Trashy Books

[ailbhe]

I'm getting increasingly annoyed at this as a categorisation. Yes, I have used it myself. But I don't understand how it's used - some people use to to mean "genre I don't like", some use it to mean "plot I don't like", some use it to mean "badly written", and some use it to mean "popular". What makes a book trash?

I think that I tend to use it to mean "poorly thought out" or "unoriginal and badly written". But I suspect I have also used it to mean "popular romance".

Can you think of any genres which you think of as "trash"?

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Not trash, precisely - heck, if someone cared enough to write it, who am I to judge? But I do have a mental category called "supermarket books." You know, the ones you buy 'cause the impulse to read something, anything, hits when you're grocery shopping and the choices are limited to whatever your local Safeway can cram into a half aisle of paperbacks. Romance novels by women with three names, Westerns, genre detective fiction, and everything John Saul ever wrote ...

Some of it's actually pretty good, but the fact remains that I buy it much as I buy Cheetohs, for the flavor, not the nutrition.