Blog Post # 6

Faryaal Zindani

Is there a difference between literary and popular commercial/genre fiction in your mind?

In my mind when I think of a literary book I end up thinking about something boring or uninteresting. When I think about popular genre fiction books then the books like Twilight or Harry Potter, basically any popular trending book comes up in my mind. The teachers/schools put a negative image in our mind about what literary books really are, by making us annotate every page and read a certain amount of pages by a certain time period makes us not wanting to enjoy the book and makes us more uninterested.  When I read a popular genre book outside of school I don’t have to keep stopping to write things down which makes me go more into the book. Jodi Picoult, states how she doesn’t think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction, I would agree with that statement because if a person likes to read literary fiction more than they should be able to, same goes with people who like popular genre fictions.

If Gallagher’s argument is true in Readicide, should we continue to teach literary fiction so exclusively?

We should not teach literary fiction so exclusively because that’s going to make the future generations not want to read much, or for those matters just stop reading. People are already starting to hate reading because of the schools book choices so why keep teaching literary fiction so exclusively. I agree with Gallagher’s argument that schools should teach half literary fiction books and half popular genre books because if students start reading books they like it will keep them more enthralled in reading a book and possibly make more people want to start reading again because they forgot the feel of what books were like.