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Steve Donoghue’s Followers (20)
Steve Donoghue
“It's the outgrowth of a natural human contradiction: people want to read good books, but people are also invincibly lazy ... so they read only stupid, easy books, but they still keep feeling the original want - and eventually, that causes them to call the stupid, easy books they actually do read good ... because it seems like such a neat little solution to their problem! And if those stupid, easy books are big enough financial successes or garner a wide enough audience of people trying that same solution, those of us who aren't invincibly lazy and actually do read good books - or at least real books - on a regular basis start to get characterized as cranks and killjoys and snobs, because we still have the nerve to say the Harry Potter books are awful, or that there's no literary worth to anything Stephen King has ever written, or that Susan Sontag is grotesquely overrated, or that nobody should be reading Raymond Carver .... and so on. All those judgements are right, but as the crowds grow larger wanting to elevate what they've settled for, they start to look more and more eccentric ...”
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“I’ve made no secret of my dislike for this charlatan and “Nerdfighteria,” the vast, sprawling cult he leads with his brother Hank. I have no beef with the strictly average Young Adult novels he writes – somebody’s got to write such things, and they serve a useful training-wheels function in conditioning young reading muscles for the more rigorous joys of the reading awaiting them down the road (at least, they used to perform that function – but I’ll come back to that). No, my problems with John & Hank Green, with “Nerdfighters” and “Nerdfighteria” and their idiotic motto “Don’t Forget To Be Awesome” is the way the whole lock-step conformist mess undermines the very individuality it alleges to celebrate. The ranks of “Nerdfighers” in their thousands quote back and forth the catch-lines from The Fault in Our Stars; they pattern their every last behavior according to these limp, overwritten little things; they check their smallest stray individual thought against the consensus of their chat-boards – and they worship the Green brothers with a blind idolatry that would have embarrassed the golden calf at Mammon.”
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