Monday, May 6, 2013

Yup, I'm a Genre Whore

*For the record, I will never shit on your choice of reading. Whether you read the Times Best Seller list or supermarket Harlequins, I fully support your reading choices. *

I'm a big reader. I will pick up and try just about anything once. And I have a wide, WIDE, reading range. Yes, I have a collection of specific children's books I use my children as an excuse for. *cough* Yes, I own a hefty collection of books for a two bedroom apartment. (Five overflowing bookcases, a few boxes, board book bins, and random stacks but who is counting) Between the Writer (moi) and the Husband (book a day man) we still frequent the library, used book stores, and regular bookstores to supply our habit. I have worked in bookstores for nearly a decade now, so the 'pantry' is always stocked. There are books on the kitchen table, books by the bed, even a wooden picnic basket chalk full of picture books in the bathroom to read to the boys for potty training. We are obsessed with books in this house and proud of it.
Between the Harry Potters and Jim Butchers is a healthy stack of Kresley Cole and Larissa Ione, James and the Giant Peach is comfortable nestled between Memoirs of a Geisha and The Autobiography of Mae West. To put it mildly, our reading tastes are eclectic. Though the hubby will swear in as a Sci -fi man, he will read just about anything with enough convincing/whining on my part.
Wearing my coveted Shaun of the Dead pin!

I don't need any convincing. But people get caught up on genre. I have hocked books at several different bookstores now, but working in used book stores, in that intimate setting they provide, has revealed the inner workings of the reader. People get caught up on genre all the time. I'm not sure when the change happened. I mean when I step back and see the same people who revere the work of Ray Bradbury and Orson Welles turn around and sneer at modern sci-fi, really? You know these two gentlemen wrote fantastic sci-fi and fantasy right? It's the label issue of the matter. We must fit everything into a box, though the box doesn't always fit. If I tried to put 1984 in the same box as Storm from the Shadows by David Weber, people get up in arms. No, 1984 is a classic piece of fiction!

Well, what about putting Dracula in the same box as World War Z. Both are horror right? Surprisingly not as many people get upset about that one, though Dracula is older and more classic than 1984.

Labels, they boggle the mind. Then you have the 'genre breaking' phenomenons, I'll use Hunger Games because Twilight makes me rant for whole other reasons.

What some people may or may not realize, Hunger Games was not Collins's first rodeo. She has this whole other series , a children's fantasy series, moderately successful itself. But in the balls and glory of the Games, which everyone and their mother read, people seemed to forget Suzanne Collins as a YA/Children's Fantasy author. It was a box, a nice, lovely box more and more people are poking their nose into. Why the felt the need to pry her out of the box is troubling. On my personal copy of the Hunger Games there is not a label for YA fiction anywhere on the cover or the copyright page. Your only indicator is Scholastic publishing, which is primarily a children's publisher.  It's still marketed in the Young Adult section, but why rid it of labels? Why not celebrate the labels? It's not a Genre breaking YA novel, it is a YA novel.

In truth, YA as a genre has lots of amazing offerings. I, myself, hope to join the ranks when I publish my book, because I am okay with this label. I'm also okay with labels like Fantasy and Science Fiction. My serial blog is Science Fiction, but the themes I'm exploring are just as heavy as any "fiction" piece.
It is thanks to writer's like Rowling, Collins, and even Meyers, I do not have the great fear of being nothing but a niche writer.

Now as a reader, I love genres, I love exploring different genres, sampling all the pies. I will proudly tell all I read smut, it's fun, relaxing, and it makes me giggle. I read fantasy, YA, sci-fi, mysteries, steam punk, biographies, horror, thrillers, graphic novels, comics, etc, so on and so forth. If it interests me, I'll read it. I believe everyone needs a healthy dose of fantastical fiction in their lives, even if it has to be sneaky. I believe it's a slap worthy offense to openly sneer at another person's reading choice. Who made you the literary police? I believe a well read man is sexy. I will stop whatever it is I'm doing if my child crawls into my lap with a book. Because books have power. I will remember the characters and plot of a book long after I've read it, I will go back and read many I love again. They inspire, they fuel imagination, and they survive, no matter what form they take, be it paper or digital. For me, genre is not a weighted word. I long ago decided books fell into two categories, Fiction and Non-Fiction. Genre is not a box I judge a book's quality by, I let the book speak for itself.

Genre is just an adjective.

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