Science fiction author Steven Brust has come up with an analogy to categorize different types of reading matter according to their “nutritional” value:

Books can be broken down into four classes: popcorn, steak, caviar, and celery.

 

Popcorn is pretty obvious. Anyone here enjoy The Destroyer novels by Sapir and Murphy as much as me? gobble gobble gobble Steak is the stuff you can bite into, chew, swallow, and gain sustenance from. …

 

[Caviar] is a lot of work to get to. You have to open the can, you have to make sure the refrigeration is exactly perfect. You have to have the right atmosphere, and you have to approach it with the proper reverence if you’re going to get anything out of the experience. But if you do, my god, is it worth it!

 

Celery is that stuff you have to chew and chew and chew and, by the time you’re done, you’ve gotten even less nutritional value from than the popcorn. I won’t name any names.

What’s interesting to me about these categories is that they are, to a certain extent, subjective. I think everybody can agree that certain books are “popcorn” — Dirk Pitt novels, for instance — but it seems that one person’s caviar is another’s celery, i.e., the ratio of reward versus effort expended would vary widely depending on one’s education, interests, and tastes. For example, there are folks out there who happily read high-brow postmodernist lit (Thomas Pynchon, anyone?) and find it both entertaining and nourishing, while I myself think it’s a tedious slog from which I take little of value. By contrast, many of Stephen King’s novels qualify as “steak” for me — the Dark Tower novels, in particular, have a lot going for them that some folks might not notice because of the genre elements — but many people dismiss his work as popcorn reading (or worse).

I don’t have much else to say on this subject, I just thought it was an interesting little thought exercise for the day…

(My thanks to SF Signal for the referral.)