2008-06-22

ranty rant rant

I'm sick of defending chick lit.

Not because I'm no longer a fan of the genre. Not because I've given up hope that there is anything to defend.

I am just sick of feeling stupid because I like something. It would be like trying to defend my dislike of honey versus my like of strawberries. I don't happen to think I'm stupid for either of these tastes, yet a like or dislike of certain kinds of books can actually make a girl feel like a bloody moron.

I could throw Nick Hornby out there as an author of chick-litty novels. I could ask what makes Giller Prize-winner Elizabeth Hay all that different from chick lit-cousin Alice Hoffman. But I'm sure those who are made sick by the very idea of being in the same room as an adult paperback fairy tale would simply scoff.

Anyway.... on a brief side note, I re-read Hey Nostradamus! this weekend for book club, and have a couple worthy quotes to share:

Hey Nostradamus! Did you predict that once we found the Promised Land we'd all start offing each other? And did you predict that once we found the Promised Land, it would be the final Promised Land, and there'd never be another one again? And if you were such a good clairvoyant, why didn't you just write things straight out? What's with all the stupid rhyming quatrains? Thanks for nothing. (p. 91-92)

We're all born lost, aren't we? We're all born separated from God - over and over life makes sure to inform us of this - and yet we're all real: we have names, we have lives. We mean something. We must. (p. 146)

In the end, I think the relationships that survive in this world are the ones where the two people can finish each other's sentences. Forget drama and torrid sex and the clash of opposites. Give me banter any day of the week. (p. 151)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Huh, I feel somehow like a potential trigger of the rant. While I do appreciate your arguments, I believe it is far easier to make "judgments" about people from their chosen leisure activities (for example, all those perfectly nice boys who suffered in high school for liking fantasy and Dungeon and Dragons; what was wrong about that), as opposed to something less "defining" of who one is (like disliking a certain food). How we came up with these ways of defining people, I don't know. Is it an underlying flaw in culture? Western or all? And I have now realized that I truly do not have a point, and should stop babbling...