"Genre fiction" is a synonym for "clichéd, formulaic, reactionary crap."
The older I get, the less interested I am in the emotional lives of people who don't really exist.
The New York Times Bestseller List is just a highbrow version of the Billboard Charts or movie box office stats; they are no indication of quality, just popularity, and there is no correlation between the two one way or the other.
Most children's book authors are usually both bad writers and bad people:
—L. Frank Baum was a mediocre writer and a genocidal racist who called for the elimination of all Native Americans; in fact, the entire Oz universe is nothing but Manifest Destiny propaganda, especially the original book where a white girl kills two women of color and longs to go to a "home" built on land that was stolen from Indians to begin with. If it wasn't for the M-G-M movie and its wonderful songs, it would be completely forgotten.
—P.L. Travers was an out and out monster and a pretty shitty writer, and everything based on her works is also shit. Walt Disney wasted his time trying to please her when he should have recognized that there was no there there, and the horrible, awful, terrible, dreadful, completely unwatchable movie that resulted from all their bickering was much better (and ironically, about 1,000% less ideologically, morally and aesthetically problematic) when it was called [italic]Song of the South[/italic].
—Roald Dahl was a vile man in every way imaginable, and I don't understand Jewish filmmakers' preoccupation with his works, even though the 1971 [italic]Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory[/italic] was a huge improvement on the original book. He hated Jews but he gladly took Jewish money for the movie rights to his films, and so has his estate since the old bastard finally died and went to Hell where he belongs.
—J.K. Rowling is just a poor person's Mary Norton, and she lived off taxpayer money to fart out what amounts to a bloated, clunky, self-insistent pastiche of every Disney movie with a witch, a wizard or a magician in it. By contrast, Norton's writing is genuinely charming, engaging to children and adult readers, and a model of efficiency, and her witch only needed two books and one movie (that even in its longest version is still shorter than any Harry Potter movie) to tell her story.
—Dr. Seuss was a sanctimonious, womanizing, bigoted hypocrite whose anti-racist and pro-environmentalist messages grew not out of principle but out of guilt for the racist cartoons he drew in his youth. [italic]The Butter Battle Book[/italic] is appalling in its insistence that the difference between the USA and the USSR is merely like "the side your bread is buttered on." How glibly simplistic and empty-headed can you get? If he had lived in the USSR, then he probably would have been put in a gulag.
—Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie were both pedophiles, and frankly I shouldn't be surprised if it is ever revealed that A.A. Milne took inappropriate liberties with Christopher Robin.
—Rudyard Kipling was little more than a cheerleader for British imperialism. Walt Disney was right to tell his animators to ignore the book when he turned [italic]The Jungle Book[/italic] into an animated film.
—Everything by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis is Christian propaganda designed to sell religious superstition to basement-dwellers. And to think New Line Cinema, once one of the US's leading distributors of independent film, almost went broke trying to make secularized versions of that crap with [italic]The Last Mimzy[/italic] and [italic]The Golden Compass[/italic].
—Most young adult fiction is unreadable, melodramatic, patronizing tripe even to its intended audience, and most of it is dated and quickly forgotten by the time the current generation of adolescents graduates from high school. Even a random episode of [italic]The Facts of Life[/italic] is likely to be more believable and a great deal more amusing.