Because people are easily amused idiots. Just go look at the What are you reading thread. Dan Brown and George R.R. Martin...
Dan Brown...Partly responsible for the perpetuation of that preposterous Maitre de Sion nonsense, subsequent Plantard mania, and numerous other conspiratorial nonsense. Sorry, had to be said.
i wouldn't say they are crap necessarily. cultures change, ideals change, not everyone can appreciate tolkien and they don't have to. tolkien is pretty hardcore, dense shit. some criticize it as an "overwritten work". not everyone has time for hardcore material like that but watered down light stuff may suit them better. plus modern time = different ball game and different value structure.
Read it out of a sense of obligation. Difficult going with few obvious pay-offs. I think he had "Lost the plot" by then.
i read crap fiction because my mom always gives me her old books and it's good enough to read while i'm shitting.
Probably for the same reasons that many people write trashy, crap, tasteless bullshit here on this forum.
^yeah And for the same reasons that people watch the Bachelor/Bachelorette and other idiotic crap shows
or say to someone I am talking to that they want to hit that...if you really want to start with me, i am ready!
true, but i prefer HF on a computer and i don't have a laptop. maybe skip should make a book out of the old archived forums and i could use that for a bathroom reader.
When people say music/film/art/literature these days is awful, stuff in the past was so much better I tend to hear: "I don't know how to look things up and find stuff that I like, so I rely on people from previous generations to have already done it for me." There has never been more fiction being published and made available through different mediums than there is right now. You have to do the legwork to find stuff that is good/that you like. Anna Karenina was not the only book published in that year, the vast majority of popular fiction was dross then as it is now. People worked to find and preserve the good stuff, just as they are doing today. Anyway, I love bad books, there's two great books specifically on the sybject that I've read recently, one is the Bad book club by Robin Ince and the other is Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix (which is about the 70's/80's paperback horror boom, not specifically bad books, but god there was a load of glorious rubbish in that era) both are hilarious.