I was trained in college with 'The Classics' - those being the canon of books deemed worthy of study in 'Literature' courses for university by some all-knowing body back in the 60s. They're good books for the most part, but they're not all stellar like my professors tried to convince me. They're also missing a lot of books on their list that aren't on there because of their 'genre' classification. Some slim few slip through the cracks, though, because of their subtlety or good marketing. Or, in the case of the particular argument that I'm going to heap upon you, the author is pretentious enough to claim that it's "not genre; it's literature".

I recently read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It's a fine example of poetic prose and a good demonstration of the use of language, but that's where it ends in its good qualities for me. I quickly got over the nearly complete omission of punctuation because after a while it comes naturally to you (like the street-speak in A Clockwork Orange). What I couldn't get over was that I felt nothing for these characters; I felt nothing for their plight; and I certainly had no decent response at the end of the book. It was depressing the whole way through, and it was poorly resolved.

Here's my real gripe: it's speculative fiction, but it's a terrible transition into science fiction. Like other pieces that have been deemed science fiction because of some of their material, it has a good opportunity to bring new readers into the genre, and it fails in that respect. It's disappointing. The other thing is that there are people within that scholarly arena who consider it literature - implying it is beyond the label of genre fiction. That bothers me immensely.

Also, it baffles me about awards even more now. The more I learn about them, the more I begin to dislike them.