Some babble about genre & categorization

Since reading this fantastic conversation between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro, ideas about genre and what makes one thing “fantasy” while another very similar thing is “horror” or even the esteemed “literature” have been rolling around my brain. I plopped myself in the middle of this very problem this week when I was met with delightful pain in the butt of trading my old, crappy Target shelf for a bigger, wooden one that used to live in my neighborhood bookstore. (Until the owner decided to close it – sniffle.) My genius self got the bright idea to actually organize my books by genre for real this time when I re-shelved them.