Genre Books are BAAAD... Mmmkay?

I constantly see Internet complaints about those DIRTY, STUPID, and CHILDISH CRAP gamer novels. You know, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms. You can probably count other series books like the Star Wars and Star Trek books under this heading.

The basic Internet line of thought is that they are all garbage and we should be reading more "intellectual" books.

Which mostly means snooty, self absorbed literary fellatio that few people actually finish reading, and even fewer understand.

Now on to my thoughts on gamer novels and such straight on. Honestly? I quite enjoyed a lot of them as a high school and Navy era teen. They are light and fun mostly. The problem comes when they start acting like comic books where nothing is ever really accomplished, nobody is in any real danger, and the only setting changes happen when the game company wants more money so they do a total rules rewrite. (Which leads to God awful games such as D&D 4th edition.)

Which tends to be just as bad as no change really. (Just like actual comics!)

Now I think most of the bashing of genre novels is really unfair. And mostly reserved for the Internet, which has been proven to have no basis in reality. Just bored people like us who really should get out more often as the "real world" could care less about Joss Whedon, Ron Paul, or any other hot button issue serious or entertainment based we have.

But these books do get tedious after a while. I still really like Dragonlance, but outside of the Tasslehoff book, I only read the Weiss and Hickman co written books. So from 89 to 2003 or so I read 11 books from that line. Chronicles, Legends, New Generation, Summer, and War of Souls. Now the last 4 books were pretty much KILL EVERY CHRONICLES CHARACTER WE CAN, but I didn't have any fanboy rage or anything. I actually enjoyed the work as a whole complete story. I just don't want or need anything else from Dragonlance.

The Crystal Shard was probably my first "real" novel at the tender age of 13 and no matter what anyone thinks about Salvatore he got me into reading actual big arse books. And for that I will be forever grateful. And I enjoyed the first 2 trilogies, but stopped caring by the black hardbacks.

Again, see the comic book comparison. Plus the plots got silly.

I've read a TON of the Battletech novels, most of the Ravenloft ones, and I read some of the Warhammer 40K books.

Tad Williams and other so called "respected and worthwhile" authors aren't my cup of tea. Or as one friend put it "All Williams does is spend dozens of pages going on about the most meaningless detail I don't care about". I do not disagree.

Considering your average person in the street MAKES FUN OF BOOKS AND READING, do we all need to bash silly summer reading novels?

No, no we don't.

If I am a big bad dummy for enjoying such "populist" books as stuff by Stephen King or JK Rowling or various other authors? (Except for the burgeoning "Female Written Supernatural Horror/Fantasy That's Really Just Porn for Women" genre. It can eat a big bag of fart. Seriously. Either do porn and call it such, or get the foot long weretiger shlongs out of the novels because the kinky sex is ruining some seriously cool "Urban Fantasy" novel concepts!)

YOU MAY EAT MY BUTT SNOBBY BOOK PEOPLES.