Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Well that depends on how you read this thread. I have already been found wanting in my understanding of people's opinions/statements, so I could be wrong ... but here goes.
There seem to be quite a number of explicit statements/opinions that popularity has nothing to do with a book being well written. What I was attempting to do was gently lead in to the idea that accessibility is at least one important factor in considering whether a book was well written. If we accept that, and you and I seem to, then as the next step I was going to ask was whether popularity was a reasonable measure of accessibility? (And if it is then popularity does have something to do with quality, even if you would not go so far as to allow that very popular books cannot be badly written.)
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No, I can't agree that accessibility can be a measure of the quality of a book's writing. Let's take as an example the original versions of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy" books. They are completely inaccessible to me, because I don't read Swedish. Is my lack of knowledge of Swedish really a factor by which one can judge the quality of the writing of the books? I don't personally think that it is. A book can be well written, but yet completely inaccessible to me if I don't speak the language in which it's written.