I am glad that I did not go to my first choice college ( yours, David) .

I didn't know that, beth!

Even within an English degree its easy enough to chart a tight course and land where you prefer. I was able to build most of my classes around poetry instead of novels and meet all my requirements: Victorian poetry, Renaissance poetry, Shakespeare, etc. Though at Kenyon it was common enough to read literature for your other courses, like Antigone (rights of the individual vs. rights of the state) or Heart of Darkness (Colonialism) for Political Science.

Hard-boiled fiction is classed with mysteries though it's a different tradition. The early hard-boileds did usually have a mystery in them (like The Maltese Falcon) though later they became basically Crime Fiction, exploring the milieu and encompassing both police procedurals and heists and all the other sub-genres.

Kind of weird that Daughter of Time is shelved with Red Harvest but then science fiction and fantasy are conflated in odd ways. I mean, Bradbury's way more of a fantasist than a science fiction writer. What does I, Robot have in common with The Last Unicorn anyway? And yet they're filed in the same section.

Stop it...I only got the one crime story. Super-innocent-looking geek woman(mobility aid optional) goes outside the law and gets by with it. But I guess Lippman has a nice life and she writes that, too. Sometimes.

An Agatha Christie list for Corwood à la Netflix:

If you like René Clair, you'll love And Then There Were None
If you like The 39 Steps, you'll love N or M?
If you like The Hound of the Baskervilles, you'll love Murder at Hazelmoor
If you like Citizen Kane, you'll love Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
If you like The Lady Vanishes, you'll love What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!

What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!

Oh, that's another of my favorite Miss Marples.

I seriously wanted to be either Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher when I was younger. (I sort of still do).

I wanted to be Samantha Stevens (and still sort of do) but that's a discussion for another thread.

Even within an English degree its easy enough to chart a tight course and land where you prefer.

Yep! I was able to avoid most American Lit and tried to avoid as much poetry as possible, but couldn't in the Elizabethan and Victorian lit classes.

Kind of weird that Daughter of Time is shelved with Red Harvest

Seriously? I keep my copy of Daughter of Time with my (few) mysteries, next to my copy of Colin Dexter's The Wench Is Dead, a neat follow-up to DoT.

Even within an English degree its easy enough to chart a tight course and land where you prefer.

True. I mostly studied plays, which are limited by the tolerances of the audience's tushes.

Kind of weird that Daughter of Time is shelved with Red Harvest but then science fiction and fantasy are conflated in odd ways.

If you think about it, organizing fiction by genre is a bit like organizing an art gallery based on color. It can be done, obviously, and at least that way you have a hope of finding something you're looking for, but it's so arbitrary that it doesn't really tell you anything useful about an individual items.

but it's so arbitrary that it doesn't really tell you anything useful about an individual items.

True dat. I think most Elmore Leonard fans would enjoy Neuromancer (which Gibson modeled on Leonard's plots), so it even defeats the marketing angle.

I actually do prefer shelving everything together. It's a pain trying to figure out whether they're shelving Iain Banks in Fiction or Science Fiction.

The reason we went with an alphabetical format in our Lost in the Grooves book was to purposefully arrange records next to each other from a variety of genres.