I seldom just write a post to point to a blog post, but this is one of those times. Ursula K. Le Guin has haunted my bookshelf all my life. For one thing, she holds kick-ass opinions on writing sex in fiction. But today, she’s blogged about the Literature / Genre divide:
Of course every reader will prefer certain genres and be bored or repelled by others. But anybody who claims that one genre is categorically superior to all others must be ready and able to defend their prejudice. And that involves knowing what the “inferior” genres actually consist of, their nature and their forms of excellence. It involves reading them.
Her hypothesis is magnificent: every readable book is ‘literature’. To all the literary snobs of the world, to all the guilty, under-the-cover readers of romance or smut, this is a post worth reading and considering deeply.