A long time ago I was once in a book store - it wasn't a used bookstore, it was where they sent the remaindered books - does everyone know what I mean? Anyway, they had The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the Travel Section. That was just too funny.

Actually, I just moved flat & decided to rearrange my bookshelves while I was at it. Before, I basically had all the books alphabetically, regardless of style, period, or nationality of the authors. Now I have one section for fiction (this includes Harry Potter, Henning Mankell, Terry Pratchett, & so on - stuff I read when I want to be entertained without having to think too much) & one (the bigger one) for everything else - call it "classics", call it "serious stuff", call it "literature" or whatever you like. To me it's mainly the stuff I appreciate on a different level, often books I have to concentrate on a bit more, or simply those works that formed part of the "canon" when I studied. But at times I'm finding it quite hard to differentiate. I mean, Huckleberry Finn is very funny, & I haven't read Jasper Fforde yet, so I didn't really know where to put him.

quote:

Originally posted by Maeve:
I find it odd that Christopher Moore and Jasper Fforde are in the Fiction section (at Borders/the local mall) and Neil Gaiman is in Science Fiction. It just seems to me that Fforde's notion of jumping in and out of books and traveling/policing time should be science-fictiony things.

i think i've said before, in my library fforde is filed under crime.

and yes, neil did say that, that that way people would read books they may not otherwise have given a chance.

My shelving is utter anarchy. Stuff is pretty much wherever I put it. I don't mind it much, but it bothers some people.

my personal shelving, apart from the graphic novel shelf (because they need a larger shelf and are too expensive to rip) is mostly also known as piles.

i have a book shelf with my favourite books on it. unfortunately its not a very big bookshelf. so its only got a small fraction of my books on it. when someone has a new book, i kind of have to decide what other book to bump out.

after that i have a handful of shelves here, a top space there, and piles, piles and piles. sigh. i do have an extra set of shelves waiting to be built, hoping that will make a little difference.

as for genre. i'm bemused by the resurgance of a thread from 2003, and would probably contribute more if it were fresher. ideas like conteporary literature, where a brand new novel is put into literature undermines the idea that a book needs to be so old before its considered quality. i can half recall a blog post by charles stross where he suggested all his novels were mis-filed. but i can't remember the detail. his merchant prince novels - someone in our world finds gateway to other fantasy world - seems obviously fantasy, but he insisted it was science fiction. his laundry novels - bond meets lovecraft - seen as horror should in fact be crime. and his accelerando - far future post-singularity stuff - seen as science fiction should be fantasy. it was something like that. i think he was playing a little though.

I see the business and administrative sense in making these distinctions. It's when the distinctions become ideological and set in stone that they become immensely silly.

Having said that, I think there's a part of me that would bristle at putting Terry Pratchett next to George Eliot or Don DeLillo, for the sake of either.

there does seem to be a clear idea on the part of author's i've heard talking about it, that in someways being put in a genre is bad. the whole idea of the genre ghetto, as though it instantly limits the number of people you can reach. perhaps that is true, perhaps a genre author who breaks into the mainstream will see a real difference in sales and the impact on their careers.

but then different genres are treated in different ways - with the rise of the supermarkets selling millions of copies of paperbacks, their impact has to be reckoned with. and they don't sell literary, not the places that only have the "top 10". my local tesco, which i'll use as an example, sells predominantly crime and romance novels. i've noticed a trend in some ways for some "science fiction" authors to try and creep sideways into crime, if not sideways into general fiction/lit. michael marshall is the obvious example - switching from his weird/fantasy/sf persons michael marshall smith into more crime/conspiracy/with-undertone-of-weird. since then everyone of his books has been sold in tesco, and sold in all sorts of special offers. so that change has, i assume, made a huge change to his carrer. such that the pressure is to keep doing michael marshall work and not michael marshall smith work. by comparison paul mcauley keeps trying to creep into crime/fiction, and has had some success. though i guess part of the success does come from the publishers and how much effort they make to place a book in a book shop.

though of course, in some ways, online buying changes the ideas of categorisation in someways. though not sure it does entirely.

but then, talking about promotions, gaiman's publishers have made various efforts with his last few novels. american gods was a hardback that was only £10, and came with a money back guarantee and was in a lot of the high street newsagents in high promotional spot. anansi boys didn't quite have the same kind of offer, but certainly a lot of promotion behind it as well. which would suggest that his publishers at least were making some effort to push him outside genre - because a lot of the places pushing those novels didn't push "fantasy" novels.

Well, without genre how would people find "things that are similar to the stuff I like reading"?

*says the girl who doesn't get the current genres because she keeps looking for books in the wrong sections*

quote:

Originally posted by Babylon the Bride:
Well, without genre how would people find "things that are similar to the stuff I like reading"?

On the internet, that isn't a problem, really. Any good bookseller will have functions along the lines of "You may also be interested in..." or "People who bought XYZ also checked out...".

In a bookshop, though, it makes great sense to have all the sci-fi and fantasy books, to give just two examples, close to each other. There are many readers who'd say they only like crime/sci-fi/fantasy/chick lit, so it makes sense to put books that they're likely to be interested in next to one another. It's only with those pesky, interesting genre-bending and -breaking writers that the genre ghettoisation can feel unfair.

i have no problem with genre. i can see its -ve connotations to a degree - i saw a girl who did english lit in okc ranting about guys who read science fiction as though it made them simple and dumb - was pretty tempted to respond by point out my two technical degrees and ask what kind of job a fuck wit like her was doing in the real world. um... tangent... sorry...

anyway, yeah, being able to find fiction by association is a good thing, to a degree. the same is true with music. but then you get into the last.fm model, where if you like autechre you must like aphex twin. i love autechre, i hate aphex twin. go figure.

quote:

Originally posted by remote:
was pretty tempted to respond by point out my two technical degrees and ask what kind of job a fuck wit like her was doing in the real world. um... tangent... sorry...

she probably ended up with a tech/office job at entry level with no hope of increasing either salary or position...um, wait, we were talking about me, right?

dammit.

ummm...anyway! I don't really read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy, so having a store that organizes by genre would be useful if I were looking for, say, Stardust and happened upon something else...but that so rarely happens in practice. I usually pick up books based on word-of-mouth recommendations; as such, it doesn't really matter to me how they're arranged. the subject becomes a question of image and the perception of a book's quality for me. sci-fi/fantasy is not not-literature just because it's sci-fi/fantasy.

although I do like the fact that all the cheesy romance novels are in one section. easier to avoid.

quote:

Originally posted by Thirith & His Enormous Tibia:
I see the business and administrative sense in making these distinctions. It's when the distinctions become ideological and set in stone that they become immensely silly.

Having said that, I think there's a part of me that would bristle at putting Terry Pratchett next to George Eliot or Don DeLillo, for the sake of either.

of course it would be silly, no-one would dream of putting T next to either D or E

My books are also in piles, but not by choice. I tend to separate out fiction, non-fiction and 'collections': that's it.
'collections' includes poetry, short story volumes and collected newspaper/humour columns: mainly because I have to be in a certain mood to read them as opposed to a whole book.

quote:

Originally posted by Thirith & His Enormous Tibia:

quote:

Originally posted by Babylon the Bride:
Well, without genre how would people find "things that are similar to the stuff I like reading"?

On the internet, that isn't a problem, really. Any good bookseller will have functions along the lines of "You may also be interested in..." or "People who bought XYZ also checked out...".

I'd say the Internet community gives a better sense of it if you're buying books that aren't very popular. For one of the most recent gaming books I picked up, the other book most commonly checked out by people looking at my book was one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul books. For mainstream fiction it works, though.

quote:

In a bookshop, though, it makes great sense to have all the sci-fi and fantasy books, to give just two examples, close to each other. There are many readers who'd say they only like crime/sci-fi/fantasy/chick lit, so it makes sense to put books that they're likely to be interested in next to one another. It's only with those pesky, interesting genre-bending and -breaking writers that the genre ghettoisation can feel unfair.

In the warehouse stores you definitely need that separation. In the smaller stores I think you have a bit more freedom to mix things together, but I do think that having the Star Trek novels listed by author rather than by "Star Wars" is less than useful.

Well I end up going to most parts of a book store, as I'm what you might call a genre slut. I'll read any type of book at least once, unless it's technical to the point of being unable to follow, or I've previously read & disliked the author.

I popped into this thread to make some comments and realized that I'd said pretty similar things 5 years ago! (Crazy feeling, isn't it Dweller?)

The 'Literature' section of a book store seems to be equivalent to 'comtemporary fiction', i.e. anything that doens't easily fit into one of the genre sections - SF, Fantasy, horror, romance etc.