Everyone reads trash sometimes, but why are we now pretending, as a culture, that it is the same thing as literature? The two are utterly different.Īctual literature may be harder to get to grips with than a Discworld novel, but it is more worth the effort. Their books, like all great books, can change your life, your beliefs, your perceptions. There was far less of an internet splurge when Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014 and Günter Grass this spring. Thus, if you judge by the emotional outpourings over their deaths, the greatest writers of recent times were Pratchett and Ray Bradbury. A middlebrow cult of the popular is holding literature to ransom. In the age of social media and ebooks, our concept of literary greatness is being blurred beyond recognition. I don’t mean to pick on this particular author, except that the huge fuss attending and following his death this year is part of a very disturbing cultural phenomenon.
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