The Publishing and Promoting Complex.

I keep running into well-reviewed and award winning novels that I simply don't like. Worse, some of them are just badly written. 

So have I changed or has the market changed?

A bit of both, I suspect, but that really doesn't explain some of the clunkers which I think I always would have found wanting. 

One thing's for sure--blurbs by famous or favorite authors don't mean a damn thing. The worst book I read recently was adorned with five very well known authors' blurbs.

So much of what people think is great writing is pretentious and belaboring. Give me a straightforward action book any day. 

I was explaining the plots to some of my books to some customers the other day and said, "I started realizing that my books were like 70s disaster movies. A bunch of characters (types, if you will), thrown into the maelstrom of a disaster. And that's exactly what I was looking for."

Not the kind of thing that is going to win awards. 

I have to ignore all this when I make orders for the store. Except for making sure that I carry my favorite books, I'm ordering what the market has decided are the "best" books. The fact that I read the descriptions and think, "Oh, another book about (one of several social problems). Ugh," doesn't matter.

There is a publishing and promoting "complex" that has its own reasons for pushing certain books and I have to go along with it. 

I still probably concentrate on backlist books more than most bookstores, because there a lots of books that have stood the test of time, unlike some of these "bestsellers" which I suspect will be just as ignored as my own books in another ten years time. Heh.