"Class and Prejudice" (article)

Jenny

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7993920.stm

Are people judged by what they like to read?

richt

Sadly, they often are. But that wasn't actually the point in this case, was it?

Dwight

I have a friend who turns up for work every day with the novel she is currently reading. Always an epic romantic saga of 800 pages approx. and it seems to take her about two days to read each one. Barbara Taylor Bradford and that kind of thing. I sometimes feel a sense of superiority in having more eclectic reading tastes.

Stirling

I won't think myself superior just because I was reading a book I believed (subjectively) 'superior' to other books. I'm just pleased to see people reading!

KJ

I'm with you on that Stirling.

Stirling

I actually re-read that title. So they are saying genre fiction is somehow low brow and indicative of working class; while 'literary' fiction is more worthy and an indicator of middle/upper classes?

b*******!

*air turns blue in Stirling*

What a load of twaddle. Why don't they look at University reading lists:

Charles Dickens
Edgar Allan Poe
Wilkie Collins
William Shakespeare
John Buchan
Philip Pullman
Robert Louis Stevenson
JM Barrie . . .

All populist writers; all considered literature!

richt

No, Stirling, that's not what they are saying at all.

The point being made, by Laurie Taylor's interviewer, was that it was questionable to consider Dickens somehow more 'real' (because it dealt with the working classes) than Jane Austin (which dealt, with equal 'reality', with the middle classes.

Nothing there about being judged on what you read (though you are quite right that readers of literary work do tend to look down on readers of genre fiction), and nothing there about the relative merits of literary and genre.