High school... *shudder*

I went to the 8th grade parents’ info night at our assigned high school, which is one of the best in the state, but the building is so big, and the very idea of my little tiny baby going off to high school is still a lot to get used to. Mostly we learned about the trimester system that they switched to this year. The kids only have five classes a day, and they finish a year of math, science, whatever, in two trimesters instead. It’s not too bad. We even got to see the reading lists for the various English classes. D. will most likely be in three advanced classes (Algebra II, Biology, and Honors 9 English), and probably Jazz Ensemble (which is also advanced, and which starts at 7:30 a.m., which is going to be soooo hard, but maybe it counts as a sixth class?), and I think he’ll also have Global Studies and maybe Teen Health or maybe he starts Japanese, I don’t know. We heard a lot about all the college credits the kids get, not only for AP classes but also for oodles of classes that have been “articulated” to match the content of the local community college.

Wondering

I’m an outsider to the literary world – obviously I read stuff, and I follow various writers online, and I did once work for a remainder book company for two years, but there are things I wonder. And one of them is this:

Today I was in a bookstore looking for the sequels to Wicked. I went to the SF/F section and looked a couple of shelves above Martin, but no Maguire, which seemed odd. Wicked was a very popular book. A million copies in print, or some such. So I went over to the regular literature section, the “Modern Classics,” and there were two shelves of his books. “Ah,” I thought, “he’s one of those authors.” For whatever reason, some authors write what’s clearly fantasy, and yet it’s considered mainstream? I’d also bought Lev Grossman’s The Magicians from that part of that bookstore, and although I haven’t read it yet, I thought it was fantasy too.

Is there a thing where some authors, maybe those with East Coast publishing establishment connections, write books that are considered non-genre even though an ignorant reader would say they are? And does that make their work “literary” and increase their sales among people who don’t think of themselves as SF/F readers? And do these books still have the same appeal to those who do?

I’m not talking about children’s books, or fairy tales, or literary books with fantastical elements for the sake of allegory. I’m talking about books for adult readers set in full–fledged fantastical worlds, or with elaborate systems of functioning magic. Fantasy novels.

(Another example might be Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, British rather than East Coast, but I think it’s in the “regular” section of bookstores too.)