Tasha's (aka Beren) Journal

Yes! I love Middlemarch and find The Mill on the Floss far too melodramatic. I adore the Barchester books and Ayala's Angel and get bored to tears by the Pallisers. And despite going to the same school as Charlotte Bronte I cordially despise Jane Eyre and hate Wuthering Heights. Yet we're supposed to tiptoe round them with expressions of awe just because they're old.

I also hate Scott Fitzgerald and Hemmingway etc.. And of modern lit!fic writers I suppose I like about 5%.

There's a lot of rubbish in genre fic too, of course, but there's an enormous amount of incredibly good writing, as there is in fanfic! Nowadays I tend to go for genre and fanfic for my fiction 'fix' and stick to non-fiction for other reading.

I suppose we have to consider who is giving the accolades. Usually, critics and journalists (and sometimes other writers) who probably don't read genre fiction and don't know what they're missing! Not readers, anyway. You don't normally get lit!fic on the bestseller lists! And in the end, the number of readers is the highest accolade.