Of good books and bad books

[katikat]

Why are only the books that don't have a happy end considered "good", "well-written" and "realistic"? Why do these "serious" readers not like a happy end? Why is a tragic love story better than the one where the couple ends up happily ever after? Why does the main character have to "search for their identity" all the time? And why do readers read books they know from the beginning they won't like?

Comments

[seraphim-grace.livejournal.com]

the ending has to fit the story, I don't care if it's happy or not, it has to fit. There is nothing worse than a tacked on ending.
On the whole people tend to look at books as being more "literary" than films which is rubbish, I can show you pulp novels from the 1820's as happily as i can from yesterday, this doesn't make the books rubbish, I can think of some great pulp novels that I've loved, but it doesn't make them lasting.
Look at Virginia Andrews (and i have read them all) 11 books, all best sellers, but are they any good in a literary sense? No, they're populist crap, she went out of her way to find things that would make her audience go ooh, ahh, but yet she sold millions of copies and there is an age when you're 14 or so when everyone reads them. They're passed about like contraband and then you all sit around talking about the bit where Heaven caught Tony in his wife's nightgown.
THey're fun books, but they didn't set the world alight, they didn't touch some part of you deep inside. And a "good" book will do that, and often they're as much fun as Virginia andrews (who makes me cry) I'm currently reading Anne Rice, not some obscure author who wrote one book before a hideous nervous breakdown. I read books for fun, and some of them touch me, and some of them amuse me, that's the difference.

[katikat.livejournal.com]

Okay, tell me more about the nightgown thingy! *snickers*