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What's up with fiction?
I haven't read any since high school English class, but my fiancée does. She often buys the trendy stuff that has won some awards and is (I assume) prominently displayed at Indigo. Hanya Yanagihara and and Sally Rooney are two recent examples.
After asking her about her current book over the last couple years, I have come to realize that all of them are mostly based around the following things:
Sexual abuse, especially molestation
Homosexuality or transsexuality
Main character is black or similar, everyone is racist towards them except the good guy(s)
Main character is disabled somehow
While these plot points are basically mandatory to win a book award now, a lot of "classic literature" is just old books that happened to contain these themes. For example, Truman Capote would not be a big deal had he not been a homo who wrote about homo stuff.
None of this is that interesting, but it is weird how well the title of "literature" and book awards launder what is essentially gratuitous descriptions of homosexual molestation into something tasteful and classy. Is this widely known? I get the sense that this is something most right-wing men just have no idea about.
Well, there's your problem. You literally don't know what you're talking about.
I read a lot. I read fiction and non-fiction, but mostly fiction. I read genre fiction, I read litfic, I read classics, I read small press and indie-published stuff and I read stuff from the big publishers. In other words, I think I am qualified to say that while you may have accurately described most of the books your fiancée reads, you have not accurately described most of what's published.
Publishing is pretty woke so the wokest titles get prominently featured at your local bookstore, so sure, you'll find plenty of misery-porn with characters like you describe. (I have not read anything by Hanya Yanagihara or Sally Rooney - I am not into misery-porn.)
However, if you bother to browse past the highlighted displays and actually look at the shelves (or, you know, browse Amazon), there remain hundreds of books published every year to suit every taste. Even conservative tastes, even the tastes of conservative men, in whatever genre you like.
As for awards, the big literary awards (the Man Booker, the Pulitzer, the National Book Award) rarely resemble your bullet list. Can you tell me which award-winning books you think fit that description? (As far as I can tell, Yanagihara has been nominated but not won any of them, and Rooney has won some smaller awards for Irish writers and the Goodreads Choice Awards which is... probably not as prestigious as you think given that it's literally just a Goodreads popularity contest.)
I've definitely discovered books nominated for the goodreads choice awards where they had more votes than they had actual goodreads readers (just the kinds of signaling books you would expect). So they are being pushed externally somehow, whether that is by publishers or authors or social media, I don't know.
I also find those awards problematic because Amazon pushes them the same year they are published, but many popular fiction titles that aren't by a major author take 2-3 years to peak, by which time they no longer show up on that list.
Total ratings is a good gauge of actual popularity of books though.
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