There once was a boy. He had some rough times as an adolescent, but settled down into a pleasant but largely unremarkable adulthood. He held down a moderately challenging but not dangerous job pushing papers for a local widget firm until he died of a myocardial infarction at 56. His family was pretty sad but ultimately it didn't matter much.

That is an Anne Tyler novel.

JZ, you forgot the long passages where he sits at the kitchen table looking regretfully into the distance while his coffee slowly gets cold. Note: be sure to put them in before the myocardial infarction, or you've got a ghost story and therefore genre cooties.

That is an Anne Tyler novel.

You take that back, you! t Anne Tyler partisan

you forgot the long passages where he sits at the kitchen table looking regretfully into the distance while his coffee slowly gets cold

Pfft. The protagonist of my worthwhile adult fiction would never sit around indulging in a wet and impractical emotion like regret. He may occasionally think back on the old days and say to himself, "My, that was a time, wasn't it?" as he takes his coffee cup out of the microwave, but he doesn't let it go beyond that. He's not living in a piece of trashy fiction, after all.

Toss out epic sweep of plot, you eliminate fiction by everyone from Homer to Dickens to Larry McMurtry. Not to mention that tossing one person's meaningful impact also shitcans the biographies of a hell of a lot of actual human beings who were apparently not so much heroic as misguided by adolescent fantasy.

Yeah, I'm insanely confused as to how "epic sweep of plot" and "one person having a meaningful impact on history" are cornered by the YA market. I mean, the former alone is completely and utterly baffling.

I did mention that Peter Jackson had the film rights to Novik's books, which seemed to impress her.

I really don't know what she reads, except that she likes mysteries but seems to feel the need to apologize for doing so. Obviously it's her issue rather than mine, but it's a bit baffling to figure out how to respond. I mean, she also doesn't get why I'm interested in the Napoleonic era--because she thinks the Victorian era is more interesting. When she asked (months ago, just after we met), I gave my usual explanation: that in some ways I stumbled across the era almost by accident, but that it held my interest because it's modern enough to seem familiar and recognizable, but it's also the last era before technology really sped up our lives, in that you couldn't move faster than a galloping horse on land and at sea were at the mercy of the winds. And, you know, the clothes were cool.

Cue baffled look. For a woman in her 50's, she seems to have some trouble with the fact that other people don't necessarily think like she does.

I had thought a girl I knew in college was the least tactful person alive, but Susan's co-worker has proved that wrong.

As for alternate history being the stuff of YA, even Newt Gingrich (insert gesture warding off the evil eye) has written alternate history, as well as some actual writers including H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill, Allen Drury, Vladimir Nabokov and Philip K Dick.

Also, you're both wrong. The most interesting era is America in the late 19th century.

I like Anne Tyler, too. Although I must admit she's not the poster girl for "Wow, then what happened?" storytelling. But I don't want that all the time.(Weird thing for a crime junkie to say, maybe, but it's still true.)

Reading for pleasure, as opposed to reading for enlightenment, is considered juvenile. I think adults are only supposed to read things that have insightful things about the angst of modern existence. Anything else is trite escapism.

Excuse me while I go back to my SGA fan fic.

Reading for pleasure, as opposed to reading for enlightenment, is considered juvenile.

Why can't you do both at the same time?