jennydiski wrote:Also ridiculous is the idea that eg Ian McEwan is a serious literary writer. Put your own over rated in.
KB wrote:I can think of a fair few (although I have to defend McEwan's Cement Garden and First Love, Last Rites... Couldn't read anything else of his, though - I put down Enduring Love after the first chapter).
Is that why the other thread went dead when I mentioned his name in a list of stuff I read recently?
To be honest (since this thread appears to be about confessing to awful literary taste), I have enjoyed *most* of his books that I have read: Atonement, Amsterdam, even *ducks for cover* On Chesil Beach. Not so much Saturday, and I think I put down Enduring Love too.
I don't read them because I think they have more *value* than other books, they just happen to be books I have read and enjoyed.
Haven't read the ones Keith mentions above though, so maybe I should so I can see where you think it all went wrong.
KB wrote:Browsing is indeed one of the nicest things about entering a bookshop. I always forget what authors I like when I enter a bookshop, anyway, so I have to browse (I have the same problem in record stores - the number of shelves just make my mind go blank).
I find it intimidating - such a big wall of books, with no real way to determine good from bad without spending my money. If I get too much choice, my eyes tend to blur over, and then only picks out books that I recognise (usually because I have already read them).
Which leads me to my next question, which I tentatively raised in another thread and didn't get a response:
Can someone please recommend some good SF or fantasy books, that can be read as a single book rather than a trilogy, or longer (and authors that get on with telling the story rather than falling in love with their powers of description).
Unfortunately, I know very little from the genre, and haven't liked what I have read: the early Harry Potters were written for kids, and I kept thinking "this would have been great when I was 10"; LOTR is too thick with description, I could barely get through the first fifteen or twenty pages; a few others that I think were the ones that give the genre a bad name.
I have enjoyed some SF and fantasy movies though, and expect I would enjoy the books too if I am reading the right ones. But with that big wall of books, they all look the same on the cover!
Matt