I went through a period of reading primarily hard-boiled murder mysteries starring the lone female detective who wins grudging respect from authorities who are consternated and oppositional to her otherwise. And there’s the formula, the genre, right there. That formula was haiku, though: there were ones written well and ones written poorly; there were fully drawn characters and characters from the head of someone catching a trend.

I needed to hear that Coyote story, and I needed to hear it often, and I needed it to star someone I could identify with. Studying english and psych and women’s studies helped make it obvious what I was doing, but I would have done it anyway.

I can and do read classics, and some hit me as mythos and some hit me as intellectual exercises and some hit me as both. The myth making ones become me and live in me and become part of who I am, helping me access life in a new way. Now that I am no longer on the edge, I have more emotional space for more nuanced novels, but I am using them in the same way I used my tough-lone-wolves; they are helping me to create ways of being.

Intellectual reads are sometimes interesting puzzles - but reading JUST to say how “good” something is (which I certainly have done) strikes me as sort of self-indulgent ego stroking, holding myself back with the strength of my ponderous brain.

Something that still hits me in the myth maker even though I have the tools to look under the engine? That’s a book I’ll read again.

So my answer to “crap” is usually “why?” and I think there’s often an interesting subtext to the Zeitgeist that produces such phenomenon. Harry Potter is loved not because of marketing, because the mythology is loved. I would suggest it is needed or lacking.

Literary “snobs” might need something else. Good for them. I mean that seriously - if they love a book deeply enough that it changes them, and they cannot love Harry Potter that way, that’s fine. However, if the engine analysis takes over the ability to love - well, that’s just sad to me. It’s Don Juanism, literary playin’.

But for that same reason I cannot give props to someone simply because they are reading. Crap is crap regardless of the medium. I don’t believe that crap in the form of text somehow magically makes it better. (Please note that I have not specified what is crap and what is not. I am relying more here on our own individual idiosyncratic senses of what is crap and what is not, in a manner that says more about what we like than what others should like.)

I am sensitive to the notion that people are too drained by capitalism to read “serious” literature, but I would appreciate greater specificity regarding why these people do not read said literature. The claim that they do not have enough time is bogus, because these same people spend an inordinate amount of time watching television, playing computer games, and/or Internetting. To say that they avoid “serious” literature because of the additional work required to digest it is an altogether different claim, and one that contains the kernel of the argument that you yourself are arguing against.

And I don’t think you’re not such a critic. You’ve always been able to succinctly tell me your synopsis on a book and give me its highs and lows. Isn’t that critique?

There’s a woman at our county library who is in charge of ordering books for a certain section. She says she spends most of her budget ordering patron-requested graphic novels because that’s what folks request most and shit, at least they’re reading.

A lot of my friends are into Harry Potter, but it’s mostly like you, for escapism. They’re university students and scholars and are usually stuck with textbooks and conference papers. It’s fantasy and light reading and there’s nothing wrong with that from my vantage point. We all need breaks.

Me on the other hand, I’m buried under a currently-reading list full of nonfiction that should have been required material for my undergrad but wasn’t. Maybe I’ll pick up a TC Boyle at our next library trip since you praise him so well.