Literary Plague

There are books in which every page one reads, is a work of masterful art. Very few books fall into that category, and are rightfully called classics. They will live forever in our hearts; their characters shall always remain relevant in today’s world, no matter how old they are in their conception. A fewer authors can call their books their crowning achievements, feathers in their hats in a field where people frequently get reprimanded for inflicting such rot upon humanity. There are many authors in the latter; I’ll gladly name a few of them:

1. Chetan Bhagat: He and his semi-autobiographical ‘stories’ with a narrative so colourless and plain, reading it’ll remind you of a ten-year-old’s account of his or her weekend. Like many people who try ever so hard, we have a writer whose language is as half-baked as his plot and characters. If they were inspired from real life, he would’ve led a really one-dimensional life where all his acquaintances would’ve been caricatures of over-simplified stereotypes. I assume he operates under the presumption that his works must be accessible to the ‘common man’. Unfortunately, he seems to end up writing for the complete imbecile. Real works that make no flamboyant pretence are what are accessible to the common man. RK Narayan wrote for the common man, Chetan Baghat spews filth upon the sanctity of the written word.
2. Christopher Paolini: Classic plagiarism is what this gentleman, no, amateur adolescent, in every sense of the term, is capable of. I used to hate The Chronicles of Narnia, for it seemed a cheap bootleg of The Lord of the Rings, but no, a new kid’s in town, quite literally. Shamelessly lifting characters and plot elements from Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, and even Harry Potter, this pseudo Norse myth styled disaster only succeeds in disappointing the poor reader. I lumbered through the first book because I opened it, woe is me, and I gave up on humanity when I saw the second book adorning a shelf in the local bookshop.
3. Sydney Sheldon: I know, quite controversial, but yes, in the most affirmative of tones, he’s the father of cheap, Hollywood styled banality in literature. Every story of his features an extremely good-looking, perfect-in-everyway protagonist who, for some reason, gets entangled in something big, and with every chapter, the crisis gets bigger and bigger until it all diffuses in the end making it the king of all anticlimaxes; and there’d be a meaningless love story thrown somewhere in between for the sake of it, while it wouldn’t make sense at all, in terms of its relevance to the plot. His books are well-written scripts for tasteless soap-operas, not works of literature. Hackneyed cliff-hangers and loud explosions must remain only in Michael Bay’s movies intended to kill the viewer, not in a book. “Mainstream Hollywood” is the bottom-line of all his books; while it fails to entertain as a movie, it does even more so, as a book.
4. Dan Brown: He is the master of the familiar. Five books into his career, every single one of his books is similar to its predecessor in more ways than one. I wonder how many people appreciate his books now, for they just contain different conspiracy theories, different locations, similar characters who only differ in their names, but the same story. The format in which the story unravels itself is also the same, something which is bound to test every reader’s patience. While old wine in a new bottle is desirable, his books are not. While he might be interested in sighting lofty castles that do not exist amidst the clouds, the rest of us are more earnest and have no patience for the modern Don Quixote, only not very lovable but equally dense. Frankly, no one gives a damn about how ugly people danced naked every full moon standing in buckets filled with sushi hundreds of years ago.
5. Stephanie Meyer: No words can describe the injustice she has wrought upon humanity by force-feeding her tosh about vampires making Bram Stoker puke in his grave. I’m sure Hell has a special place for the publisher who cleared this drivel for publication. Mere fodder for over-weight middle aged women too ugly to find a husband, this is not literature; it is an insidious crime to have written this load of baloney. The reason this series of books is so repulsive is ubiquitous, but I shall elucidate anyway. The central theme has a colourless and nondescript protagonist, a character any reader can identify oneself with because the character has no personality of her own. Added to this is a boy, so freakishly handsome in every way, one would think he has issues related to self-esteem for falling for our main character in the first place. Wait, that’s not enough, the final nail on the coffin was making this man a vampire. The tale then reaches new levels of absurdity when it panders to baser emotions of every black-sheep of literature, letting real readers bite dust. Twilight is not a vampire novel; it is a cheesy romantic story begging to be used as toilet paper, masquerading as a fantasy novel to trick the hapless reader into untold misery. If one calls oneself a twilight fan, one has either been paid huge amounts of money to say so, or one is a complete idiot.