All About Romance put up an inter­est­ing blog post a few days ago about genre fic­tion and book clubs. The post talks about how one woman in the club gets apolo­getic about some of her read­ing choices.

This post made me think of a news­pa­per story that I wrote a few years ago about some book clubs in my area — and the fact that almost all of them were read­ing lit­er­ary fic­tion and non­fic­tion. Books that I had never heard of. Books that I would prob­a­bly never read in a mil­lion years. Oh, there were a few pop­u­lar fic­tion authors in there, but not many.

Now, to each their own and all that, espe­cially when it comes to books. We all have dif­fer­ent tastes, after all. But at one point, I remem­ber think­ing, you guys are read­ing these books for fun? Because they didn’t look like very fun reads to me. (I believe one of them was about some kind of epi­demic that killed tho­suands of peo­ple. Not exactly a light, fluffy beach read).

When I read, I want to be enter­tained — I want to have fun. And noth­ing does that for me bet­ter than genre fic­tion. Romances, mys­ter­ies, west­erns, spy thrillers, fan­tasies. That’s pretty much what I read, and I’m not ashamed of it. I had enough of the “clas­sics” in col­lege to last a life­time. Think­ing about Ulysses by James Joyce still makes me shudder.

I guess I’m won­der­ing where all the fun book clubs are — the ones that read genre fic­tion. And why so many folks feel like they have to read some­thing that’s “impor­tant” or “wor­thy of their time.”

Maybe if we focused more on read­ing books that we actu­ally like instead of those so-called impor­tant titles, we might actu­ally read more. Just a thought.