So many news articles start with "the big narrative"™. The authors seem like burgeoning/frustrated writers who are just practicing on us. I skim to get the details and toss all the narrative fluff. So many books are full of this fluff, you have to skim or its boring. The "respect" for the novel is a past time. When everyone can blog/cast/self publish people are not so impressed by the existence of a book. It is taken as a starting point, not a be-all-end-all.

This article is great.