Here’s an interesting quote and I would love to hear your comments on it. I think it gets at the heart of why so many avid readers get pegged as book snobs. A lot of my well-read friends dislike a lot of popular fiction, and it makes them sound snobbish, but the fact is that they are probably just pickier readers.
“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.”