After reading at Maud Newton's blog a short note on True Grit coming back into print, I followed her link to Salon to see just why the book had ever gone out in the first place, but was stopped short by the article early on:

The 40th anniversary reissue of Charles Portis' "True Grit" is the third go-around for the novel since its publication and simultaneous serialization in the Saturday Evening Post. In a saner world, it wouldn't have to be reissued, it would have always remained in print.

Why it hasn't is one of the unsolved mysteries of modern American literature. Conventional wisdom blames the hugely successful 1969 film with John Wayne (for which he won his only Oscar). Potential readers, it has been argued, felt they'd already gotten the story from the film and didn't need to read the book. I don't know that I agree; I'm not at all certain that most of John Wayne's fans read very much.

When did we decide that enjoying a John Wayne movie meant you didn't read? Was it around the same time we had to give sly explanations for why we crack open Vogue? (It's all for Jeffry Steingarten's food essays.) Or was it when Michael Dirda decided that the classics were all that and a bag of chips and that we all must read them (The Millions begs us not to be intimidated by the idea):

Why is it that so many people are turned off by the classics? Is it because would-be readers are afraid they won't "get it?" Or does reading a well-known tome on the subway or in a cafe exude an air of pretentiousness, when it's more likely that the reader just never followed through on that English lit assignment?

In talking about his latest book, Classics for Pleasure, the Pulitzer Prize winning critic, Michael Dirda, said he not only hopes to make the classics appear less daunting and more accessible to the general public, but he also wants to "encourage people to read more widely."

So I guess if you aren't into Wuthering Heights or Huck Finn or The Canterbury Tales then you are just trying to be too cool for dead authors or too afraid to read them? Does turning your back on Jane Eyre to watch Donovan's Reef (and thus embrace your inner John Wayne) make you just one step up from the cavemen? (The Quiet Man is one of the best American movies ever made and I will make that argument against anybody, anytime.)

I am so tired of this. I am tired of the NEA saying teens aren't reading enough mere months after we were told that they were reading too much of the Gossip Girls. Naomi Wolf wants to save the children by making them read something else! Maureen Dowd is wants to save women by making them read something else! And Allen Barra laments that True Grit was lost along with some other fine literary novels because "...they seemed to bear the faint taint of genre fiction."

Did you smell that? It was genre fiction taint rearing its ugly head.

It is probably unreasonable that these comments should annoy me so much, but the fact that they just keep showing up - that everyone thinks it is just fine to talk down to someone because of their taste in magazines or movies or books with pink covers annoys me to no end. But then again I am probably overly sensitive to this subject; I have a dog named for a John Wayne movie that was based on a Louis L'Amour western after all and he sits here beside me as I peruse the holiday issue of Vogue. I have never read the Brontes to the end, nor did I enjoy Huck Finn.

I never thought any of that mattered when it came to my reading habits but I guess I'm wrong. I wonder what all these fine folks would think of my comic book collection, or those DVD sets of Buffy.

Apparently it's amazing that I can put two words together let alone read them.