In the last couple weeks, I have poked around a little in genre fiction. I’ve always been a literary fiction gal, but there’s such an explosion going on in the genres that I wanted to see what’s up. Time to stop being a book snob and check it out (literally, at my local library).

On a friend’s recommendation, I picked up The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, in the YA (Young Adult literature) genre. I started the book on a plane. So many people love to read on planes, but I too often feel restless and can’t concentrate. Yet I could not put this book down, immediately hooked on the characters’ voices. I even found myself slowing my pace so I could read it on the flight home, too. YA (Young Adult) literature did not exist as a specific category when I was a YA (though books were written that would be labeled YA now). But it’s fascinating that this genre is as popular for OAs (you can guess that meaning) as for its intended audience. Some research shows that more than half the readers of YA books are older.

Another genre, speculative fiction, is also getting a lot of love these days. (It includes science fiction, horror, fantasy and a number of other sub-genres.) I’m just finishing up World War Z by Max Brooks, which also happens to be very popular with the YA crowd, but it seems Zombie lit is now its own genre. I have a fascination with comparing books with their movies and have recently read a number of books after seeing the movie to compare them (e.g. True Grit, Rebecca, A Christmas Carol, No Country for Old Men, The Hobbit). Apparently, I’m one of the few people who loved the World War Z movie, but in any case, the telling of the tale in the book is very different. And even better. The book’s format, a fictional oral history, is brilliant but would be hard to hold onto in a movie, so it makes sense that this was omitted. The oral history allows the writer to get into some fascinating repercussions of this fictional apocalypse. It’s an engaging—and frightening—read.

I’m glad to give up some of my genre prejudices. And while I’ll stick with my literary fiction mainline (just finished The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson—now that is an impressive piece of writing…well deserving of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), I want to be sure and pick up more genre fiction. The more books—and the more readers—the better.