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PSA: My book club fought for 45 minutes over whether a novel was 'literary' or just 'genre'
Last month at our meeting in Portland, someone called a fantasy book 'not real literature' and the room exploded. We spent the whole time arguing about what counts as literary versus genre fiction instead of talking about the actual story. I finally had to step in and say the author themselves called it speculative fiction on their website. Has anyone else had a book club debate spiral into weird definitions like this?
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drew_jones311mo ago
Right, is there anything book people love more than a pointless argument about what counts as "real" literature? lol my old book club in Portland had basically the same fight, someone called a sci-fi novel "not serious reading" and we wasted a whole hour on it. Ended up with someone actually pulling up the author's interview where they said "genre is just a marketing label" and still nobody backed down.
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smith.nancy1mo ago
My old book club had a similar blowup over a fantasy novel. One lady kept saying it was just "escapist junk." I pointed out the author won a Nebula Award. She said that didn't count. Then someone else brought up that the book had a map in the front. That somehow made it worse. We never finished the book. The map lady still brings it up three years later.
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gibson.morgan1mo ago
Huh, 45 minutes over whether something counts as "literary" or "genre"... that's a lot of energy. I mean, who died and made anyone the gatekeeper of what's "real literature" anyway? Seems like some people just need to feel superior about what they read, like calling something genre means it's less than. But honestly, most of the arguments I've seen about this boil down to people being snobby about fantasy or sci-fi without actually reading any of it. Did you ever just ask the person who started it what they'd call books like The Road or Never Let Me Go... those get called literary but they're totally post-apocalyptic or sci-fi at their core. Feels like a waste of a good meeting when you could've been debating whether the main character was actually likable or not.
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