What I think Of Book Snobbery

This is a post for the people who think that their tastes in books are better than everyone else and how you can deal with those people. 

I’m a book lover and I’ve always been since I was 6 years old. My first book was Le Petit Prince and I loved every single bit of it. Then, I read a lot of chick literature and Harry Potters when I was 8 years old. I still remember how excited I was every time my Mom brought me to the library to choose my books and I keep going back 2 weeks later to get the sequels. During my high school years, I started to have an obsession with classical literature- I read books from Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, Jane Austen to George Orwell. Since I missed all the typical “teenager’s books” I discovered them later on in College hahah. Yup that’s where I started reading Lord of The Rings, The Hunger Games, Divergent, etc. And now that I finished my university, my readings gather every genre from horror to scifi to YA to fantasy to comics.

That said, I have had a huge problem when people start to judge me on my readings just because they only read classical literature all their lives and they don’t consider the book in my hand as “well-read”. In other words, a typical book snob person. How do I react to it ? Very hardly in the beginning, as a very expressive person, I would start to go into a huge discussion and debate on how they don’t know what they are talking about but slowly with time, my reaction would resume to this: 

1. First, I don’t give a fuck what you read. That sums up for everybody, book snobbery or not. As long as you read and you want to discuss the book with me or share an interest concept and idea, I’m all ears.
2. And I give less fuck on what you think about my books. I‘m sorry that your book snobbery is grounded in a misconstruction that your mental frames are absolute right and everyone else’ are wrong. Let me explain. Let’s take someone who says :« if you’re reading YA, your book is inferior because you are not challenging yourself to better your vocabulary and improve your view on the world.» You are actually making an implicit assumption that I possess the same values, same comprehension of the world, same opinion, same vocabulary, the same knowledge as you. Well spoiler alert: we don’t. In YA, I found myself feeling more alive than reading classical literature. That’s because I read to feel something, to escape reality. And in some classical literature I found myself being amazed by the richness of the words.  So you are reading to challenge yourself…..or to prove to other people that you are trying to challenge yourself? Why don’t you read for you instead ?
3. Books opinions are personal and should always be. We can, to certain points, agree on what books are good and what books are bad but we (even this blogosphere) does not represent the world. We are only a small part of it. There’s a whole world out there that we don’t know about. And that’s what’s good and what’s fun about books. Because it will allow us to discover and explore out of our comfort zone.  I absolutely love this quote by Lemony Snicket :
   

   “There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different.”

   

   What do you think of this phenomenon? Have you ever witnessed it yourself? 

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