Is there anyone else on here who didn't love The Book Thief?

I'm reading Spongebob goes Jellyfishing at the moment.

I would agree that accessible does not equal lowbrow, but not that all reading is of equal worth.

No way no how no no

shite is shite, boffy

if it looks like shite, smells like shite, has shite sentences, construction, characterisations, story etc.

Amen to that, BOF.

yeah but the Book Thief is still shite innit

A friend of mine who writes had a blog post I'd like to share, as it sums up my feelings:

"And people should read books. Books are good.

But many are intimidated. One of the reasons people are put off reading is snobbery. You know, the snobbery that says opera and lacrosse and Pinot Noir and jazz fusion and quails' eggs and literary fiction are for certain types of people and them alone?

There is something innately snobby about the world of books. There is the snobbery of literary over genre, of adult books over children's, of seriousness over comedy, of reality over fantasy, of Martin Amis over Stephen King. And it is unhealthy. If books ever die, snobbery would be standing over the corpse.

So here is my message to book snobs:

1. People should never be made to feel bad about what they are reading. People who feel bad about reading will stop reading.

1. Snobbery leads to worse books. Pretentious writing and pretentious reading. Books as exclusive members clubs. Narrow genres. No inter-breeding. All that fascist nonsense that leads commercial writers to think it is okay to be lazy with words and for literary writers to think it is okay to be lazy with story.

1. If something is popular it can still be good. Just ask Shakespeare. Or the Beatles. Or peanut butter.

1. Get over the genre thing. The art world accepted that an artist could take from anywhere he or she wanted a long time ago. Roy Lichtenstein could turn comic strips into masterpieces back in 1961. Intelligence is not a question of subject but approach.

1. It is harder to be funny than to be serious. For instance, this is a serious sentence: 'After dinner, Alistair roamed the formal garden behind this unfamiliar house, wishing he had never betrayed Lorelei's trust.' That took me eight seconds to write. And yet I've been trying to write a funny sentence for three hours now, and I'm getting hungry.

1. Many of the greatest writers have been children's writers.

1. It is easy to say something to people who are exactly like you. A bigger challenge lies in locating that universal piece of all of us that wants to be wowed, and brought together by a great story. There isn't a human in the world who wouldn't enter the Sistine Chapel and not want to look up. Does that make Michelangelo a low-brow populist?

1. It does not matter about who the author is. The only thing a book should be judged on is the words inside.

1. Martin Amis once moaned on the radio that there were too many writers talking across the table to their readers rather than down to them. This was the point I went off Martin Amis.

10. You don't have to be serious about something to be serious about something.

11. You don't have to be realistic to be true.

12. You are one of 7,000,000,000 people in the world. You can never be above all of them. But you can be happy to belong.

13. The only people who fear people understanding what they are saying are people who have nothing really to say.

14. Books are not better for being misunderstood, any more than a building is better for having no door.

15. Shakespeare didn't go to university, and spelt his name six different ways. He also told jokes. (Bad ones, true, but you can't knock him for trying.)

16. Avoiding plot doesn't automatically make you clever. (See: Greene, Tolstoy, Shakespeare.)

17. Freedom is a process of knocking down walls. Tyranny is a process of building them.

18. There can be as much beauty in short (words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters) as long. Sparrows fly higher than peacocks.

19. Snobs are suckers, because they have superficial prejudices.

20. The book I am least proud of, that I didn't work hard enough on, was my most ostentatiously highbrow one.

21. Reading a certain book doesn't make you more intelligent any more than drinking absinthe makes you Van Gogh. It's how you read, as much as what you read.

22. Never make someone feel bad for not having read or not read something. Books are there to heal, not hurt.

23. Imagination is play. Snobbery is the opposite of play.

24. I used to be a snob. It made me unhappy.

25. Simple isn't always stupid. When I write a first draft it is complicated. There is mess. The second and third and fifteenth drafts try and get it to make sense, to trim away the frayed edges.

26. Stephen King was right. Books are 'portable magic'. And everyone loves magic.

27. Inclusion is harder than exclusion. Just ask a politician.

28. The brain can absorb many things. So can a novel.

29. For me, personally, the point of writing is to connect me to this world, to my fellow humans. We are all miles apart. We have no real means of connecting except via language. And the deepest form of language is storytelling.

30. The greatest stories appeal to our deepest selves, the parts of us snobbery can't reach, the parts that connect the child to the adult and the brain to the heart and reality to dreams. Stories, at their essence, are enemies of snobbery. And a book snob is the enemy of the book."

Cross posted with a serious point.

I agree trills. I think there is a lot of brilliant writing for teenagers around. In fact I think it's a pity MN seems only to have adult fiction and children's fiction - unless I'm missing the YA section?

It's fine, hully. In fact in the ancient proto-Anatolian such apostrophes were de rigueur, and it is awfully johnny-come-lately to object to them.

So I hear from Prof Bof, anyway.

I enjoy teenage books, if they are good ones, and I think there are many more good ones about now than when I was a teenager.

"knock's?"

dear lord

please forgive that apostrophe

Is that an ivory tower, or are you just pleased to see me?

I'll get my coat.

Absolutely. I'm all about the ivory tower.

I couldn't get past the first paragraph

Intensely irritating and twee

How dare you?

I learned everything I know at BOF's knee.

Or, you know, the professorly equivalent of knees.

"I think you either get it or you don't. "

What is sad is that you call yourself a Professor of English Literature but are unable to explain what you feel has gone "over our heads" in a book written for teenagers fgs

I hope your students get slightly more intellectual replies from you in class than "either you get it or you don't".

The Woman in White is fabulous, certainly knocks the Woman in Black into a cocked hat.

I read it,quite enjoyed it then re-read it for a book group a couple of years later. The second time,I loved it.

I loved it, I guess I just bought into the magical realism and the way the girl was emotionally stunted, forced to just survive. A lot of it is portrait of ordinary poor Germans caught up on an ideological maelstorm they can't see objectively. Interviews with the author are good, too.

If you don't like, just move on quickly! Something like The Woman in White would be dull & turgid to me. Isn't it great we're all different & like different things?

I thought it was quite meh. I read it a year or two ago and I don't really remember it much at all.

I didn't mind it, but there are many better books out there that address the holocaust using mythic tropes - Jane Yolen's novel Briar Rose and short story Sister Death, for example.