Reading, Drinking and Dancing with a Chaser of Snark

I read a post the other day on The Passive Voice about how some writers may condemn a bestseller book because of all the “bad” that’s in it. Though the title of the post points to the fate of today’s book bloggers — who are suffering from overload because they’ve become the new gatekeepers for the slush pile — a lot of what was written in that piece really hit home for me.

See, I’m human and, like many other writers, I get annoyed when I read a bestseller book that, in my opinion, is poorly written. Now, let’s get something out of the way before I go on, okay? What I consider poorly written is not necessarily what someone else considers poorly written. However, I do believe there are some universal traits on what most readers consider “bad”. Writers, on the other hand, are more critical because they deal…