On Book Snobbery or Does It Matter What You Read or Only If You Read?

At the end of my last post, I mentioned “fluff” books – the trashy, non-literary, dirty-little-secret kind of mass market paperbacks found in grocery stores and airports that many (if not all) readers occasionally succumb to and most (if not all) of us enjoy (even if only secretly).  I made a joke about not mentioning them because I wanted to sound impressive.  Well, it was said dryly (wryly?) so that you, oh Clever Blog Reader, would read it and chortle to yourself at how witty I am, hahaha.  But the more I think about it, the more I’ve come to realize that I need to come clean.

So here goes, my own true confession: I am a book snob.

Yup, it’s true.  Not an unapologetic snob, to be sure.  But I am one nonetheless.  I am the girl who judges the book by its cover, the reader by the contents of his/her bookshelves.  If I see you clutching the latest Nora Roberts to your breast with fervor, I will smirk; if I hear you talk about how you have the complete collection of Barbara Taylor Bradfords in hardcover, I will snicker.  If I go to your house and the shelves are only covered with wall-to-wall colorful spines depicting scantily-clad women and men with Fabio hair and muscles gleaming, I will roll my eyes.

I’m a snob, a snob!  she said.

Don’t get me wrong.  I will still read many of these kinds of vampire-and-werewolf and Scottish-laird-ravages-the-peasant books – and regularly.   But I will NOT read them on airplanes or in doctor’s offices or in coffee shops.  Especially if they have cover art that makes them readily identifiable as “those” kinds of books.  They will not go on the beautiful hand-carved wooden shelves in the living room or the study.  And I will not buy them in bookstores or check them out at the library either – unless they are discount bookstores or libraries in towns I don’t live in.  Nosirree bob.  These are the books I read at home, on vacation on my private island where no one sees me, or in the company of other, like-minded, friends who share my guilty pleasure; they are the books I keep in the guest room or on the shelves hidden in the corner, the ones I buy online (by the box-full, sometimes) through superstores where no one knows me by anything other than my email address.

Ridiculous, isn’t it?

In this day and age, it is a miracle anyone reads at all.  Between the internet, television, DVRs, Netflix, texting, cellphone games, soundbites, reality TV and the like it should be a cause for celebration when anyone anywhere picks up an actual book to read, regardless of what the title or meat of the book address and regardless of what the cover art, or author picture look like.  I know this, objectively, in my head.  And yet I still feel slightly ashamed at the thought that They (you know Them, the ubiquitous people who somehow watch and judge everything we do) might see me reading something so low-brow, so unliterary, so COMMON.  As though certain genres or authors were somehow beneath me, and that I therefore, by virtue of education, personality, training, or acculturation, were somehow above being seen reading something so frivolous.

As though reading could ever be “frivolous”.  As though I were somehow lofty and high-brow.  Shame on you Jill-Elizabeth.  Shame.

I mean, seriously – I am an unemployed slug who until fairly recently spent the vast majority of her life lying on the couch with a stack of books (of all shapes, sizes, colors, lengths, genres, cover-art-types, etc.) next to her.  Let’s be brutally honest, an intellectual or cultural giant, I am not.  Sure, I have been fortunate enough to be well educated and to have experienced a lot more of the world in my thirty-MGHRMMM years than many people will be able to in their entire lives.  Sure, I enjoy a lot of “high” art and literature, and have probably read more than the average person.  But that doesn’t make me some sort of intellectual hotshot, and it surely should not make me into any kind of a literary snob, since I have always enjoyed a wide variety of book styles, from the classics to kid-lit, sci-fi to chick-lit.

Anything you read that you enjoy is worthwhile.  Anything.  The act of reading itself redeems the reading material, in my mind, because the act of reading is an affirmative step to improve one’s own mind by taking in new ideas and expanding one’s worldview.  And any and all ideas are worth taking in – not necessarily or always worth keeping or adopting, mind you, because there’s a lot of craziness in the world.  But taking in new ideas and expanding one’s own awareness of what is out there in the world, well, that will always be a worthwhile endeavor in my mind.

So I am going to try to cut people (and by “people” I mean others AND myself) some slack.  Sure, I can’t imagine reading Harlequin romances all day; but I’m sure there are a great many people who can’t imagine reading the science-fiction and children’s books that I do all day either.  There’s a place for everything in the literary world, much as there is in the “real” world – “trash” included.  😉