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I’ve just read a short article on UK book sales over the holidays. A cookbook by Jamie Oliver, the guy who screwed up school lunches to the point where some children won’t eat them, did well. He sold 140,000 + of his latest, and a couple of other celebreties sold 40,000 — 50,000 copies.
But somewhere in the article serious fiction and serious books were mentioned. Who decides what a serious book is? I’ve read somewhere, for instance, that seriously (???) humourous writers don’t get serious awards, and I don’t think J.K.Rowling was considered serious until she started making serious money. One definition of serious book is ‘appealing to the mind’. That really depends on the mind, surely. Is Fifty Shades of Grey considered serious?
I haven’t read Fifty Shades and don’t plan to, but I’d guess that it’s not ‘serious.’
When I think of ‘serious’ books, I think of Tolstoy and Dickens. Or anything in which a moral or lesson is supposed to be taken away. I… don’t think cookbooks fall into that category.
As for ‘serious writers,’ I generally think of them as ‘serious’ when they start earning their living with their books, which might be why Rowling wasn’t considered such early on.
I found one description for serious fiction and serious books at http://marylaine.com/bookbyte/serious.html
Another place called literary fiction serious fiction, as opposed to genre fiction not being serious.
Not sure if literary fiction is what the person in your article meant by serious fiction.
djmills wrote:I found one description for serious fiction and serious books at http://marylaine.com/bookbyte/serious.htmlAnother place called literary fiction serious fiction, as opposed to genre fiction not being serious.
Not sure if literary fiction is what the person in your article meant by serious fiction.
The context sounds like that’s more or less what they meant. But “literary fiction” is a pretty vague term too. A lot of fiction that fits a genre also winds up fitting “literary.”
I might as well say this, because I’m gonna float an opinion here: It’s only an opinion.
I’m a big genre fan and my wife reads more of the literary side of things (though she does read mysteries).
The idea I just had is that literary fiction has a meaning under the surface. Ideally, the meaning is different for each reader–this isn’t a straight parable, allegory, or moral tale. But the book tends not to be about the events of the book but rather about what the events mean to the characters and to the reader: A wife has an affair because…why? And how does it change her? The story presumably explores it.
Ideally, genre books do that exploration too, but genre books tend to be more constrained in their requirements that the books also provide certain other experiences. A mystery has to provide a mystery; a science fiction book has to provide a science fictional element; a romance book has to provide a romance. In fact, if that other experience is sufficiently good or entrancing (or, I suppose, the audience is hungry enough for the experience), they can do without the deeper meaning. Many mysteries, fantasies, thrillers, romances are essentially disposable: they provide a brief surge of the experience and off they go. Harlequin has largely built its publishing empire on this.
The flippant way of putting it is that all good fiction has meaning under the surface, but only genre books insist that there be an interesting surface. In one way of thinking, that’s absolutely true: to get literary fiction, critics and authors have largely stripped away the genre elements in order to make it easier to say, “No, this is really about something else.” It’s not totally true, because each genre has accumulated tropes–and even literary fiction has accumulated tropes so that it can be distinguished from genre fiction with similar gewgaws. Atwood originally made a big deal of saying that Handmaid’s Tale wasn’t actually science fiction, she was just using some of the forms of SF to say what she wanted to say.
Now, I say that all good fiction is like that, but it’s a tautology for me, because I use that as one of the characteristics that defines good fiction (as opposed to serious fiction).
Great at theory, terrible at practice.
Being on the internet too much, I hear “serious book” and “serious writer” in similar contexts as one might hear “SERIOUS BUSINESS” – something that takes itself overly seriously to the point of looking down on everything else. E.g., “I AM A SERIOUS WRITER AND IF YOU ARE NOT DOING IT MY EXACT WAY, YOU ARE WRONG AND NOT TAKING IT SERIOUSLY. ALSO I LIKE CAPITAL LETTERS.” Haven’t read the article, so I don’t know the context, but it seems like it could apply.
Not to say that one shouldn’t take their writing seriously, but like pretty much everything in life, it works much better in moderation.
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