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Yes that's the point. Now that Gone Girl is a phenomenal success, every unreliable narrator book will be "copy cat" of gone girl

That's my issue with snobs who claim to like "originality" like LoTR when is is clearly inspired by loads of mythology.

He certainly didn't invent elves!

"The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared"
by Jonas Jonasson
(Love it -- hilarious, witty, a pleasure to read)

"Kafka on the Shore"
by Haruki Murakami
(Strange good -- but I'm not sure if I liked it as much as liked "The Wild Sheep Chase")

"One hundred years of solitude"
by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
(Very slow, had a hard time honestly)

"Gone Girl"
by Gillian Flynn
(A fast, exciting read but found the ending unsatisfying. But would recommend)

"Still Life with Woodpecker"
by Tom Robbins
(Fantastic prose, fantastical characters and situations. Will read more from him)

And for technical books, I read "The Art of Agile Development". Was alright.

> The first impulse of each mystery I write is some crime — or occasionally some enigmatic and ominous image — that gets a grip on me. (A good test I use for these is whether I’d listen to a whole season of Serial about whatever I just made up. If not, I scrap it immediately.)

> But writers often falter when they simply ride that feeling without trying to shape it, which is why Gone Girl is better than nearly every novel that’s been published since it came out. I’m not a complete inspiration skeptic — once in a while, as Hemingway said, you get lucky and write better than you know how to write — but it’s a rare novel that can survive on it exclusively.

Seems like good writing advice in general

Love this. I just ordered a copy.

I've been under the weather for a while, so I took the opportunity to read some. I can't emphasize enough how important regular reading is. If for no other reason than to climb out of your own problems and into an author's head for a bit, especially one with something important to say.

For anybody interested, the books I read over the past 2-3 weeks were War and Peace, Gone Girl, and God's Chinese Son. I've got about 35 more on-deck waiting for me to start on them.

A selection:

Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari, 2014 [English]) - A bit late to the party on this one. Mostly enjoyed it, especially the early ancient history stuff, but I felt it got a bit contrived in the middle - like the author was forcing it. Overall a good read though.

How to Invent Everything (Ryan North, 2018) - First book I've pre-ordered in a long time. A look at the history of civilization and technology through a comedic lens. Pretty funny and enjoyable.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Edmund Morris, 1979) - Randomly happened across this book while browsing a used bookstore for some stuff to read on a summer vacation. Loved it. It's big, but reads pretty quick for a biography. I've been a fan of TR since I first really learned about him in High School and I would recommend this for anyone interested in TR/The West/Americana.

Jaws (Peter Benchley, 1974) - Quite a bit darker than the movie.

Sharp Objects (Gillian Flynn, 2006) - I enjoyed Gone Girl (book and film) so I wanted to read this before the HBO series. To be honest...not my cup of tea. It was okay.

The Art of Racing in the Rain (Garth Stein, 2008) - Made me cry on an airplane. Thankfully my coworkers were on a different flight.

Vox, as a publisher, is hardly an unbiased source.

> But in fact, the lawsuit seeks financial damages only for the sharing of 127 books under copyright, including titles like Gone Girl, A Dance with Dragons, and The Catcher in the Rye. If the court awards the plaintiffs the maximum amount provided under the law, the most the Internet Archive would have to pay would be $19 million — essentially equivalent to one year of operating revenue, according to IA tax documents. That’s a huge setback, but for the IA, a tech nonprofit that relies heavily on grants and public donations, it’s not the major death blow it might seem to be.

Okay, but two things:

1. This opens up the door to other publishers to do the same thing.

2. $150,000 per book is clearly excessive.

I meet a lot of people who share this perspective. They're the ones who remember one line from Harry Potter that repeats a word or who think the Da Vinci Code was the worst-written thing that year. I always think that these people must not read very widely, because these books aren't actually poorly written. Were you to read ten randomly published books in any year, you would understand that, actually, there are tiers and tiers of writing that are actually bad. Typically, the books people target for cultural derision have prose that is workmanlike at best but which have met with success due to tight plotting or pacing, which is difficult to construct, or because the subject of the book taps into something in the zeitgeist and expands some conversation society is having with itself (Gone Girl or Fifty Shades).

The only NYT bestseller in recent years that comes close to your Titanic analogy is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book that sold on its title alone and which I would not be surprised to learn not a single person has read, including the author. Most successful books of the stripe you're describing are more like a singlecamera situation comedy--they stick to a basic but largely innocuous set of prose conventions that won't win awards but allows the author to focus their efforts on elements their audience cares more about.

There were like 100 major-publisher books that clearly modeled their title, if nothing else, on Gone Girl in the years after it came out. Didn't see that with 50 Shades. Both got a movie. Gone Girl seemed to have wider and more lasting cultural impact outside its immediate readership, as more than a joke or rapidly-fading reference.

For the record I haven't read either nor seen their movies, but I see the influence of Gone Girl around way more than I see 50 Shades.

The difference between his book and "Gone Girl" or "Fifty Shades of Grey" is that he sold a couple thousand copies in a week and dropped off the radar, while those books are numbers 12 and 9 on the list almost 9 months later. Being a best-seller for a week is a great way to sell a couple thousand copies, but you don't sell hundreds of thousands or millions due to one week at the top caused by some temporary publicity.

In the end it does not matter whether you re-read A. Christie's complete works thrice and did not finish Brothers Karamazov or vice versa.

Personally, I have a hard time not finishing a book, for example I can't decide whether I want to continue reading Gone Girl past half. This book is written cleverly yet somehow disappointing after the first big twist(it came too early imho).

One strategy I employ is reading three or four books at a time, one sci-fi, one mystery, one science, one philosophy one political and so on.