@Colleen--Love this post!

Let's definitely chat MFAs on here sometime--there is much to debate, and I am so curious to see what other Community members think about the growing phenomenon about going to grad school for creative writing.

As for me, I liked The Corrections okay, but I read it in college where navel-gazing was absolutely a way of life.

One book I REALLY did not like was Twilight. (Though I absolutely ADORE the movies!)

And while I love a good dystopia, I didn't have the patience (or the stomach) for The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

I've never read either of the dual bugaboos of Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey. Partly that's due to me not being interested in reading romance, but it's mostly because I heard about them first due to their more negative press.

For me, the two books I hate are Watch on the Rhine and The Last Centurion. Neither of them's exactly mainstream, but they're about the only books I've ever hate-read. While the first I dislike due to some spectacularly tone-deaf plotting, The Last Centurion's simply one of the worst books I've ever read period. 

Divergent by Veronica Roth. It isn't even anywhere near a functional dystopia and the main character is horrible.

 Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick. I'll just leave my review link because I just can't repeat it here. Too painful.

Just about anything by Cassandra Clare. This review actually started getting my blog hits, and it's apparently one of the funniest things I have ever written. I've actually attracted a fan base on Goodreads who are looking forward to my next Infernal Devices review. It's like 6 people, but it's something.

My husband actually forbids me from reading Twilight because he doesn't want to hear me rant and rave about it.

Colleen, I feel your pain. I haven't read Franzen's latest novel but the writing in his essay collection, How to be Alone, sparkles with brilliance and wit. Yet somehow I just can't manage to work up enough enthusiasm to tackle that novel yet . . .   

For myself, I groan over one kind of "literary fiction" novel in particular. Does this plot sound familiar?

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Book-jacket Copy:

"Professor X. (invariably an upscale Caucasian of Christian or Jewish religious background) has been teaching at Ivy League U. for lo these many decades now. Caught up in a day-to-day grind of dull faculty meetings, on-again, off-again book writing and intermittent combats/bad sex with his loveless wife, all looks most dark and existential for our Mercedes driver/top-shelf liquor drinker. 

But when bright-eyed, vivacious Betty Sparks sashays into his classroom one ominously-overcast day quoting the epigrams of Martial whilst fingering herself and moaning, Professor X. dares to ask, 'Can I learn to live again? Is this bright young thing my muse, come to save me from a lifetime of meaningless comfort, idle indulgence and boring routine? Perhaps--first through reciprocal oral sex, later in acts of tasteful and poetic intercourse--I will learn anew to laugh, and live, and fuck. Mostly fuck. But certainly with intellectually-stimulating and spiritually-enlightening interludes interwoven betwixt tricksy-trysts.' 

The Professor's life is upended, everything he's ever believed in challenged and sifted as he experiences a powerful, satyr-like awakening. 

At the end of the day only one thing is certain: Professor X. is a groaning, narcissistic malcontent. He hasn't the slightest clue how people who work in the retail, security or food-service industries struggle to survive. Nor does he care. No matter! His own personal drama builds to an inevitable climax: Will he be able to commit that final verse of Boccaccio's to memory, or might his over-strained heart explode in his chest from one-too-many acts of sexual indulgence? Buy the book and find out! Or not. We don't need you. Genre readers like yourself are more attracted to books with monsters, swordsmen or starships on their covers. So go on, then! Buy some of that trash. We've got--sniff!--important favorable reviews in big literary magazines from high-brow critics who eat this stuff up with a spoon." 

END Jacket Copy

--edited by Carl E Reed on 8/7/2013, 12:33 PM--

I do believe that Carl has hit the nail on the head.

When it comes to genre fiction, there is always the "strong" young woman, named Mary Sue, who is considered the center of the universe because she has a super-magical-deus machina power despite being an inconsiderate, spoiled, and stupid little brat. (See Speshul Snowflake.) She is always caught between the sweetheart, almost always the best friend, and the bad boy, who is always a self absorbed jackass who wouldn't know nice if threw him through a brick wall. One or both of them is usually some kind of supernatural creature of the blood sucking/angelic/furry persuasion because being human is apparently too normal and not interesting at all. Oh, and they die too easy. You can't pit a human versus some paranormal monster and expect them to live. It just doesn't happen.

(I now point the reader to Grimm's ever increasing quota of involved, entirely human characters. Two so far, maybe a third in the future. Oh, can't forget the top-tier bad dudes. They're human too. It helps that the mythos allows firearms that are entirely normal to do damage, minus the poison bullet elephant/ogre gun. Hemingway would be proud. And then there is Seanan McGuire's Incryptid books. I can't wait for the next one.)

I would like to use this space to recommend to Book Country members a new book titled JEFFERSON READ, IKE WATCHED and OBAMA TWEETED, two hundred years of popular culture in the White House, dwelling particularly on Jefferson and the founding fathers, a most literate group whose love of books was central to their greatness and crucial to all the magnificent documents that became the foundation of America.

Quoting from the book, "Washington had a nine-hundred-book library, including biographies and classics from ancient Greece and Rome. The Founders viewed reading not merely as entertainment but as a path to wisdom, virtue and toward a just society. Jefferson, who owned over four thousand books, famously said, "I cannot live without books."

I also, as many of you, cannot live without books. Without the vast and profound readership extant among the Founders, America as we know it would never have happened. The books they knew and loved, as with the books we know and love, are undergoing a massive sea change. Most likely, printed paper books will become extinct. To future generations living exclusively in the Cybernetic Age, will electronic books be as valuable to them as the printed book was to our Founders?\Is the dumbing down of America, with all the various contentious elements shredding the very seams of gentility, the result of not only far less reading but the overwhelming reading of popular books and inconsequential tomes not long remembered? Will reading be the same with electronic books? Will some future Jefferson aspirant declare, "I cannot live without my iPad?"