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Comment by jccalhoun | Hacker News Reader

For the last few years I've had a joke that there is a law that every Goodwill store is required to have a copy of Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, Hunger Games, and/or Left Behind. I wonder if these bestsellers will be forgotten decades from now because clearly a lot of people are not holding onto these books.

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Part of that is the sheer volume of those books that were sold. People throw away more copies of Hunger Games in a day than many books will ever sell until the end of time. Like the anecdote about Pablo Escobar losing 2 billion dollars every year due to rats and mold destroying his mountains of cash that he was unable to store in banks (for obvious reasons).

The charity Turning the Page runs Carpe Librum pop-up used bookstores in Washington, DC. When one opened downtown some years ago, I walked in and saw 30+ (I counted) copies of Eat, Pray, Love on the discount shelves.

Probably not - if something gets as popular as these it isn't likely they're going to be forgotten anytime soon, least of all the Hunger Games.

Many of them will probably grow into 'classics' in the decades following, and it's a bit rare to see them just fade into obscurity, but it happens.

Hunger Games is written for a teen audience, and like most books targeted to that demographic, will simply go out of fashion and disappear.

Yes, I read it :-)

ah yes, like all the other flash-in-the-pan teen novels:

to kill a mockingbird, the hobbit, the catcher in the rye, the lord of the rings, fahrenheit 451, anne of green gables, the lord of the flies, flowers for algernon, dune, the call of the wild, treasure island, and the narnia series.

Yes, I know many books in that category fade away, but only time will tell if hunger games is one of the ones that fade, or one of the ones that lasts

I wrote "most", not "all". I didn't see anything special or deep in THG.

Many of those are now recognized to have a real artful quality and literary value, which is hardly present in something like the hunger games

Well, I haven't read The Hunger Games, but my readings of criticism of it leads me to think it probably has some sort of real artful quality and literary value - what is your argument that it doesn't?

Don't take my word for it - read it yourself. It's trashy YA kitsch. Contrast with catcher in the rye or LotR afterwards

It also has a completely predictable plot and many deux ex machinas to get our heroine out of a hopeless jam. Its plot is similar to Stephen King's "The Long Walk" which is a far better (and grimmer) book.

I don't think all of those books were necessarily written for the teen / young adult market although I guess they were marketed at it at one time or another.

Isn't part of the point of the article that some books were best sellers and yet they are forgotten?

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