Why I Believe In Reading Multiple Genres

Imagine that you love pastries. Flaky crusts, decadent chocolate, tart fruit fillings--these are what you see when you go to your happy place.

All you want is to be a pastry chef.

When you see your name in print, it's going to be on the front of a place like this:

But what if, in your earnest desire to be the best pastry chef ever, all you ate was pastry?


Maybe sweets aren't your thing?

How about this?

What smells better than fresh-baked bread? Soft, warm--the crust with just the perfect amount of give. How butter melts across the perfectly aerated surface...

But what if bread was all that you ate?

Don't like bread? Who can resist this?

Cheese. Smoked, baked, hard, sharp, soft, white, gold, rolled, crusted--you name it, I want it.
But my god, could you imagine living only on cheese? You'd probably be lactose intolerant within the week.

So besides the opportunity to share mouth-watering pictures with you, what's my point?

I'm sure you get it by now.

Genre is literary food.

In order to live a healthy life, we need a well-balanced diet.
Wait--but what about the pastry chef--the one who wants nothing more than to be the best pastry chef in the world? Shouldn't s/he see what the competition is cooking? Taste every kind of chocolate that comes across the plate? 

Sure. Absolutely, in fact. 

But what's one of the most important things a truly brilliant chef posses? 

A mature, broad palette. 

After all, if bacon was always put with eggs, how would this have been born?

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.  

~W. Somerset Maugham