Sections in a Bookstore/Library

[cybertalus]

Cthulhu's Librarian, I dunno about anyone else, but I have a pretty simple way to tell the difference between literature and fiction. If I can roll rapidly through pages without having to stop and think about what's going on, it's fiction. If I have to stop and think about what I'm reading and it takes me more than two days to read per 500 pages or so, it's literature. Though by that definition most non-fiction and all poetry is also literature.

It's not that I dislike literature, quite the contrary. I'm not always in the mood for it, but when I am I like it to be lumped all together so I don't have to sort through John Grisham and Stephen King to find it.

Oh, and Morrus, give the online bookstores a few more years and you could very well get your wish. As a quasi-regular Amazon customer I'm always getting recommendations based on my past purchases and how I've rated them. So far the recommendations are so-so (and absolutely horrible when it comes to game books), but as time goes on the system is bound to improve. Eventually online bookstores may very well be able to have a personalized section of books you'll like.

 

[RenoOfTheTurks]

Most fiction sticks to things that could happen today, or have happened in the past, while speculative fiction (scifi and fantasy) do not. That's a real and instinctual distinction. Orson Scott Card has a well-conceived rant about separating scifi and fantasy from one another in bookstores...it can't be done so as not to confuse customers, for two reasons: the distinction breaks down in some cases anyway, and authors that write both will cause people to b*tch about not being able to find some works with the author's others.

At least with the lit/fiction distinction you don't as often come across situations in which some of an author's works appear in one category, some in another.