I'm afraid I can't be a snob... All literature I've read was mainstream. I think that the mainstream literature is a very nice mirror of society in general and even if they are not that "deep" or whatever, they do carry a message that reached a lot of people. So it's my opinion that people that don't read mainstream literature for the sole fact that said literature is mainstream should think twice about it. One thing is if a person particularly doesn't like certain famous books ( I suffer from that -- I didn't like the Hunger Games saga). Another thing is having a prejudice against everything that is mainstream, which is the view I have of snobs. And they are, sadly, true. Check on the internet.
Not really. It's like our favourite pastime of complaining about the weather. I don't participate. Weather is something you can't change. Complaining about it seems like a waste of time to me. I write suspense because I like suspenseful stories, not because I want to become a lauded celebrity in Dutch literary circles. I don't go around telling people I'm a writer, but whenever the subject comes up and I do tell people what I'm working on, I often get the 'I always wanted to be a writer'-remark. But when you ask what these people have written, you get feeble excuses why they don't write. The reality is that they don't want to write, they want to be 'a writer'. They want to take their friends to a bookseller's display, point out a book and say, 'I wrote that!', and bask in the praise.
I had a friend just like that when i was a teen. She refused to even consider reading the kind of books I read, because they weren't literary enough. Her mom is/were some kind of poet and she had her daughter read only heavy old classics and other stuff she considered good when it was obvious she'd rather read fantasy, and my friend always had piles of books she 'had to' read but she never got through it and she never seemed to enjoy reading them the same way i did with my not so literary novels.
