Taking Out the Trash: Or, a Discourse on Less Exalted Reading Material

Abstract

When my father finds me immersed in inferior reading material, he likes to tell me that I read too much candy, and that I ought to satisfy my craving instead with something more worthwhile and filling. What he means is that I read too much trash — space opera, genre fantasy, romance, even the occasional murder mystery — and not enough real literature, books with substance and meaning. While I acknowledge that my father might well have a point about the quality of the mass market paperbacks I devour at a positively alarming rate, I don’t see any problem. Literature is well and good, and when I’m bored and have an hour, I like to curl up in my mother’s pink rocking chair and read Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Vladamir Nabokov, and others besides. There are other times, though, when I’m tired, stressed, or generally unhappy, and then trash fills its own less exalted but no less necessary niche in my life.