And yet, after reading the thing, you might likely be left wondering what in the world the sources of all those quotes might have been thinking when they handed them out.

It is for books with literary merit such as these that we might find the entire back cover full of impressive recommendations and praise from other authors. As such, they typically make lots of mistakes along the way when it comes to telling a story that is actually engaging and worth being told. My take is that a literary story’s primary concern will be to try to relay a “theme” or “well-posed question” dealing with society or humanity… or something else equally boring and, for me, pointless. It seems to do a fairly decent job of relaying the main ideas of what literary fiction is about. A Google search for the term “literary merit” currently brings up a 2017 article from. Not only do I not understand them, I don’t even see them when I read a story. In fact, I think I can safely say that any literary aspects of a story come across as 100% transparent to me. Finishing this book has brought me to the conclusion that I am completely oblivious when it comes to understanding the “literary” merit of a story. Sometimes it surprises me just how different my opinion can be from other readers, not just around the world, but from those in my own backyard as well. Well, here I am again at the tail end of the reading experience for a book that has left me absolutely stymied.

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig