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Originally Posted by MrsJoseph
Very true and very important! I think - as we all sit in judgment of other's reading habits and choices - we tend to forget that this is a community of hardcore readers.  Most of the population simply doesn't read - at all. I used to deal with this in despair almost daily at my last job.
Reading Austen and Shakespeare is great - but she is not on everyone's educational level. So, what we have basically been discussing is intelligence. The more intelligent you are, the more appreciation you have for language as a written art.
I have a love/hate relationship with Faulkner (I get so SICK of his run-on sentences!) but I never look down on people who don't want to wrestle with his language. Dan Brown might be reviled as a writer on this forum, but he's a great story-teller and there are thousands for whom "The Da Vinci Code" was the first full-length novel that they completed.
Harry Potter is a good children's book series. Is it on par with A Wrinkle in Time/The Time Quartet? Of course not! It didn’t win a Newberry Award, either. The Harry Potter series was made to appeal to a wide audience in a time when most people don’t read - which meant that the JKR had to dummy down her language. Anyone who has had to write copy for local newspapers/news shows (does not include the NY Times) learned early that almost all information is disseminated on a 5th grade comprehension level.
--All this has made me want to go buy the Time Quartet. I wonder if I can find it DRM free anywhere… |
You might be right about this, but really, it makes me just about want to roll off a cliff. Writing for people who don't like to read is
almost as pointless as composing a symphony for the deaf. Hopefully civilization will collapse quickly and we won't have long to worry about it.