Yawning at Book Snobs

So I’ve been pretty good at keeping out of the newest tired, dead-horse version of “fun books, especially those by women, mark the end of Western civilization” kerfuffle. What is there to say on the detractors’ end that hasn’t been said over and over since Daniel Defoe was slamming Aphra Behn? Has civilization been steadily crumbling since then? Has the state of the novel? (Hope not,s icne it was just invented around that time!)

It’s a stalemate, folks. You know that scene in Twelve Angry Men where the racist just starts ranting away and instead of attempting to argue logically with him anymore, all the other jurors realize he’s a brick wall of idiocy and just walk away? That’s how I feel. There’s no point in trying to respond logically to people who honestly believe that the text of Hamlet is somehow tainted by being on the same shelf as the text of Shopaholic, or that there is an automatic devaluation of any book encased in a cover reflecting an unsaturated orange hue of 620 nm (i.e., “pink”).

But then I read Bookseller’s Chick’s well-reasoned defense, and I just want to say: right on, my friend! Telling an adult reader that she is incapable of making good decisions about her reading choices is tantamount to saying that if candy is available on the shelves at my local Giant, I won’t buy Brussels sprouts. Hey, guess what? I’m a grown up. I know the difference between vegetables and chocolate. I don’t need them to be on separate aisles or color coded for me to be able to tell, either. I also happen to love vegetables and I find it laughable that you assume, because you see me with a Snickers bar, that I don’t eat vegetables too. I happen to love vegetables, especially Brussels sprouts.

I was a Literature major at Yale. I can shoot my mouth off about the Western Canon enough to satisfy even the snobbiest of lit snobs. At one point, my friends and I estimated that we read between four and ten thousand pages of literature for every class. (The Russian Novel class was a particular bear, though Women and the Rise of the Novel was no slouch in terms of doorstoppers.) That means that over the course of my college career, I probably read about 200,000 pages worth of literary classics. Two. Hundred. Thousand. And that’s not including the books I read in high school, in childhood, and the classics I’ve read for fun. (Yes, I read all kinds of books for fun.)

Thanks for your concern, but I think I’m good, really.