palizcat: Ursula Le Guin had some choice words for this type of person 💙📚 (if anyone knows the source of this quote aside from Goodreads/tumblr 💀 please let me know)

Ursula Le Guin had some choice words for this type of person 💙📚 (if anyone knows the source of this quote aside from Goodreads/tumblr 💀 please let me know)

haven't been around long enough to weigh in on lit fic vs. spec fic ego battles, but MFA type classmates love telling me they're dabbling in SFF, like they're picking it up on thursdays like pickleball or skiing instead of learning a field, should annoy me but it cracks me the fuck up, godspeed

I'll check my Le Guin essays and see what I can find. This one is from a Guardian Q&A. www.theguardian.com/books/2004/f...

It was *so* frustrating when HP came out. So many news articles said how great it was that JKR was getting excited about reading. Booksellers who knew the fantasy genre like Le Guin talks about were ready to steer them to the Good Stuff when readers ran out of HP. But the kids wouldn't go there.

"Did you like HP? You can try ... " Diana Wynne Jones, etc. No, they just wanted more HP and nothing else. My take was like Le Guin's: Okay but not that special. "British school story with fantasy mixed in, it's a nice twist." 🤷‍♀️

Yes! Le Guin's disdain for HP brings me joy. And The Chronicles of Chrestomanci was one of my favorite books as a child (I just went and looked at the blurb on the cover of the edition I read: "Mad about Harry? Try Diana." 🙃)

I want that spell that makes the things taken away from the house shout about where they belong!

Yes yes yes!!! For a long-time DWJ reader it was just, um, ok? And DWJ has riffs on the British boarding school books - that ridiculous book in Witch Week that Charles has to copy, as well as the “Millie” books that Christopher sneaks to the Goddess. We belong to Crestomanci castle!!

I’m following you both, as I do when I find fellow DWJ readers. 😀

I already did. 😜 just bought Howl for my niece who loves books but somehow had only seen the movie but not read it. What?? Nooo!

I remember seeing a copy with a HOTTER THAN POTTER sticker in the early 00s. Correct but sadly ineffective

*getting kids excited about reading

A Redditor (weedshrek) says it is from her essay Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love www.reddit.com/r/TheAdventu...

Reddit - Dive into anythingwww.reddit.com This is a community dedicated to The Adventure Zone, an RPG audio fiction podcast.

Information on where to find the essay "Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love" at the Internet Science Ficition database. www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/titl...

Title: Genre: A Word Only the French Could Lovewww.isfdb.org

Here's the Tiptree Award Anthology at the publisher's website. (I haven't checked this yet to see if that is indeed the right essay; if I have a copy, it isn't where I can lay hands on it right now.) tachyonpublications.com/product/the-...

James Tiptree Award Anthology 1, The - Tachyon Publicationstachyonpublications.com Simultaneously exploring and expanding gender, the stories and nonfiction in The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1 are thought-provoking, imaginative, and highly provocative. Touching on the most fundam...

I love the collection “Words are My Matter” - really worth picking up if you haven’t yet.

📌

I was lucky that just as Harry Potter had been picking up I had finished Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion and started reading A Wizard of Earthsea and later her Hannish cycle books, and those seemed to have inoculated me against the Harry Potter.

She has so many amazing essays, especially about SFF - see especially a collection called The Language of the Night ***chef kiss*** and I'm a big fan of Dancing at the Edge of the World as well!

Yes! I LOVE The Language of the Night — I have a tatty second-hand paperback I bought when I was temping at the Law Society of Upper Canada and would go haunt the bookstores on Queen West at lunchtime. It’s so good.

First time I read it was in high school, and by her standards a lot of the fantasy I read at the time was pretty crappy lol so it mostly made me want to argue, but it was the first time I'd heard someone talk w such gravitas abt what fantasy could/should be and do - totally formative reading!!

We really fucked up when we let marketing dipshits make "literary fiction" into a genre. At this point lit-fic seems like a much narrower and less interesting space than any of the "lesser" genres

CONFIRMED: from "Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love" A talk given at the Public Library Association Preconference on Genre, in Seattle, February 2004, revised in 2014 reprinted in Words Are My Matter Writings on Life and Books from HarperCollins www.harpercollins.com/products/wor...

Words Are My Matterwww.harpercollins.com A collection of essays on life and literature, from one of the most iconic authors and astute critics in contemporary letters. Words Are My Matter is essential reading: a collection of talks, essays, ...

Thank you for tracking it down! I always feel better with confirmation when quoting someone

You're very welcome! It's a quote worth knowing about, so I am glad to know where it came from and glad to be able to cite it properly. (I found it by searching, excluding site:tumblr(dot)com, with Ursula's name and the phrase "buttered toast". That made reddit pop to the top on Google.)

📌

When I was a kid I could enjoy HP due to not having read any fantasy outside of fairy tales. Being in my 30s, having a very strong interest in all manners of myth and folklore and consumed fantasy rather commonly.... There's been better fantasy works since the medieval era.

My Uncle convinced me to read LOTR, and after that I stumbled apon her Earthsea trilogy (as it was at the time). Returning to the library I borrowed "The left hand of darkness" and after that I wanted to read everything she'd ever written, even if was just her initials on a receipt.

Buttered toast is pretty good, but an experienced toast reader also knows about things like jelly or cinnamon sugar.

As someone who also reads a lot of romance, I feel like her commentary holds just as well for that genre.

Absolutely. I have not read a lot of romance, but the difference between someone who writes romance because they love the genre vs someone "dabbling" in it and probably rather condescending about it is very obvious.

I would hazard that these conventions and structures are furthermore something Tropers have ruined

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