I’ve been wondering about this. Colleen Hoover is well known as the sort of poster girl for sloppily written, baffling and aggressively mediocre books.
What was the equivalent to her in previous times? Like the Romantic or Modernist period?
During the the 1890s, what book was considered “embarassing” or super low brow to be caught with (in the same way the book community largely treats It Ends With Us)?
The problem with that is that kind of literature is that it will fade to obscurity fast, and modern readers (who are not students of the literature or history of the time) will not ever have heard of it. So regarding the 1890s, I do not know, and it is not something to waste time reading…
There is a new book by Zadie Smith, who is about a novellist called William Ainsworth, who was at the time more popular than Dickens, not sure if it fits the equivalent thing…
But Colleen Hoover like, that kind of place, well authors become famous fast at some times. I can totally see 80s bonkbusters (Jackie Collins, or Judith Krantz) or bodice ripper authors (Woodiwiss?) as filling that kind of space relatively recently. I actually think Taylor Reid Jenkins is doing precisely the type of story, shortened and simplified that Judith Krantz would have written…
“Riders - 3200”
When the hot sexy polo dude on his AI horse gets spicy in the cyberspace stable - watch out, space knickers!!