Indeed. I found Grisham to be a decent airplane book, and Rowling is witty enough for a short book. When they started getting long, I gave up on them. They are both one-note authors. Grisham is always about the cleverness of his protagonists. Rowling is always about her protagonists being "special" in some way. Both highly appealing tropes, of course. But not a lot of meat there.
And this is the problem with modern literature. It is all about the tropes. It is deliberately thin in these ways. Literary fiction is actually thin in its own way as well -- lush prose but relying on grimness and unhappiness to create limited drama. It's hollow. We need serious popular fiction.
I mean, I think JK Rowling is great as a children’s author. I loved the books when I was younger and I loved the movies as an adult. The stories are insanely magical and in worldbuilding she could compete with Tolkien. And I obviously a lot of people love Grisham, even if that is not really my thing.
To me both are lacking that sentence-level beauty and that philosophical complexity that I love in a book, and which historically older books have. BUT- that is only what I am looking for in a book. Clearly there are millions who disagree with me and who love these novels as they are. Which is why I wonder if it’s not that writing has lost some depth, but that I have not gotten with the times. I am being nostalgic for the past and that is making me lack appreciation for the works of the present.
I’m reminded of the movie Midnight in Paris, in which each generation idolizes the one that came before them! And doesn’t appreciate their own time!
With childhood books I think a lot of it is what you read first. Those books which first awakened wonder have a special place in your heart and imagination that later works cannot supplant. For me, Rowling, clever and funny as she is, cannot hold a candle to The Wierdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, Elidor, The Wind in the Willows, Puck of Pook's Hill, Swallows and Amazons, or, of course, the Narnia books. But those were all book I read in childhood, and I was 40 the year the first Harry Potter book was published.
Part of the problem of comparing the past and the present is that there is so much more of the past and we only tend to see the tops of the hills, not the long valleys between them. Culture is clumpy. It waxes and wanes. I don't think we have to beat ourselves up for supposing that we are currently in a valley, that our culture had waned for several decades now, or that its obsession with trauma and misery, which you have noted, is a symptom of its waning.
Our task is to make something better, or at very least something more cheerful, in hopes that we made some contribution, however small, to its waxing again. Let us gather whatever pebbles we can to start building up the next high hill.
Because I don’t like Rowling and Grisham. I haven’t found much modern fiction I’ve read, to be honest, and that’s the trouble!
Indeed. I found Grisham to be a decent airplane book, and Rowling is witty enough for a short book. When they started getting long, I gave up on them. They are both one-note authors. Grisham is always about the cleverness of his protagonists. Rowling is always about her protagonists being "special" in some way. Both highly appealing tropes, of course. But not a lot of meat there.
And this is the problem with modern literature. It is all about the tropes. It is deliberately thin in these ways. Literary fiction is actually thin in its own way as well -- lush prose but relying on grimness and unhappiness to create limited drama. It's hollow. We need serious popular fiction.
I mean, I think JK Rowling is great as a children’s author. I loved the books when I was younger and I loved the movies as an adult. The stories are insanely magical and in worldbuilding she could compete with Tolkien. And I obviously a lot of people love Grisham, even if that is not really my thing.
To me both are lacking that sentence-level beauty and that philosophical complexity that I love in a book, and which historically older books have. BUT- that is only what I am looking for in a book. Clearly there are millions who disagree with me and who love these novels as they are. Which is why I wonder if it’s not that writing has lost some depth, but that I have not gotten with the times. I am being nostalgic for the past and that is making me lack appreciation for the works of the present.
I’m reminded of the movie Midnight in Paris, in which each generation idolizes the one that came before them! And doesn’t appreciate their own time!
With childhood books I think a lot of it is what you read first. Those books which first awakened wonder have a special place in your heart and imagination that later works cannot supplant. For me, Rowling, clever and funny as she is, cannot hold a candle to The Wierdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath, Elidor, The Wind in the Willows, Puck of Pook's Hill, Swallows and Amazons, or, of course, the Narnia books. But those were all book I read in childhood, and I was 40 the year the first Harry Potter book was published.
Part of the problem of comparing the past and the present is that there is so much more of the past and we only tend to see the tops of the hills, not the long valleys between them. Culture is clumpy. It waxes and wanes. I don't think we have to beat ourselves up for supposing that we are currently in a valley, that our culture had waned for several decades now, or that its obsession with trauma and misery, which you have noted, is a symptom of its waning.
Our task is to make something better, or at very least something more cheerful, in hopes that we made some contribution, however small, to its waxing again. Let us gather whatever pebbles we can to start building up the next high hill.