The National Book Awards were given out yesterday, with Shirley Hazzard given the award for best fiction novel. Stephen King was awarded and honorary National Book Award for his contributions to American literature. This was followed by a snide remark (which I cannot find, though I know I read it somewhere this morning) from Ms. Hazzard, deriding King for being popular. This is another shot in the war between snobby academic literary types, and people that write books that others actually want to read. To some you cannot be taken seriously if more than critics and three others read your book. I applaud King for his speech in which he said he has no use for those that refuse to respect such authors as himself, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, etc. Granted, I'm not a big Grisham fan, and I find Clancy to be both entertaining and a horrible writer, but to me King's book, especially his Dark Tower series, are the height of literature. He uses pop sulture references, ancient myths and legends, and his own catalogue of works to create an epic story of good versus evil. He's a good writer, with a great sense of style and grammer, and an imagination to challenge the best that have ever lived.

This controversial issue in the literary community is best illustrated by the differing opinions on J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. He provided the framework for an entire genre (epic fantasy), he has inspired creations in comics, movies, books, even real estate development. Linguists honor him for the extremes he went to in creating entire new languages to go along with his books, cartographers bow in awe to the consistency of his world and its topography, and historians only wish the real world has such a depth of ancient knowledge. All of this, yet literary critics, the kind you find writing in "intellectual" journals like The New Yorker, not the ones reviewing the new Grisham novel in Parade, show constant anguish that the general public could think of Tokien as the greatest writer of the 20th century. Yet a poll of the British nation shows just that. I like a lot of what is considered gret literature, and a lot of it I find boring, some of it even incomprehensible. This all leads one to wonder what exactly are the qualities of truly great literature. To me it's appeal, writing quality, what I call "I'm losing sleep because I can't put it down," and meaning. Tolkien represents all of those. Many critics seem to think appeal has nothing to do with great literature, but to me if no wants to read it, and those that do wish they hadn't wasted their time, then it's not good literature, it's crap.