So, then. Is literature the serious stuff you have to read in college, and after that you read for pleasure, which is guilty?

Mr Krystal doesn’t say this directly. But he says nothing about the non-guilty pleasure that both literary and genre novels can afford. And what he says about genre fiction all fits into the familiar modernist mishmash of Puritanism and reverse snobbery.

I don’t want to join the group still huddled together in a corner of a twentieth-century lunchroom smirking over a copy of Amazing Wonder Tales because it’s “bad,” and flipping off the stuffy teacher who wants us to read A Tale of Two Cities because it’s “good.” I don’t want to be there any more.

— Le Guin’s Hypothesis | Book View Cafe Blog. Ursula LeGuin has been the smartest person in the world on these issues for about forty years now. So when are self-proclaimed “literary” people going to start giving her the deference, or at least the attention, she so obviously deserves?