Suz's Space Blog

An honour or a slur

Posted on 29 April 2010. Filed under: Rant and Rave Time | Tags: bookselling, Dan Brown, Robert Ludlum |

I was talking to Arnold Zable the other week and happened to tell him I hadn’t seen his books in op shops or secondhand bookshops too often. I’ve seen so many other authors but not his. A couple of authors I’ve seen come up so many times are Dan Brown and Robert Ludlum. Ludlum writes a quite nice thriller but very formulaic while Brown has interesting ideas but his books are not terribly good. I’ve read quite a number of Ludlum’s and have only recently disposed of my collection so I feel I can actually talk intelligently about them, but I’ve only read one by Brown and that’s The Da Vinci Code. I was not impressed by this book, I felt it had so many holes and the writing was just okay, if I’d been at home I wouldn’t have bothered finishing it. Now, what I’m wondering is if it’s an honour or a slur on their writing if you see a secondhand book on sale somewhere. I’m guessing the more copies you see the more likely it is to be a slur. Ludlum and Brown probably generate a huge number of copies of their books and it makes it so easy to get new ones so people probably just dispose of them willy nilly. Authors like Zable, on the other hand, generate far fewer copies of their books and as their writing is so much better then I’d suggest you’d be much less likely to find the books being sold secondhand as people would be more likely to keep them to read again.

I found this lovely article the other day

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