Authors I've Given Up On, part iii

From the extremely long Crooked Timber thread on the subject, a nice summary of why I avoid much contemporary fiction in favor of genre works:

Do I care, even the tiniest bit, about the delicate epiphanies of an aging bourgeois, the topic of so many contemporary novels? Well, maybe a tiny bit, but if it’s an aging university professor and his fascinating affair with a student or something, not at all.