It's stuff like this, New York Times. Stuff like this. But do you even care that so many people hate you? You must not, if you cheerfully run breathlessly snobby book articles like this week's gem, in which author Dominique Browning discovers the joy of mass market bestsellers. 

 

The key to enjoying a mass market bestseller - according to Browning - is that they always remain in their place. On a plane, entertaining you when times are difficult. You wouldn't want a bestseller like Faye Kellerman or Sue Grafton (Browning eschews all but the best bestsellers, of course) getting all uppity and creeping its way into your REGULAR reading time.

No, according to Browning, these books belong in the ghetto of airline travel. And she is happy to go slumming, when the occasion is thrust upon her. 

 

Lest you think I am exaggerating, let me be clear: I am not. Browning spends at least half of her article talking about what awesome taste in literature she has. How intellectual her usual reading is. How hard she tried to read Important Books while she traveled across the country. And how dismally this failed her. And then, in a moment of crisis, she made a world-changing decision: she bought the first Game of Thrones novel in an airport bookstore. 

 

But Browning wants to make it clear that her overwhelmingly positive experience with mass market bestsellers hasn't changed her everyday reading habits. 

 

"I no longer take Great Literature on the road. It belongs nestled in my arms, deep in a comfortable chair by a crackling fire, where I can tend lovingly to every detail it whispers, where I can pay close attention to the dexterous play of intelligence and the lilting nuance of verbal agility."

 

I'm not sure which is worse: this level of self-aggrandizing intellectualism, or all the people who will turn up their noses at it. I'm sure you know a lot of people who would never deign to read something off the bestseller list. Popular appeal being, in their minds, the stamp of idiocy. 

 

But these people are wrong. Books become bestsellers because a lot of people like them. You might imagine that the idiot masses are the ones pushing these books up the bestseller list. But you would be wrong. The idiot masses DON'T READ. They are busy watching the latest Real Housewives spin-off.

 

If mysteries or thrillers or romance novels or Great Literature or science fiction doesn't do anything for you, then don't read it. If you like mysteries or thrillers or romance novels or Great Literature or science fiction, then by all means indulge away. But for pity's sake, spare us the need to apologize for your choice in reading.