What Am I Reading?

Myth or legend?  Novel or novella?  Comic or graphic novel?  Sometimes it can get difficult to classify the type of book/story I am reading, so I did some research.  Since I like to babble ad nauseum about things I discover, here is what I found out.

Myth - A myth tends to be a world view story, usually a story that explains something unexplained.  We see this most often in creation myths, seasonal myths, and attributing courses of nature to gods, demi-gods and the ilk. These tend to be of a more religious nature.

Legend - A legend is usually told as historical fact.  As in "my great-great-grandfather once..."  These tend to have a basis in fact, but may have been exaggerated, or embellished as time goes on.

Folk Tale/Fairy Tale - These stories tend to be regional, set in and around local areas with local flavor.  These stories also tend to have an element of magic, or magical beings in them. These tend to be more magical then religious in nature.

Fiction - This is a story that is made up, at least in part.  There may be some partial truths, or actual fact in them, but the story itself is actually untrue.

Non-Fiction - This would be the opposite of fiction.  These books are supposed to be completely true, thing biographies, how-to books, histories and so forth.  These books may have opinions in them, but on the whole are based in fact.

Short Story - A short story is meant to be read in one sitting and is usually between 1,000 and 20,000 words with most being between 4,000 and 7,500 words.  These stories tend to focus on a single element of a story instead of the big three (story, world building and characters).

Novella - This is a story in length between a short story and a novel.  In general a novella is no more then 40,000 words.  A novella offers more opportunity for development, but often focuses on a single element, with little to no sub-plot.

Novel - Here we have our full length book, usually over 40,000 words and have a fully developed plot, characters, world and sub-plots.  This is where we see multiple idea's fully fleshed out.  These tend to be the most common of "books" that are read.

Graphic Novel - Even though these are called "novels" they tend to be shorter then your average one.  Graphic Novels are classified by a story told by a "comic" style illustration with the story told more through visuals then words.

These are the basic definitions of the various types of books/stories one might read.  Of course with the zillions of books out there, there is bound to be some overlap, and some books that do not fall in the standard definitions.  All of this to say, when I use these terms in my posts, this is in general what I mean.  Hope this is helpful to some of you.  Happy Reading Everybody!

What's In A Genre?

Had a very interesting discussion (yep, let's call it a discussion) with my Hubbin the other night.  We ended up discussing the definition of various genre's.  He was saying that the meaning of what a person thought of a genre was more important then a solid if vague defined term.  I smugly told that he was absolutely wrong, that genre definitions were hard and fast and that is how we bibliophiles got on the same page about various books.   As often happens I kept thinking of our conversation and discovered that I may not have been as absolutely right as I thought I was.  I still think some sort of definition is needed when talking about genre's, but when you get down to it, maybe using genre is not the most specific of ways to classify a book.  Take Twilight for instance, I think the best genre description is paranormal romance...but one could easily make the case for it being fantasy, urban

fantasy, YA, or any number of things based on various genre definitions.  I have also discovered that genre's constantly change.  We are adding more and more styles of writing, and then combining them to create even more.  We are also much more accepting and have almost unlimited access to more then the mainstream versions of genre's.  To this end with the myriads of books out there being shoved into pre-conceived genre's, and more genre's being invented all the time, is it any wonder when I say cyberpunk, and he says cyberpunk, they don't necessarily mean the same thing.  Neither of is all right, but neither of us is even remotely wrong in our understanding of a particular genre, it's just a broad way to capture a complex idea.  All that being said, genre's are still at least a starting point in which to categorize your books, and we still need something along those lines or else MASS CHAOS! (Ok I may not have been to bed in three days and am a wee bit loopy).  Just try and keep in mind when using genre's to describe a book, or look for a book, or get suggestions for a book, to try and keep an open mind, because keep in mind Pride and Prejudice can be classified as a Classic, Fiction, Romance, or Historical Fiction and Fantasy can be anything from Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter and beyond and they are all valid.  Happy Reading Everybody!