Genres

[mrissa]

Okay, you people, I'm in a restless mood sitting here writing my book, and that means it's question time on the livejournal. What I want to know about this time is genres and subgenres:

Do you have genres you definitely don't read? (And if so, what?) Do you have subgenres you definitely don't read? (And again, what?) Do you have genres or subgenres in which you'll read very nearly anything? Does genre have anything to do with what book you get in the mood for, or do other characteristics have more to do with what book you choose to read at a given moment? For what else do you use genre (recommending books to others, finding it in libraries or bookstores,...)? Do you feel certain that you know the difference between genres? Between subgenres? Do you make up your own categories? How do you categorize nonfiction, if at all? Do you consider age indicators (middle-grades, YA, etc.) to be genres or some other type of categorization or completely irrelevant to you or what? What does it take to get you to read a book in a genre you usually dislike? Any other genre-related thoughts you want to share with me? Is the word "genre" starting to sound nonsensical the way words do if you repeat them enough?

Comments

[porphyrin.livejournal.com]

I will attempt to read anything, but I find that the 'throw the book across the room factor' is higher with medical/hospital romance, medical thrillers, technothrillers, and badly written books with great globs of exposition like Dan Brown's _Da Vinci Code_.

What makes me throw books against the wall, in general, is a lack of 'getting the details right'. Things that please me will, like Bujold's _Curse of Chalion_, get even their casual referents right.

In general, I mostly read within the genre for my fiction, although my father keeps pushing "lit'rary" books at me (like _Cancer Ward_). For my nonfiction, it's biographies, histories, archaeological books like _The Ruins At Ebla_), Bible commentaries... just about anything, as long as it doesn't put me to sleep.

Although if it DOES put me to sleep, that could be desirable on insomnia nights...

And again, the stuff that's not boring gets thrown across the room if someone makes an obviously buggered-up assumption. I cite as an example a book I just tried to read on the wreck of the Batavia, which asserted that Anabaptists were a violent terrorist group.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Some of the Anabaptists' latter-day descendants get pretty belligerent....