Speaking of which, just started reading Lolita... a book that so many people seem to really enjoy.
I'm not sure 'enjoy' is the right word. I found it unsettling. But captivating.
Dan Brown set out to write successful novels, and he created a formula.
I can't remember whether it was Dan Brown or John Grisham who said in an interview I once read that they took to writing novels as a business venture, in order to become rich. Might have been both. I don't hold it against them. You can't really argue with that kind of success.
Lolita is terrifyingly good and utterly disturbing, which is the point, especially when realise just how Nabokov has flipped your perspective somewhere really very disquieting.
The path to being a successful author these days is to churn out what are essentially movie treatments in the hope they'll get optioned (they mostly never get made, which I suppose, is fortunate). The most memorably bad one I read recently was something call
Brilliance and was anything but, definitely one of the worst things I've read. It's so bad you have to finish it just because it's a marathon of bad (according to my google-fu, it's part one of a saga, presumably about as much fun as a march to Moscow that ends in mid-winter). According to Amazon, it's worthy of a billion great reviews. Honestly, it's awful on any measure. Mind you, I put
The Martian in the same category, I don't get it, it's awful. It reads like it's written by a twelve-year-old.
I'm not actually bothered if people do enjoy this stuff, it's just the insistence that I must be interested. I get the HP lecture all the time (for the stupidest reason, I share a name with one of the lead characters, so yeah, just call me Reluctant Hermione). It's the same with football, as a regular traveller, it's was a safe bet that in any given taxi anywhere in the world, I'd get the Football Conversation. From Nairobi to Hanoi, they're waiting for me. I've tried bluffing it for diplomacy's sake, which is always a mistake since my knowledge of football ended with half-complete Panini album sometime around the kickoff of the 1980s. I never did get that bloody Sheffield Wednesday badge (this traumatic historical episode, alas, is never what they want to talk about). Even now, my father in any given conversation will bring up football and the fact he can't believe I've no interest in it. I honestly think those will be his last words to me.