Adult Readers Advisory: Week Seven Prompt (In Defense of James Patterson)

For our prompt this week, I want you to think about fake memoirs, author mills, and celebrity inspired book clubs. Basically write a readers' response to one of the articles you are reading for this week - or talk about a time when a book or author that made headlines affected you personally or your work.

For this week's prompt, I want to talk about James Patterson.

Patterson is incredibly popular, but he's also controversial and often derided for his persona, writing style, commercialism, and use of co-authors. I've been known to make fun of him myself, mostly for his TV ads.

(Watch Patterson's commercial for "Private Vegas" here.)

He also doesn't really write the type of books I normally read, though I haven't read any of his books in particular. 

But I'm perfectly happy with Patterson writing his reportedly schlocky suspense books and doing his advertising juggernaut, complete with dorky commercials. If people are buying what he's selling, more power to him. 

While I can't vouch for the quality, or lack thereof, of Patterson's work, I have enjoyed a lot of books by people whose work has been derided for its inelegance and commercial nature. I devoured Dan Brown's books when "The DaVinci Code" got popular, for example. I just don't think it's particularly healthy or helpful to diss the books that people enjoy reading. It reeks of snobbery, and I've never understood why it particularly matters to anyone what another person chooses to read. There's value to "low culture" - entertaining culture - as well as the more artistic high culture, and there's room in the world for both.

It's especially a problem when librarians fall into this trap. The beginning of the ALA's Library Bill of Rights states, "Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves." That means that, if people want to devour every James Patterson book, we should help them achieve that. It doesn't even matter why they want to read the allegedly bad book - whether they find the books comforting, or silly, or distracting, or because they genuinely think they're good. These are all valid reasons for wanting to read a book, because every reason is valid.

One of the other big issues that people have is with Patterson's co-writing, but that just doesn't seem like a problem to me. He credits his co-authors pretty prominently on his books, if not always in his commercials and other advertising. But Patterson is a former advertising executive, and he understands the idea of "branding" and, for better or worse, his name is a potent brand. And other commercially popular writers also have co-authors - one of my favorites is Janet Evanovich, who has co-written several series with other writers. As long as the author is up-front about the co-writing and the co-author is being treated fairly according to the contract, I have no problem with it. Let the readers decide if they want to read it.

We can all probably thank Patterson for giving the publishing industry a boost, too. His books sell incredibly well and makes his publishers a ton of money, which allows them to continue to publish books, including the less popular "good" books. He is also a supporter of reading in general, and has tried to start a discussion about the future of books and how to help books and reading thrive. Yes, it's partially self-serving, since he's made his living from books, but to be a successful writer, I think you need to also be a reader, and I suspect that Patterson would be sad to see books go away in general.