Book Blogger Hop: One Genre I’ll Never Read

Sorry for my absence! It’s been busy, as I’m getting a few loose ends sorted out before returning to university in September. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a lot of time to read recently, though I did finally manage to finish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and am now slowly working my way through The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, which will probably keep me occupied well into September (it’s a very lengthy read, at 627 pages).

I’ve skipped over on some of the weekly blog hops I’ve come across because I didn’t feel I could contribute anything interesting, but I like the question posed this week at Crazy-for-Books: What is the one genre you will NEVER read?

I’m a very picky reader, though I didn’t used to be. As a child, I read whatever had the nicest cover, or looked the newest on the shelves of my local library, and I discovered many wonderful books that way, such as The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke and Whale Rider by  Witi Ihimaera. I used to order books from the Scholastic catalogue if they came with cool-looking toys, and I would look on the to-be-shelved carts in the library to see what other people were reading.

Nowadays, I’m not nearly as adventurous, and I tend to read the sorts of books that would appear on Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels, or that would be required reading in high school, or a university literature course. These books have been read, tested and true, and I find that I am very rarely disappointed.

Now to actually answer the question—I don’t think there is a genre I would never read, at least amongst the ones I’ve heard of. Genres are extremely broad classifications; even amongst the numbered list of novels I typically reach for, which are nearly all ‘classics’, there are many further divisions: romance, historical fiction, sci-fi. etc. Essentially, I think any genre can be appealing if one finds the right book, and no book should be discounted because of its genre.  For example, I usually avoid young adult literature, but two of my favourite novels, The Book Thief and I Am the Messenger (both by Markus Zusak), are classified as  young adult. Discoveries like these encourage me to expand my reading list to be more encompassing, even if I find myself disappointed from time to time. There will likely be a genre, or several, that is more appealing, and those that we will purposely avoid, but I think it’s important to keep an open mind, and remember that once upon a time, we didn’t know or care about how books were placed in a library or bookstore.

(That being said, I don’t think I’ll ever read any paranormal YA literature— more specifically, anything involving vampires (or werewolves), teenagers, and love triangles. My experience with Twilight has put me off for good.)