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?

1 comments

1 Comment

gibson.morgan56m 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.

-1