Book sales figures are so private that I don't know how to validate this, but my intuition is that this is just the mirror of the rise of genre fiction. It was

Book sales figures are so private that I don't know how to validate this, but my intuition is that this is just the mirror of the rise of genre fiction. It was never unpopular in the first place, and there's little if anything left of the 1960s-era consensus that genre fiction is fundamentally lesser. I read a lot, and it's just never occurred to me that I have to find literary fiction if I want something deep or thought-provoking.