Sir Terry Pratchett was the author of the Discworld series of novels, a satirical fantasy series following the lives of the people of the Discworld, which is, unsurprisingly, a giant flat disc (that rests on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space, but that's neither here nor there).

In my opinion, Pratchett is one of the greatest satirists of all time, being able to be ranked among the likes of Oscar Wilde, Kurt Vonnegut, and (perhaps my most controversial claim in this article) even Mark Twain.

But at least one writer over at the Guardian disagrees with, but for all the wrong reasons.

In an article entitled "Get real. Terry Pratchett is not a literary genius," Guardian writer Jonathan Jones makes some truly horrible arguments to "prove" his point. Go read the article. My points will make more sense afterward.

You're back? Good. There's four things that really annoyed me about that article.

The biggest issue in the article is the following: Jones claims that the entirety of the Discworld series is nothing more than a "potboiler" for Pratchett, while openly admitting to never having read more of his books than merely "flick[ing] through a book by him in a shop."

This is, of course, no way to write literary criticism.

In school, I'm a double major. These days, I mostly function in my broadcast journalism major, but I still occasionally moonlight as an English major. If there's one thing that I've learned in my English classes, it's that you actually have to have read the damn book to have any opinions on it.

Mr. Jones, I must ask, how can you hope to contribute to the discussion about a book, when you haven't even read it?

The answer is, of course, you can't.

I was tempted to stop reading here, but for some reason, I pressed on, perhaps because I knew I couldn't criticize Jones without understanding the full context of his piece.

The second thing that annoyed me about the article was Jones' apparent feeling that there is only literary fiction and "trash," with nothing in between.

Is a lot of the literature to be found in your local Barnes & Noble "trash"? Perhaps. But I'm of the opinion that every text has some sort of value.

If a novel is popular, that means that it somehow resonates with the people of the time period in which it is popular. That means that, even if it is the most poorly written novel of history, it still has value, because it can help future generations understand the mindset of the current generation. This of course effectively means that no literature is trash.

Third on my list of grievances is Jones' overall tone of holier-than-thou literary superiority. Jones brags about having read both Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Charles Bukowski's Post Office this summer.

So you've read a few authors that are required reading for an Intro to Literature class. Don't get smug about it.

But perhaps the thing that rubbed me the wrong way most about Jones' article was his complaint that people cared too much when Pratchett died in March of this year, according to the BBC.

Jones complains that people seem to care more when popular writers, such as Pratchett and Ray Bradbury, pass on than when critically-acclaimed ones, such as Gabriel García Márquez, do.

My reaction to this is to say "Well, of course they do."

Writers like Pratchett and Bradbury found a way to communicate big ideas in such a way that made the average consumer of pulp actually care. Márquez, while creating an undeniable classic in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is well-known to write far more densely, making his works less accessible to the average reader. And besides, Márquez wrote to a Spanish-speaking audience while Pratchett and Bradbury wrote to an English-speaking one, so it only makes sense why the majority of people Jones knows care more about them.

While Sir Terry Pratchett is easily one of my favorite authors, I was careful not to go too in-depth in this article on my love for him, mostly because Pratchett isn't truly the point of this article.

The point of this is to show that there's more to "trash" literature than one would think, and to show that "trash" literature truly doesn't even exist.

And the point is to, very publicly, ask Jonathan Jones to never write an article such as "Get real. Terry Pratchett is not a literary genius" again, because if he does, he'll just look like even more of a joke to the literary community than the actual jokes in Sir Terry's work.