I've been visiting Leslie for the past several days. It's been fun. :D

I was walking through Best Buy tonight (alone, since Leslie's working), and I was looking for a particular DVD, Labyrinth. But I was flummoxed for a moment about what place to look for it. Once I thought about it a bit, it was easier to guess (ah, sci-fi). But the better I know a particular movie or book, the tougher it is for me to place it in only one genre. At first, genre will mean those different sections in a book or video store where items are arranged electronically.

For Labyrinth, it can fit into a few different genres. It could be considered a children's movie, because it has muppets and fantasy. It could be considered fantasy, because it has trolls and such. It could be considered sci-fi, because many stores put fantasy in sci-fi.

Pride and Prejudice DVDs can occur in a few different places. Drama, romance, TV miniseries, BBC productions... what have you. The book itself can appear in romance or general fiction, though it most often gets placed in some classics section.

But these easy ambiguities are only a small shadow of the more difficult ones that come when considering a book, not for where it appears in the bookstore, but for how we might describe it.

To start with a familiar example, the Harry Potter series is certainly intended to appeal to children, so they might be called children's books. At least in the earlier books, the reading level and other aspects, including the ages of the characters, maintain that. However, it also has very potent roots in modern fantasy and mythology, drawing ideas of wizards and witches that are already apparent in Earthsea and other novels, centaurs and other magical creatures from various mythologies (and some fantasy like Narnia), and dragons from both. It is also a Bildungsroman depicting the growth of a boy into a man. It could be considered an educational treatise from the way Hogwarts is depicted, a satire of real world politics in a world of magic, a travelogue in an imaginary world, a journey of friendship, or any number of other things. Not all of them have to be genres or are typically considered as such, and alone, they carry nothing of what Harry Potter actually is. But like any body, where marrow in the skeletal system produces cells for a circulatory system run by a muscular pump, they are an interconnected part. And so while for brevity one might pick the most prevalent genre to describe the book as a children's book or fantasy book, it is difficult to pick between one, the other, or any other, for prime descriptive value.

But it is occasionally because we do so anyway, trying to describe something with the greatest efficiency with a limited vocabulary and capacity to articulate thoughts, that we sometimes come out with such travesties as making an introduction to a book sound pretentious when it is coy, vain when it is witty, and so on.