Ursula Le Guin had some choice words for this type of person 💙📚
(if anyone knows the source of this quote aside from Goodreads/tumblr 💀 please let me know)
We really fucked up when we let marketing dipshits make "literary fiction" into a genre. At this point lit-fic seems like a much narrower and less interesting space than any of the "lesser" genres
My Uncle convinced me to read LOTR, and after that I stumbled apon her Earthsea trilogy (as it was at the time). Returning to the library I borrowed "The left hand of darkness" and after that I wanted to read everything she'd ever written, even if was just her initials on a receipt.
I was lucky that just as Harry Potter had been picking up I had finished Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion and started reading A Wizard of Earthsea and later her Hannish cycle books, and those seemed to have inoculated me against the Harry Potter.
When I was a kid I could enjoy HP due to not having read any fantasy outside of fairy tales. Being in my 30s, having a very strong interest in all manners of myth and folklore and consumed fantasy rather commonly.... There's been better fantasy works since the medieval era.
She has so many amazing essays, especially about SFF - see especially a collection called The Language of the Night ***chef kiss*** and I'm a big fan of Dancing at the Edge of the World as well!
