Do you find Childhood’s End in the literature section today, or in the SciFi section? A dozen years ago the kids a grade below me were assigned that in freshman English. And as part of my English Teaching Seminar we were told to use the books we read in class as part of a hypothetical curriciculum for high school kids - including The Giver and Z is for Zachariah, both of which are supposed to be commonly assigned books at the high school level. I’m sure Dopers could find dozens of other examples of books they’d been assigned that aren’t placed in the Literature section of bookstores.
Where is it?
It usually means neopaganism, such as Wicca.
I was freaked the first time I noticed that the horoscope section at Barnes and Nobls was many times larger than their “science” section, and the science part was mostly books on pets.
As Elfkin has pointed out, it’s already being done. They’ve been teaching The Martian Chronicles in high school English courses for years, for instance. This high school reading list includes Fahrenheit 451, Flowers for Algernon and the movie Mad Max.
It’s the same in college: My college has an entire course titled The Lord of the Rings and its Sources, using the trilogy as a basis for a general survey of Medieval literature.
You can find plenty of examples just by looking over any college bookstore website at the start of the term (this is a bad time right now, since last term’s books have been returned and next term’s books haven’t been ordered.)
Of course not. The writer writes what he wants to write. However, when he goes to get it published, the publisher determines its marketability. They are a business, after all, and that’s been a consideration for centuries. Do you really think they would have published Dickens if his books didn’t sell?
Happens every single day in literature, and in every single genre as well. Writers by choice are not pack animals.
Blather. Nobody said it and it isn’t true.
Most bookshops in the UK have such a distinction. And I’m such a snob that I never go to the “fiction” section.
However, there’s a fantastic bar/café/bookshop here in Oxford called Quite Interesting (that spawned a TV panel game).
I can’t remember any specifics, but they’re categorised into things like “Books about vicious revenge”, “Idle hands are the devil’s tool”, “Books to read when you’re feeling a bit crazy” and so on. I had a browse and ended up buying a book I would never have even looked at in a traditional bookshop. It’s a brilliant idea.
Our university english class had Harry Potter as one of their assigned books. And Orson Scott Card’s Enders Game is commonly assigned to schoolchildren and is firmly SF.
:eek:
I’m a librarian. This . . . this . . . Is it possible to organize a lynch mob from a transoceanic distance?
Anecdote: My brother worked at Waldenbooks, and his manager, Kim, was a fan of the works of Katherine Stone. Company policy was to place the works of Ms. Stone in the “Romance” section, but Kim fancied herself more highbrow than a reader of mere love stories, so she ordered the staff to shelve Bed of Roses, Home at Last, and other Stone novels as “Fiction”.
Honestly, you wouldn’t think it works, but it does.
I did Ender’s Game for a sci-fi unit in Grade 10. Other than that, sci-fi and fantasy is a big no-no around here. The Giver is exempt from that because of how it shows gender roles.
I worked for several years in a used book store. We had separate categories for “fiction” and “literature.” Mostly, the “literature” section consisted of books that are commonly on school reading lists. Thus, anything by William Golding was “literature,” but anything by William Goldman was “fiction.”
I once asked the store’s owner for a guideline, and she said that if there was a “Cliff’s Notes” for a book, that book was definitely “literature.” If no “Cliff’s Notes” existed for a certain title (or other titles by a certain author), the owner made the decision based upon her past experience as a college professor.
I almost quit my job when I saw that “American Psycho” had been assigned to the “literature” section.
Yes, and I shelved books in them at a B. Dalton’s in the 80’s.