The worst books of 2009, the decade and all time

Quote :

I would say that quality (or usefulness) correlates with sales/popularity, though.

An incredibly pragmatic statement. Why does that make me think you were likely born somewhere between 1961 and 1981, of the generation we often dub as "X"?

Ann

alice wrote:

LC,

They don't need to be stupid or bitter. You said you didn't liike some movies.

You are neiither stupid nor bitter. What made you go to see these losers?

I think it was the advertising!

The advertising tapped into my desire to see a movie about that subject. No advertising could get me to see a movie, read a book or buy a product which I have no interest in or use for.

And the bloggers are categorically calling those books "the worst of the decade." Not ones they themselves disliked. Where do they get off doing that?

Ann -are Gen X'rs more pragmatic than Boomers? I'm not following.

LC wrote:

Ann -are Gen X'rs more pragmatic than Boomers? I'm not following.

According to William Strauss and Neil How, absolutely!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_%28book%29

Ann

Just my perception, LC; you talk a lot of nonsense.

Cattle. Oh, I know one"s of the bovine persuasion who think they are separate and apart from the herd. Yet, every night they lay down and listen to the words the herd say. It makes them feel part of the safety of the herd.

The next morning you will see those same cows out entering the Chip Derby in Wisconsin and wearing those gaudy orange ear-rings that have a number on them and doing the boogaloo.

hahah. I loved that cow chip competition, Carol. What a brave cow it must take to enter that competition!

What really takes the cow patty is that those chips are dried and ground and mixed and sold for 15.00 a bag. Talk about selling garbage.

That garbage is what vegetables and trees and, eventually...all of us live on. Garbage is in disguise.

Love,
Betty

What's so bad about Dan Brown's writing? Ask a professor:

http://niranjana.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/whats-so-bad-about-dan-browns-writing-anyway-heres-an-answer/

Or a reader:

"Brown is shockingly terrible, but what I really don't understand is how his
material got past the copy-editors at whatever publishing house he's signed to.

I've read a lot of his books and I must say I found the ideas were decent, everyone loves a conspiracy, but his use of language is very poor, but surely the editors involved could've spotted the howling mistakes he made over the years.

Then again, fair play to him, he's a rich man now and well done to him for making people part with their dosh something I haven't figured out how to do yet, but if Brown can do it then most of us have the intellect to do it too"

The mistakes are real howlers:

"From The Lost Symbol, chapter 52 (p. 209 in the first edition) - "Mal'akh hurried now into the lab and retrieved the Pyrex jug of Bunsen-burner fuel--a viscous, highly flammable, yet noncombustible oil." --> How can something be highly flammable and noncombustible???"

Viscous oil is another name for heavy oil:

http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/Display.cfm?Term=heavy%20oil

A Pyrex (glass) jug held Bunsen-burner fuel (methane gas)?

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_fuel_does_the_bunsen_burner_use

We've never lost, Alice. LC goes away when she loses. We stay here.

What point? Some random bloggers think Meyers and Brown write terrible books. If they're so terrible, why do they sell so many? Shelagh posited on the first page that if enough money is thrown at a product then it wil be a best seller. My position is that you can't force people to buy what they don't want, no matter how much money you throw at it. Not sure why this is so radical.

Who said that anyone forced anyone else to do anything?

Btw, you are the one who keeps banging on about commercial publishers' gatekeepers -- professional editors -- who maintain standards. What a laugh!

You can't entice people to buy something they have no use for, either. Well, maybe some people. Not the vast crowds buying those books.

Do you buy things you have no use for?

As for editorial standards, what's the joke? So some mistakes slip by in commercially published books. Nothing's 100%.

I didn't buy Dan Brown's book. I did watch the film. I rated it as one of the worst films I've ever seen. I said so in 2006:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/3669

"Read [...] Montague is Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He gave a group of individuals Pepsi and Coke to taste and asked them to state which they preferred. The results were 50:50 for the two products.

However, when he told the respondents what they were drinking, around 75% stated that they preferred Coke. Montague found that brain activity in the medial pre-frontal cortex also showed signs of enhanced activity. This area of the brain is associated with higher level thinking. Montague posited that the brain was making an association with the images and messages associated with commercials for Coke that respondents had witnessed over the years. He also suggested that such activity might lead to consumers preferring one product to another, even if there was other evidence to suggest that under normal circumstances, they would not have chosen that product."

http://www.bized.co.uk/current/mind/2006_7/180906.htm

People choose to buy a product even though they prefer the taste of a competing product!

Same with books. If you bombard readers with advertising, they will buy a book that they enjoy less than a competitor's book.

Shelagh,


You are entirely 100% correct., as is usual.

Shelagh wrote:

Same with books. If you bombard readers with advertising, they will buy a book that they enjoy less than a competitor's book.

I agree that advertising favorably disposes people to buy something. Mostly because it makes people aware of its presence. But it's still tapping in to the person's desire to read something of that genre in the first place. I doubt the soda drinkers in that study would willingly choose seltza water over either Coke or Pepsi.

It doesn't matter what they would choose. For experimental purposes, you need a control group to verify the results and they could be drinking something entirely different. The point of the experiment was to find out how the brain worked, not to see who preferred Coke or Pepsi.

The professor concluded that the brain is susceptible to images and messages associated with commercials, i.e. they identified with the images and the messages in the Coke commercials more than they did with the Pepsi commercials because they saw them more often: subliminal advertising.

None of which supports the position that you can entice loads of people to buy anything just by advertising it enough. The many high-profile product flops attest to that.

Dan Brown is a lousy writer, but his subject matter is controversial, so the advertising focuses on that, and so, entices loads of people to buy it.

Ann

I like Dan Brown. He writes about sensitive issues and rattles the cages. He's successful. That alone cause many to hate him. His work even stimulates threads.

Why do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

LC wrote:

None of which supports the position that you can entice loads of people to buy anything just by advertising it enough. The many high-profile product flops attest to that.

"It is truly amazing to see good and bad advertising in retrospect. If
only we ad agencies had the foresight to know what would be good and
bad, we could have not looked so bad on many aspects. What is REALLY
amazing, is how many ideas were still horrible, yet the advertising was
so good, people still bought it."

In whose opinion were they horrible?

If you want to believe that loads of people willingly buy horrible products because an ad told them to, great. I'm sure some do. The ones that buy what their fave celeb tells them to, no doubt.

I don't want to believe anything. That's not the way I think. My mind might work the same way as yours, but it reaches different conclusions. Whereas I am willing to accept that not everyone holds the same opinion, you express your opinion in a way that suggests that others should agree with you. Yet, your reasoning is based on wildly inaccurate assumptions.