to some Lehane, Walter Mosley (oh yeah!), James Crumley (The Last Country, woo hoo), Pelecanos, Brad Smith (just finished his All Hat, highly recommend it).
But it also opened up the way I read not-quite-so-popular fiction, like Kavalier and Clay or Carter Beats the Devil or Barney's Version or whatever.

I think I'm fully in line with what Santa was saying--there are certain books I'm unlikely to read in public, or am uncomfortable about, and part of the reason is that they're the ones likely to inspire conversation (or assumptions of insight) in well-meaning but unwelcome strangers. While traveling I read Kavalier and Clay--which BTW I found to be one of the more *limited* pieces of literature I'd read in a while, historically interesting but everything all wrapped up in a tidy little package, ribbon-bowed, demure, eminently defensible, simplistically psychologistic, overpadded, TV-drama-damaged, you name it--and couldn't escape people telling me how good they thought it was, proving their right of entry into whatever "club" I was apparently advertising my own participation in.
A friend of mine--neurotically, I'd always thought--has always had the habit of fashioning his own book jackets for the books he's reading, and it never made more sense to me than then.

On another note, I just finished one of the Updike Rabbit books (Is Rich), and all these frustrated 50-year-old men kept giving me looks like I was holding their lives in my hands. I wasn't. As it turned out, I was holding a mediocre book that nonetheless was written by a hell of a craftsman who'd already squandered everything vital about himself a decade previous.

I know this all likely sounds snobby as fuck, and probably is, but whether or not it's justified, I can't feel good about carting around a Chabon book any more than I can feel good wearing somebody else's pleated khakis and a blousy checked button-down. I feel too implicated. Although, no, I wouldn't feel that way about, say, DeLillo, any more than I would about listening to the Rolling fucking Stones, because anything I think has something genuine going on in it, I'll fully be willing to identify with. Sebald, for example, who's popular as fuck to whatever extent literary novels are popular.

It's just when you're reading that mediocre book, the Lethems of the world, the Eggers' and the Carol Oates' and the rest, the ones you'd heard about and decided to take on as a form of personal cultural education, that you feel drawn into that middle American morass you'd heard so much about. And then even after you've learned your lesson, even after Wonderboys left you watery from all the facile psychologisms, after you couldn't believe you found yourself plowing through anything as sentimental/nostalgic/singleminded as the Cider House Rules, you still end up buying a Chabon novel in the airport. And then you feel even worse about it when you look up and realize that across the compartment in the El someone has just turned this yeasty wheat into part of your life.

I would so much rather be reading pure, pure enjoyable treacle--Harry Potter or whatever, old children's books, picture books, pornography--than the current crop of middlebrow. Although at that point I generally put the book down and turn on the television, which is better at that sort of thing.

M.

I think Anna Karenina's continued presence on the bestseller list should prove something. It's because of Oprah, of course, but I think it still shows that large numbers of people are willing to tackle at least a somewhat challenging read, and that there should be no shame in reading books that large numbers of other people also enjoy.

And sometimes I wonder if people (myself included) equate books with music too often. Because of the amount of time it takes to read a book versus listen to an album, I think we're inherently less risky in our book choices than our music ones. But I don't necessarily think that's such a bad thing.

Bah. Part of buying an album is that you're going to relisten to it -- sometimes you might have to relisten to it many times before you can get much out of it. Listening to an album twice and barely having an opinion about it = reading the first 30 pages of a book, getting distracted, etc.

and you can't read a book while you drive. or you shouldn't.

Chris, that's kind of what I mean - when I buy an album, I know that I can listen to it as many times as I want...with a book (unless I really love it), I'll probably read it only once. That's why I think it's difficult to compare the two, as Nick's question did originally.

But I don't think listening to an album twice = reading the first 30 pages of a book. Maybe: Reading the first 30 pages of a 300-page book = listening to the first track on a 10-track album? Reading the first 30 pages of a book = listening to the first verse of the first track on an album?

How many times do you need to read a book before you can say something intelligent about it? How many times do you need to listen to an album before you can say something intelligent about it? I'd argue that you can say something after two listens, or after 30 pages, but you can't generally say anything all that interesting until you've listened to the album a bunch more times (I'm going to go with my gut and say 20 is the sweet spot). But you can say something intelligent about a book after one read (although you'll do much better after 2).

Obv different genres work differently.

Why is "The Lovely Bones" a mystery novel?

The narrator (the dead girl) tells us who raped and murdered her right out of the gate.

And maybe it would be a mystery if her father goes on this forever search to find the killer and then get revenge, but he doesn't.

And for that matter, when the dead girl takes over the other girls body and is getting all sweaty with the boyfriend... why wouldn't she say, "tell my family that my bones are in the refrigerator in the landfill next door!"

mystery vs. crime