Ah, we're talking about two different things.

I'm good with that.

"It's not sci-fi literary masterpieces people rave about. It's human dramas,"

You know, the romance genre is so wide and varied that I can't give recommendations. Libraries usually have those "if you liked this writer, you'll like these writers" pages and they can be helpful. (Sorry.)

Or I'm not a very good reader. Sorry for the mis-read!

There's a difference between not being able to read at a reading level (the three-year-old) and choosing not to always read at your highest reading level. It's just not a sensible criteria. A lot of the stuff written at a high reading level is pretentious dreck (certainly not all, but a lot), written by people in…

Oh, honey, I wrote six of them.

I am an intellectual disgrace, not because I read nothing but YA, I read everything, but because I love the idea of being an intellectual disgrace. Also conforming to an intellectual standard that somebody else has devised strikes me as indentured servitude of the mind, but that's just my anti-authoritarian bias…

I agree. (FINALLY (g). No writer is good at everything, and good literary criticism analyzes that. But then you get into the KIND of literary criticism and it all goes to hell again.

Let me put it another way.

I disagree with the idea of shallow readers. I think all readers sometimes read shallowly because there's nothing in the narrative that makes them stop and think, and all readers sometimes stop and think because there's something in that particular narrative that captures them. I don't think shallowness is intrinsic…

Writing fiction is a bear, no doubt about it.

Genres, from the POV of publishing, is marketing, a way to categorize the kind of story inside the covers, albeit an incredibly imprecise way.

The key is "books that I've read." Unless you've read all of YA, it's hasty to condemn an entire genre on your sampling.

"Pulpy crap" is a subjective judgment. It's good that both people in your family agree on that term so she won't kill you in your sleep for criticizing her reading choice, but it doesn't mean that the books she reads are universally considered pulpy crap.

The problem is, who sets the standards?

Smooch.

"if an adult is reading something written at a 15 year old's reading level, I think its pretty fair to give them a nudge towards books more suited to their level,"

There's a lot of subjectivity there. "She's reading something I don't like, therefore it's stupid and I can shame her."

I will never understand the need to sneer at people who read.