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“A British bookshop chain held a vote to find the country’s favourite book. It was The Lord of the Rings. Another one not long afterwards, held this time to find the favourite author, came up with J.R.R. Tolkien. The critics carped, which was expected but nevertheless strange. After all, the bookshops were merely using the word favourite. That’s a very personal word. No one ever said it was a synonym for best. But a critic’s chorus hailed the results as a terrible indictment of the taste of the British public, who’d been given the precious gift of democracy and were wasting it on quite unsuitable choices. There were hints of a conspiracy amongst the furry-footed fans. But there was another message, too. It ran: ‘Look, we’ve been trying to tell you for years which books are good! And you just don’t listen! You’re not listening now! You’re just going out there and buying this damn book! And the worst part is that we can’t stop you! We can tell you it’s rubbish, it’s not relevant, it’s the worst kind of escapism, it was written by an author who never came to our parties and didn’t care what we thought, but unfortunately the law allows you to go on not listening! You are stupid, stupid, stupid!’ And once again, no one listened. Instead, a couple of years later, a national newspaper’s Millennium Masterworks poll produced five works of what could loosely be called ‘narrative fiction’ among the top fifty ‘masterworks’ of the last thousand years, and, yes, there was The Lord of the Rings again.”
— Terry Pratchett, “Cult Classic” (A Slip of the Keyboard)
(Still burning mad that at least one critic did the same exact kind of carping about Pratchett’s body of work being praised by its fans, shortly after his death.)
I stumbled on an article last night where some douche was ranting about how mad he was that, in the wake of Terry’s death, people were mourning and calling him a great writer when they should have been reading something sublime like Bukowski.
In the first paragraph he said he’d never read anything by Pratchett and never intended to, which is pretty typical of that kind of angry elitism.
As someone who has been deeply impacted by Terry’s ideas about character and storytelling, that article made me so mad. Livid. Terry Pratchett levels of righteous fury.
Can I tell you how happy and unsurprised I am that Terry himself wrote such a lovely takedown of that snobbish, splainy mentality.
A thing being popular doesn’t automatically make it bad, and fantastic elements don’t make a work of literature into not-literature.
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