Subservient to no one

Some of my worst experiences as a reader come from reading the work of best-selling authors; a banal subsistance of writers whose qualifying attributes arise from their ability to blandly appeal to a wide variety of consumers. Being mostly into the Avant-Garde, it is not surprising I find acute tedium in the realms of the best-sellers, but I do occasionally subject myself to their creative renderings out of intrigue and perhaps from a kind of self torture. Four chapters in on The Business by Iain Banks I am struck by how trite the characters are, how banal and wooden they are, how they are basically cliches ranging from posh toffs who like cars to Americans who like guns. They are like rejects from a BBC drama characters from a BBC drama; characters one has seen before, not new, original, interesting characters, just recycled archetypes: mediocre characters; the type you'd expect to find in a best-selling novel who are just bland enough (and I am assuming supposedly likea

Um, spoiler alert, I guess. Perhaps I am reading Dickens wrong. I have not (not yet) visited the Victorian era, and reading his work from the comfort of my 21 st Century poverty, I have but the faintest inkling of true Victorian poverty. Around 1/3 of the urban population lived in poverty, as told here by Angie Speaks in this excellent work house video, and there were plenty of ways the poor were subjugated and systematically punished. So when one reads Dickens, I think one must remind oneself that Dickens lived in a world where poverty, death and sickness were commonplace, and not merely things transmitted to people's homes via the safe distance of mass medium communications. The prose at the beginning of A Christmas Carol describes Scrooge much like a pantomime villain, and despite this, I think one should acknowledge the severity of Scrooge's selfishness. Those opening words are not dissimilar to that of a fairytale, but like a fairytale, the story comes from a w