I bet you didn’t know PZ Myers is a literary critic:
Try comparing LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy to Dan Brown’s tripe, or to those horrid westerns by Louis L’Amour, or the Left Behind books, or anything by Tom Clancy. Which ones have the most depth, treat their readers as serious people who will think and learn, and actually exhibit some hint of good writing? When I see people walking out of airport bookstores that are stocked with the usual bestsellers — which are often little more than glorified Dick-and-Jane books with added sex and violence — I often feel like snatching it out of their hands and leading them to the juvenile literature and telling them they need to work on rebuilding their literary foundations from scratch.
Not bad for a Godless liberal.