Michael Chabon, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

Sometimes I feel guilty about my reading. I think I should read more non-fiction and more books that are thought provoking about big and important issues. Books that make me come across as intellectual rather than some mindless housewife who reads for (horror of horrors) entertainment. Written down this makes me look vain and seems absurd. And it is and I am, of course, but there you go.

What I read is, I suppose, not so awful but one love is the dreaded "f" word - fantasy. I'm not a fan of heaving breasts and knights rescuing damsels from dragons, although I'm sure there are some good books in that, but I love, eg, the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett (please don't look too closely at the covers, they contain some heaving bosoms), most stuff from Neil Gaimann and Ray Bradbury is my favourite author. These are comfort reading and re-reading.

Needing more to read on holiday, I picked up Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands which consists of 16 essays - "an exhilarating ode to reading and writing" according to the back of the book. Ticks the boxes for quality reading or, perhaps more precisely, for reading I can talk about at the school gate and look well-read. Not bought with the best of intentions, but I loved it. It's fabulous.

The first essay was my favourite and re-defines the word "entertainment" amongst other things. Is "re-defines" the right word? It takes entertainment back to an earlier definition - a "lovely one of mutual support through intertwining" which Chabon proposes, in relation to reading, to "encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature". Forcing science fiction, fantasy and the like into "genre slums in the local Barnes & Noble" and out of the stacks of "literature" is bemoaned and Chabon notes that some of the finest short stories are written on the boundaries "in the spaces between genres".

In a later essay he analyzes Cormac McCarthy's The Road as science fiction. Other essays call for children to read more comic books, celebrate fan fiction and discuss how he thought he would become a hard sci-fi writer. It does what it says on the tin or, more correctly, on the back of the book. Fantastic stuff for a reader who has been beaten down a bit by wine-drinking book clubbers with a narrow view of what constitutes a book worthy of reading.

I feel validated, really. The books I love are loved by a guy who has awards attesting to his literary worth. I realise I shouldn't need said validation; it's a little sad. But reading this has been confidence building. And it was entertaining, in the very best sense of the word, to boot.