I wrote this up in response to a comment posted on the Bitch magazines site:

http://www.bitchmagazine.org/article/bite-me-or-dont

I have to weigh in here. I am a writer and reader of literary fiction and the occasional classic. I now get excited when I find out there is a new translation of War and Peace that is different than all others that came before it. Would I have cared about this twenty years ago when I was sitting up all night reading Clive Barker's "Books of Blood"?  Definitely not. Would I have slogged through "Atlas Shrugged" to get a better idea of what the other side believes? Not on your life. I would have stopped reading if those were my options though that's what my mother would have preferred. If I hadn't developed the patience and ability to sit still for 1,000+ pages while reading "lesser" works, I wouldn't be able to do it now.

When I was in third grade I started Anna Karenina because the book was pretty. I didn't get past the first page for obvious reasons. I still think of this as a personal failure. Strange but true. I did read seventy pages of Jaws around the same time before tiring and moving back to whatever it was I had at hand that was more at my level. I loved the front cover and tension the author set up from the first page.

My mother constantly harped about my choice of reading material, "Garbage in, garbage out." I persisted because I got something out of reading, it took me away and made me forget about all the BS that comes with growing up. I learned early on that reading was a worthwhile use of my time. Though I love Charles Dickens and his zany characters, there is no way I would have appreciated them, nor been willing to take the time to find them when I was fifteen, or even twenty.

Kids and anyone for that matter, should read whatever the heck makes them happy. Whatever. Because if they pick up the habit and make reading and words a part of their lives, they will continue to do this as adults. If they find nothing worthwhile to read when their tastes are less mature, one might say, they won't make it to the place where they can appreciate anything better (I realize that "good" and "better" are subjective terms).

I am living proof of this. I would even argue that my tastes surpassed my mothers by the time I was thirty. She never got beyond your non-fiction political stuff. She SAID Dickens and the classics was what I was supposed to be reading. What did she open up at bedtime? Shirley MacLain and Ronald Regan biographies.

Here might be a good time to point out the hypocrisy that always comes with these types of discussions. "Good literature" is something most people can pretend to agree on. What they are actually reading when no one is looking is a good story, whatever form it takes.*

*Here would be a good place to mention that this theme is handled in the book, "How I Became A Famous Novelist," by Steve Hely.