A Canticle for Leibowitz vs The Road

This last week I read both ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ and ‘The Road’ by Corwin McCormac. Both of these books are post-apocolyptic Science Fiction books. Both won awards, a canticle won the hugo award and the road won the Pulitzer prize. Now the thing that bothered me with this is that Canticle was located in the Fantasy/Sci-Fi Section of the book store while the road was located in the fiction/literature section. Granted after reading them both, The Road is clearly better written. Not that its a better story but I understand it being titled literature.

What I can’t understand is that because of the way the bookstores are set up, all literature must therefore be fiction, but no science fiction or fantasy could ever be literature because once they would achieve that title they would be stripped from their bookshelves and set under the literature/fiction heading.

This gets me so worked up because of the horrible reputation that the genre has with mainstream America. Granted there are some very very bad books out there that give the genre its bad name, yet there are also some very very well written books. The road is one such book and yet it doesn’t give anything to the genre because of something so simple as where it is placed on a bookshelf.

Well this may not be important to many people out there and yes we shouldn’t care what others think of the genre we all love, yet just think of what the success of recent authors has done for the genre…with their popularity, many other good writers have started to write in the genre so in my opinion, when people start to think higher of fantasy and sci-fi writing then we as readers receive better novels.

First Post

Hello Avid Fantasy Readers

This is my first post and seeing as there will probably be no one to read this right now it will also be in my Mission Statement Page

I decided to create this blog because I am tired of looking in google for best fantasy books (when trying to find something to read) and finding comments such as, Terry Brooks and David Eddings are awesome!!!!!!   Blah, sorry but….no.  This is a page in responce to those of us that have been slightly embarassed when people ask us “what are you reading?”  We will shrug and say, well its just some fantasy book or some such comment.  Well I’m here for those of you who are sick of reading the Lord of the Rings again and again (that includes books with different names by different authors but the same stuff in the middle).

Fantasy can be really well written, and more often then not lately it is.  Although I still find myself combing the bookstore trying to find a book without a dragon on the cover.

Fantasy can be literature!

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