@Jeruba…..I remember once wanting to throw a novel away. It was many years ago, and I was visiting someone at their beach house and they had a stack of novels on the bedside stand. One was by the bestselling romance author in the US (I think anyway). It was one of her first novels. Everyone had been reading her. I thought, “Well, I’ll give it a shot.” It was summer, it was hot and I wanted something “light”. It was so incredibly badly written that I kept reading thinking: Surely it must get better somewhere_! But alas, it did not. I remember putting the book down thinking, “How on earth did this get published?”
The book went on to sell zillions of copies (despite it’s transparent plot, extremely bad dialogue and overworked descriptions) and was made into a movie to boot.
I couldn’t throw it away because it wasn’t my book.
There is “good trash” and “bad trash”(in my opinion). Good trash is trash that is written by an author that knows what they write is merely to entertain (a la Barbara Cartland). Bad trash is when an author attempts to write a very deep tome and misses the mark completely…an author that takes themselves too seriously when they do not have the skill to do so.