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when we talk about ~commercial fiction versus ~literary fiction we are really talking about notions of ‘low art’ and ‘high art’ and honestly, we should be past those dichotomies by now. nuance x
i once taught a workshop of women in a suburban library who told me they didn’t read. after a while one, then the fold, admitted they read a lot of crime. one woman said she read two crime books a week. a week! ‘but i don’t read... you know, real books.’ they are real books.
these women were interested, smart, creative, and because of the perception of ~crime novels / mysteries are procedural and complex like / as less ‘real’ believed themselves to be outside of literature. this is classism at work.
i’m hesitant to get too into it because nuance is impossible on twitter: i read widely. lots of classic manga and poetry rn because my brain is fried from lockdown. but basically, enforcing false binaries around genres of fiction impacts people. it keeps class barriers up.
i obviously have a vested interest in how genre & class operates because i’m a science fiction writer (i think?). in what i read myself, i’m always worried i’m wasting my time, or that i haven’t read the right thing, or that i’ll sound stupid if i’m out of a literary loop.
the consumption of books is a private practice. we read alone. this means we internalize judgements on the ~quality of our reading on a deeply personal level. it’s an insidious barrier: we read to feel, to learn, to escape. to name any pursuit of this ‘less’ is... ugly i think
anyway this isn’t tweets this is like a zine or an essay or something so i’m going to stop now. unpack what you think is good art and what you think is bad art & try to catch yourself on to class biases within the arts x
