Poor little gophers

Pick up the nearest book (mine happens to be Armageddon in Retrospect)
Flip to page 123
What’s the first line?
What’s the last line?
Connect them together – not with the words that were originally there, you cheater! – and this particular page is actually rather entertaining…

“If they lay a finger on that trap,” Elmer said, “I’ll-”

He balled his hands into fists and slammed them on the table, activating the trap’s trigger and causing it to snap shut. He jumped back and nearly fell over. Roy and Willis looked at each other and the daisy-chain of traps going out the barn door and towards Billy John, who was setting the last three by the gopher holes.

“BILLY JOHN! WATCH OUT FOR THE TRAAAAAAAPS!”

“I’m not afraid!”

 

Vonnegut in Retrospect

Coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the author’s death, “Armageddon in Retrospect” will probably be read by most Vonnegut fans with misty eyes and fond glances towards his other superior works. This is not his best showing, even for a dead madman who wrote the works in question with a growing sense of self-righteousness. Even his son Mark asks in the foreword, “How could he get away with some of this stuff?”

Several of the stories contained within “Armageddon” are clearly a throwback to his “Slaughterhouse-Five” days, revealing some details of the Dresden post-apocalypse that Billy Pilgrim could not have comprehended. Other non-Dresden stories fall somewhere between “Timequake” and nonsense.

I am not disappointed in the dead man, only regretful that I could not have understood more of his work while he was alive.

 

Question and Answer

I posted on Yahoo Answers the question “How would you differentiate literary fiction from genre fiction?” and got a singular answer from a demimonde00:

“Ooo tough one! They do blend together sometimes, and should more often. Generally, something can be identified as ‘genre’, and then everything else falls under the ‘literary’ category.

Generally genre fiction is concerned with certain subjects or settings and approaches its plot in a certain way. But these days the genres are getting fuzzier, and I think that’s a good thing.”

Though she didn’t specify what “that’s a good thing,” I’m not quite sure that I agree with the “everything else” category being called “literary fiction.” Kurt Vonnegut is clearly sci-fi, but he’s got some crazy ideas going on in his work which could be called literary. Can authors start out in a genre, but as their work becomes hailed as “classic” (or, as I saw on the cover of someone’s self-published tripe, “a towering literary achievement”) could they migrate over to literary with their formerly genre’d work in tow? Perhaps this is the “good thing” demimondeoo was talking about.

Is “literary” like love: do we know it when we see it?