There are a couple things you need before you jump into this book:

1. A love of reading or writing. If you're not interested in either of those things, you will not find fascinating what I found fascinating.

2. You need to have read at least half of the books Hall discusses (Gone With the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Peyton Place, Valley of the Dolls, The Dead Zone, Bridges of Madison County, Jaws, The Da Vinci Code, The Hunt for Red October, and The Firm) AND/OR be willing to have a few of those endings totally spoiled for you. Otherwise what he's talking about won't make sense and it'll irritate you that gave away so much.

After you have those two things, there's nothing that's not interesting in his presentation of the Twelve Features that all of these title possess.

There are a couple things that seem "duh" about a couple of the Features: of course a mega-bestseller would have characters that you can latch onto - but what I appreciated about Hall's discussion was that he attempted to define why these characters were latch-onto-able. It's a really clear, concise argument that he makes.

Another aspect I liked was the focus placed on the American mega-bestseller. All of the books explored in Hit Lit have something intrinsically American about them and were wildly successful in the USA. So there's some sociological probing going on at the same time - the way Americans view race, religion, and S-E-X are front and center because there's no denying that all three of these issues are present in the mega-bestsellers here. Really fascinating.

Because of Hall's summaries and analyses, I have a greater respect for the authors' authenticity and the level of skill that writing a mega-bestseller takes. He presents the popularity of sentimentality, overt tugs at heartstrings, and the gratuitous calls-to-action for which bestsellers are critically minimalized as a gauge for what's really important to the reading public. Hall gives the bestseller a respect that's not seen often in academic or critical circles - and I think he does a good job of expressing the impact of these books. (Plus, Hall seems to know what he's talking about in general - two of his former students: Barbara Parker and Dennis Lehane.)

Hall sums up that knowing what makes these novels tick isn't enough to create one of your own. You can know the recipe all day long, but that doesn't make you Gordon Ramsay now does it? Write with passion, write what you're interested in, and remember that if there are no tears for the writer, there are no tears for the reader. (per Robert Frost)

I've read exactly half of the books on this list, and with the exception of Jaws, I loved all of those.This book has inspired me to read the others on the list, so that can't be a bad thing, right?