Librarian vs. Reader: The Myth of Perpetual Summer

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Librarian: This novel falls into two major categories, historical fiction and literary fiction. Both are incredibly hard genres to judge from a collection development standpoint, as neither are among the most read in the library. Of the two, historical is the more read, and it's fans tend to be fairly devoted to it. That said they tend to have definite preferences i.e. historical romance, historical mystery. Historical literary fiction rarely falls into the preferred reading area of historical fiction readers. (I suspect this is because reading literary fiction is often thought of the same way many people think of exercise. Something we know is good for us, and we intend to do, but never get around to actually doing.) This can make collection development decision's difficult when it's literary fiction being discussed. One one hand, it's the sort of book we want to have in the collection. On the other hand it doesn't circulate that often, which makes it harder to justify buying.
Luckily, in this case the decision is made easier, by being a truly stellar book, by an already well known author. Ordering this one for a historical fiction collection is practically a no brainer.
Reader: I don't like literary fiction that well. Sure, at it's best it's got beautiful prose, and moving messages. But, let's be honest, most of the time it's little more than pretentious crap. Still I read it, hoping for that one in a million time when the book is everything the genre is supposed to be. This is not that one in a million time. However it does come close. The prose is gorgeous, and the plot is engaging enough to keep me reading. I still found a bit pretentious, and felt like it reveled a bit to much in its own cleverness, but it wasn't unreadably pretentious like this genre can occasionally be.