What are you reading in 2025?

[Old Fezziwig]

Coming in to say "better writer" does not automatically equate to Greatest American Author. I mean, one point in favor of King - it is very American to aspire to or to actually make a ton of money. I imagine King has made about 100X more money than Pynchon, and that's not an exaggeration estimate.

I agree that it doesn't automatically equate there. It's my subjective estimation of their relative talent.

And while I don't disagree about the amount of money they've made from their work, I do find it to be the least interesting comparison we could make. If we want to talk about how we could go from sales to readership numbers, I guess I'm somewhat more interested, but America's obsession with how much money people or corporations make is kind of awful and depressing and using it as a measuring stick for other things is, I'm tolerably certain, bad for my soul.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I agree that it doesn't automatically equate there. It's my subjective estimation of their relative talent.

And while I don't disagree about the amount of money they've made from their work, I do find it to be the least interesting comparison we could make. If we want to talk about how we could go from sales to readership numbers, I guess I'm somewhat more interested, but America's obsession with how much money people or corporations make is kind of awful and depressing and using it as a measuring stick for other things is, I'm tolerably certain, bad for my soul.

I think you are onto something if we feel like getting towards "what is great". Part of it is talent; but I think a larger part of it is how well known an author is in the cultural zeitgeist. For the late 20th century, there aren't many writers whose works are better known than King. Partially because of how many were made into movies. Maybe Michael Crichton...

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I think you are onto something if we feel like getting towards "what is great". Part of it is talent; but I think a larger part of it is how well known an author is in the cultural zeitgeist. For the late 20th century, there aren't many writers whose works are better known than King. Partially because of how many were made into movies. Maybe Michael Crichton...

Crichton's an interesting one. I'm not as familiar with his work as King's, but scanning his Wikipedia page to get a better sense of his career was revealing.

This is kind of a fluid thing, though. There are artists who penetrate the cultural zeitgeist disproprortionately to their artistic merit. It's like Brian Eno's quote about The Velvet Underground & Nico: "I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. The sales have picked up in the past few years, but I mean, that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!" There are major American authors who were forgotten in their lifetime (Melville and Fitzgerald are two that come to mind). So I'm not sure that I want to leave anything to the cultural zeitgeist, at least not by itself. It might be interesting to consider what their peers thought of them? Like, who do their peers read?

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Crichton's an interesting one. I'm not as familiar with his work as King's, but scanning his Wikipedia page to get a better sense of his career was revealing.

This is kind of a fluid thing, though. There are artists who penetrate the cultural zeitgeist disproprortionately to their artistic merit. It's like Brian Eno's quote about The Velvet Underground & Nico: "I was talking to Lou Reed the other day and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. The sales have picked up in the past few years, but I mean, that record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!" There are major American authors who were forgotten in their lifetime (Melville and Fitzgerald are two that come to mind). So I'm not sure that I want to leave anything to the cultural zeitgeist, at least not by itself. It might be interesting to consider what their peers thought of them? Like, who do their peers read?

That's an interesting approach, although not sure if there's a good way to do that; or rather an easy way to do that. Is there some sort of data set or meta data that could be a good proxy to get at what an author's peers were writing? It would be REALLY interesting to create a database of author blurbs on books, although there's a bunch of problems with that data set too.

I definitely do not want to leave this to "the academy" to define "canon"...

 

[Old Fezziwig]

That's an interesting approach, although not sure if there's a good way to do that; or rather an easy way to do that. Is there some sort of data set or meta data that could be a good proxy to get at what an author's peers were writing? It would be REALLY interesting to create a database of author blurbs on books, although there's a bunch of problems with that data set too.

I definitely do not want to leave this to "the academy" to define "canon"...

Tracking blurbs would be interesting, but it would be fraught, as you point out. I feel like what we'd need would be something that could trawl through interviews, essays, other written works (their "papers," as it were, though that's going to be wild as the Internet age continues), blog posts, and tweets to find out who's talking about who. I'm probably more mildly inclined to the academy than you are: it's more diverse both demographically and in terms of the texts it engages with than it was when I was there.

 

[prabe]

Tracking blurbs would be interesting, but it would be fraught, as you point out. I feel like what we'd need would be something that could trawl through interviews, essays, other written works (their "papers," as it were, though that's going to be wild as the Internet age continues), blog posts, and tweets to find out who's talking about who. I'm probably more mildly inclined to the academy than you are: it's more diverse both demographically and in terms of the texts it engages with than it was when I was there.

There might be at least some usable information in the non-novel stuff people put in their novels--forewords, afterwords, acknowledgments, and whatever else. It's at least a place where an author might talk about another.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Crichton's an interesting one. I'm not as familiar with his work as King's, but scanning his Wikipedia page to get a better sense of his career was revealing.

Crichton, as a writer, is pretty bad, actually. The movies based his work are better than the original novels. Some of which are pretty terrible (e.g. Timeline, a Doctor Who knockoff by someone who has never seen Doctor Who).

I think what happened was the Andromeda Strain was a great movie, more down to the direction than the plot. But after that Crichton acquired a reputation in Hollywood as a good author to make movies out of.