Novel Novel Novel

These are the books I'm reading at the moment. I already finish reading Mario Vargas Llosa's novel. It's his ninth novel and he did a detective story for this one. I always find it strange when a 'literary' novelist combines his 'literary' novel with a 'pop' novel genre and still manages to go into the literature section at a bookstore. H. G. Wells and Mary Shelley are two writers that are always misplaced due to the confusion concerning the 'literariness' (again this very slippery term) of their novels. But the bookstores never get confuse with Henry James' The Turn of the Screw or Doris Lessing so called space opera or Orwell's 1984 even though these are books that have been canonized as a classical text in their respective specualative fiction genre. For me, genre is just a label and means nothing actually. There is only a good novel and a bad novel. Greatness however is something more personal. What is great for one person might just be seen as repulsive or immoral to another. In the end, one must hold on to his own anchor when diving into the ocean of a writer's mind.