I'll be honest, I felt a little guilty about putting The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks on my list of 10 worst fiction books. So many people love Nicholas Sparks.  ( And 3 people wrote into the comments to tell me how much they loved this book).  Wasn't I being a bit of a kill-joy by being so harsh on this book?

I'm feeling slightly less guilty now, however, after having read Heather Havrilesky's take down of Nicholas Sparks on BookForum.

I don't actually read BookForum regularly (my loss, I'm sure), so I found out about this via Steve Donoghue's blog, who summed up the tone of the article thus:

Heather Havrilesky very patiently and mercilessly tears apart the literary output of Nicholas Sparks, concentrating on his new book, lavishing plenty of scorn on his older books, and along the way pithily reminding her readers why the potting of such an easy target matters

...of course to be perfectly fair about all this, I'm obviously not in Nicholas Sparks's target audience.  So I suppose it's my fault for reading the book.  In the same way I probably would absolutely hate the Twilight books if I ever read them, but then whose fault would that be?