![]() For that reason, I find ‘light’ fiction as valuable and moving as the ‘heavy’ stuff, and I’m more than happy to argue with anyone who say otherwise. I face little problems, and experience little triumphs, and just go about trying to shape the raw materials I’ve been given into some kind of life. If pressed, I could probably label a couple events in my life as ‘tragedies.’ But even that would be a stretch, and my real life is lived from day-to-day, in the quiet moments. But I don’t believe that the ‘seriousness’ or ‘literary merit’ of a book is measurable by how many sad things happen in it. Now, I want to say at the outset that I can love ‘depressing’ books with the best of them: Half of a Yellow Sun with its Biafra war, Dracula with its eponymous embodiment of evil, pretty much anything Edith Wharton wrote…I love these books even while wishing I could protect the characters from their milieu. ![]() And these lit snobs would sneeringly refer to ‘light’ books…you know, the kind of fiction in which nothing dreadful happens and which doesn’t leave the reader depressed. ![]() Among the many sub-breeds of hipster there were the lit snobs. I went to a small liberal arts college that had its fair share of hipsters. ![]()
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