Booking Through Thursday: Lit-Ra-Chur

• When somebody mentions “literature,” what’s the first thing you think of? (Dickens? Tolstoy? Shakespeare?)
• Do you read “literature” (however you define it) for pleasure? Or is it something that you read only when you must?

I enjoy playing card games, although I do not play nearly as often as I did when I was growing up. One of my favorite childhood games was Go Fish. I was pretty good at it too, collecting the four cards with similarly colored fish. Sometimes we'd make due with a regular deck of cards, taking out the jokers. Literature is played in a similar fashion, regular deck of cards with two of the 52 cards removed. Whereas Go Fish tends to be less of a team played event, Literature is just that, played by two teams of three or four players. Literature is sometimes referred to as Canadian Fish or plain old Fish. It is very similar to Go Fish.

Now Old Maid and SkipBo were games that . . . Oops. The question has nothing to do with cards, does it?

Do I read literature for pleasure? Oh, I absolutely read literature for pleasure. Reading is far from a chore for me no matter what I am reading. Well, maybe the paperwork I read for work is a bit of a chore, although it does get points for never being boring.

The first thought that comes to mind when I think of literature (other than cards) is in relation to reading material, namely books. I turned to my husband for help in putting together my thoughts on the subject and basically what we settled on was that literature is writing that does more than tell a story, either from an artistic or philosophical point of view. That is not too different from some of the definitions I found online.

Sedgeband.com: Written works of fiction and nonfiction in which compositional excellence and advancement in the art of writing are higher priorities than are considerations of profit or commercial appeal.

Merriam-Webster: The production of literary work especially as an occupation.

Literature is a very broad term and encompasses not only the classics but also contemporary writing. Although some people may snub their noses at the idea, genre fiction can be classified as literature as well. I think to totally dismiss genre fiction as frivolous is a mistake and way off mark.