What a grumpy, old bookman!
Various people are asking whether trade paperbacks can save literary fiction (see Galleycat for a summary).The answer is no. Nothing can save literary fiction. It isn't a question of format or cost; it's a question of boredom.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, and you can even fool the same people for several years -- or books -- at a time. But eventually the penny drops.
As I mentioned yesterday, I do enjoy the occasional genre romp because sometimes you simply have to read for entertainment value alone. However, too much genre—thrillers, for example—is what's really boring. Most commercial bestsellers are so formulaic that you can pretty much predict the entire plot from a brief scan of the jacket copy. And reading nothing but the same exact books with the same exact characters and the same exact plots over and over and over again is what's foolish. Mixing it up keeps it interesting, so why not grab some literary fiction that might make you think?
