Popular

I didn’t expect to enjoy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I picked a copy up on the cheap a few years back, part of a workshop I was taking where one of the exercises involved best-selling novels. There was a remarkable dearth of best-sellers on my bookshelves at the time, so I grabbed a bunch of ebooks to get me up to the quota I needed: Stieg Larson; one of the Alex Cross books; the most recent Nora Roberts I could find.

I loved the Roberts. Didn’t enjoy Kill Alex Cross, but developed an appreciation for what James Paterson does via books like Zoo and his Bookshots Novellas. And yet, despite all that, I still went into Steig Larson’s crime novel with a sense of trepidation.

It occupied that space: a best-seller. Not my thing. A book loaded with assumptions predicated on how much it sells, none of which it actually fulfilled when I sat down and devoured it in the space of a single evening.

At the same time, I’m gearing up for tutorials this semester. I’ve got ten weeks of talking writing and genre fictions, theory and practice. I’m gearing up for the usual vehemence that tends to get directed against certain novels: The Da Vinci Code; Twilight; Fifty Shades of Grey. Easy targets because they’re popular books, and the people perceived as their target audience are easily disregarded.

They’re easy books to identify what you’re against as a reader, even if you’ve never read one of them or asked yourself what it is you dislike about it. Being against something is so much easier than inviting judgement for things you like, the types of work you’re really for.

And I’m tempted–so very tempted–to dig out the half-hour class I did on the opening chapter of Twilight a few years back. Pulling apart all the things it does well from a structural level to draw you in, build up immediate empathy for Bella and invest you in her story. Even if you dislike the politics of the book, and the focus of it’s story, a close look at the craft makes it a little easier to see how it became one of the books that really sold.