I have more than once in these hallowed pages trumpeted my disgust with publishers who print dreck. I have spent many an inkless afternoon impregnating this space with the incisive fonts of my emphatic abhorrence of hack writers who type anything and then find success with it. I have also expressed my dismay at the few of the public who still remember what a book is who spend their bucks on trite tripe and talentless trash.

I am aware of the shower effect on book sales. This term was originally used to describe recording buyers who make hit records of tunes that they can easily sing in the shower without embarrassment because the original performance sounds like it was recorded in a shower by an inebriated co-ed at a liberal arts college. The same thing applies to books. People like to read the kind of books that they would like to write. This often leads to intelligent people writing crap so that they can fill their own libraries with books written by intelligent people who don't have to write crap... and possibly aren't making a living from their writing... But in the end, this also leads to a kind of literary nostalgia for crap that was popular decades ago that has influenced the literate and literwriting victim to the point where the crap takes on a sort of 'sacred writ' status and ends up being taught in university courses. Witness the works of Larry McMurtry.

Of course, a lot of blame has to be placed on the supposed most popular books of all time, the HOLY BOOKS. Have you ever really taken a good look at the book of Acts in the New Testament? Look at the writing. I know it's a rough translation of a third or fourth generation Greek text. But as it's given unto us in the modern tongues, it reads like a treatment for an action movie! At least its readable. Other HOLY BOOKS are boring. They apparently were prized by people who couldn't read who paid people who could read to read the wonderful stuff and came to believe that that is the way the deity wants things that are SERIOUS and USEFUL to be written and read... unlike that frivolous stuff that is easy to understand.

And don't even get me started on 'poetry'!

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