Walking into the Strand yesterday, I made my way past teetering stacks ofFifty Shades of Grey and every possible combination of the Hunger Gamesbooks. Then I stopped.

Back up: There’s a reason everybody’s reading these books, right? Should I be so quick to write them off as “junk books”? Are they any better for you than a Crunch bar?

The New York Times reviewed airplane lit at the beginning of this summer. Arther Krystal discussed “guilty reading” at The New Yorker. And although James Patterson and John Grisham are on the bestseller list, they’re jockeying with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins. But really, why are people still reading dime-store books?

Because those authors are just as smart as the analysts at Frito-Lay.

I don’t think The Hunger Games is as brilliant or as likely to endure as The Giver or 1984, but I knew from the first sentence (“When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold”) that it was well-crafted and carefully designed to keep its readers hooked. Otherwise I wouldn’t have read all three books, in 24 hours, and felt exhausted at the end. But, just two months after reading that trilogy, I can barely remember what the Quarter Quell is. In contrast, my roommate just finished reading Dr. Zhivago and huge chunks of the book came back to me unexpectedly, even though I hadn’t thought about it in four years.

So why did I remember Yuri Zhivago better than Katniss Everdeen? Think of it this way: we barely register the experience or feeling of breathing unless we’re struggling to stay abovewater. There’s something to unpack in both commercial fiction and literary fiction, but the latter category is intentionally designed to be more complex, more mentally taxing, and consequently more memorable. It's not that literary fiction (which, let’s face it, is another genre of fiction) is inherently better or cleverer than thrillers or sci-fi—only designed to be better savored, remembered, and appreciated by critics, teachers, and analytical readers.

Which is why, even if I’m just reading for fun, I can’t shake off a feeling of, well, sloppiness or formulaic writing in popular or genre fiction. If the dime novels from a hundred years ago feel cliché, it’s because they were: the readers just mistook the cliché for the fashionable. In the same way, Lee Childs and Robert Ludlum won’t survive fifty years without becoming archaic, even if they're great pageturners now. But I read PD James and Stephen King, because they make a conscious attempt to push the boundaries of their genres; they’ve moved past the clichés to the larger concerns of our own time. The Children of Men has something important to say about how people will live on an overpopulated Earth, while The Standgoes into the marrow of living in a post-apocalyptic world.

Books, like food, don’t always fit into neat categories. “Junk food” isn’t always junk. It still provides something for your body, just not necessarily the most beneficial or long-lasting things. The critic Michael Dirda was a little more diplomatic when he said on Reddit that “Sometimes you want to climb Mt. Everest; sometimes you just want to take a stroll in the park.” If McDonald’s regulars can also like apples and even salads, then maybe the weary travelers at the airport reading A Game of Thrones can read The Once and Future King next, and then really go medieval with Beowulf.

 And hey, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

image credit: infoglobi.com

Fan fiction’s loyal partisans were probably tickled pink last week when the story broke that E.L. James’ book Fifty Shades of Grey was going to be optioned for a film.  That book, which began as an imaginative response to the Twilight trilogy called Master of the Universe, explores the hawt hawt hawt relationship between sexual naïf Anastasia and sexually domineering Christian, and will, like Twilight, probably produce a triplet of middling to poor films the rest of us can enjoy on TNT the days we call off sick.

But in these, there’ll be more sex—apparently, one reader had to pop a Viagara just to get through the book. So what makes fans want to write their favorite characters into ropes and ball gags?

Don’t blame the net: erotic fan fiction has been around at least as long as leisure suits, even if it’s blossomed in the interwebs. And sometimes it finds inspiration in strange places: I was startled to come across Caitlyn Reads 2666, an erotic novel putatively riffing on Roberto Bolaño’s grisly epic. It’s hard for me to imagine wanting to embark on a sexual odyssey after reading  “The Part About the Crimes,” but maybe I just need to think with my, uh, teeth more. And to imagine a castle. Complete with a dungeon. Mmm...dungeons.

Whatever impulse sprang these fandoms loose, assuming there’s a common one, it produces highly varied literary products. And the stuff usually isn’t even illustrated. It’s driven by narrative only. Lesser, better mortals might claim that this is rooted in essential differences between genders. Something about the male gaze, blah blah, something about female intuitions and narrativity, blah blah. See, clearly the proof is in evolutionary psychological pudding.

Fifty Shades of Grey stands apart from its estimable kin because of the monetary success it’s enjoyed. Not only has it been a number one bestseller (it had spent 18 days in that spot at Amazon as of April, 3, 2012), but the film contract it garnered is rumored to be on par with The Da Vinci Code. Some people are downright offended that E.L. James is making so much money while riding on the coattails (supposedly) of Twilight; others are celebrating the entrance of fan fiction into the serious literary world (i.e., the one that pays). As for me, I’ll give a nod to Shakespeare’s appropriations and grumble something about stickiness of creativity, especially once money enters.

Because let’s face it, it’s money that’s at stake here. We can argue about the ethics of Fifty Shades of Grey, but really, the ethics behind its creation and that of the rest of fan fiction are the same: writers appropriate other writers’ characters and put them into novel—sometimes really novel, if you catch my drift—situations. Published authors from Anne Rice to J.D. Salinger strongly disapprove; others not so much. Presumably Stephanie Meyer didn’t care about Fifty Shades, or she saw it as a way to increase attention for Twilight.

After all, that’s synergy, my little munchkins.

Image from flickr user Sarah Dawes