October 30, 2005

Topic: A Defense and Definition of Trashy Novels

People have strange ideas about reading. From the time we are young, parents, teachers, and other adults treat reading like it's good for us. They talk about reading like it's broccoli, or some sort of vaccine against ignorance and teenaged pregnancy. They encouraged, threatened and cajoled us into reading, and when we took to it, they bragged about us to their friends - "Oh, my little girl just loves to read!"

True, reading does have some great advantages - I've embarrassed myself plenty by using three-dollar words I can't pronounce that I picked up from some book or another. But mostly, it's just another form of entertainment, like videogames or TV. Like other entertainment media, some books are art, the vast majority exist to make money by entertaining the reader. Which is why I can't understand why some people get so impressed or huffy about a person's choice of reading material.

Most people have a sort of Madonna/Whore complex when it comes to People Who Read. The good PWR are the ones who voluntarily spend their free time with Literature like Anna Karenina or Jude the Obscure. And the bad PWR? If your preferred genre of reading features a clinch cover or the name V.C. Andrews, you my friend, are a Reader of Trash.

When I say Trash, I mean it in the most positive way. I'm reclaiming "Trashy" for those who read and love entertaining fiction. The Literary Self Righteous tend to regard any book that doesn't somehow improve or teach you as Trash. They sneer down their noses when you whip out the latest Nora Roberts on the train, or dismiss you with a disgusted, "Oh," when they learn that the last book you read featured Stephanie Plum. Though most folks tend to regard People Who Read as somehow smarter or more sensitive than their mouth-breathing, TV watching brethren, reading Trash will only get you stereotyped as a fat, lovelorn housewife who devours Harlequins and bon-bons with gluttonous abandon.

I'll refute that right now. What I choose to read for fun says nothing about my intelligence, my education level, or my self-esteem. I picked up reading romances from my mother - a college-educated career woman who never took shit from any man. All of my Trash-reading friends are educated and successful. Some of them were even English majors.

In further defense of Trash, some books that are now considered classics started out as Trash. The line between the two categories is often simply Time. I had an English teacher who would not let us read Stephen King's The Stand for our book reports, but actively encouraged us to read Gone With the Wind. When I complained, she explained to me that Gone With the Wind was a classic, while The Stand was mere popular fiction. Yeah, so a riveting story about good and evil with biblical and folkloric allusions is not worth reading, but a racist, historically inaccurate soap opera about the life and loves of a spoiled, slave-owning whitegirl is? (I'm surprised Forever Amber wasn't also on the list - it's a better book, though Moll Flanders has them both beat.)

Jane Austen and Charles Dickens both wrote novels that were hugely popular and highly entertaining. And while I'm no big fan of Literature for the Sake of Literature, I love me some Austen and Dickens! Those two knew how to tell a good yarn. And - for Oprah's sake! - look at Dracula. That book has got to be one of the crassest, most exploitative, f*cked up, poorly written pieces of "Literature" I have ever read. But it was hugely popular and it's over a hundred years old. Voila! A Classic.

So why should I read Literature for the Sake of Literature when the stuff I'm reading may well be book report material in fifty or a hundred years. If Gone with the Wind and Dracula are classics, why not Born in Shame?

Posted by sk :: 10/30/2005 :: 2 comments

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