Started noticing a shift in how my book club debates genre fiction vs literary fiction

I run a book club in Portland and a few years ago, like 2019 or so, everyone would roll their eyes at sci-fi or fantasy picks. Now the last 6 months have been totally different. We read The Left Hand of Darkness and people were actually fighting about whether it counts as "literature" or not. What changed is I think a lot of folks started reading more diverse stuff during lockdowns, you know, when they had time to pick up weird things from Libby or Hoopla. Now even the snobbiest member in our group admitted that Octavia Butler hit her harder than Franzen ever did. It's like the barrier between high and low art just collapsed. Has anyone else had their group totally flip on what they're willing to discuss seriously?

2 comments

2 Comments

reese_singh871mo ago

We started mixing in more graphic novels and nobody looks down on them now.

nathan_webb1mo ago

Wondering if this is really that big of a deal in the long run though. People get excited about a few books and suddenly it's the end of the high/low art divide... feels like we've been through this cycle before. Remember when everyone decided Cormac McCarthy was suddenly literary after The Road came out, even though he'd been writing genre-adjacent stuff for decades? Same thing happens every few years. Might just be that your group got bored with the same old arguments and needed something fresh to argue about. But yeah, Butler is legit, not gonna argue that one... just not convinced the snobbiest member had some deep conversion.