Bracketing my world....

The first trip to a new bookstore brings with it the need to spend the first few minutes in the store trying to cross the length and breadth of it to understand and digest the system of classification there. There is normally the universal classification of academic books from non-academic ones, which are further categorized to fiction, non-fiction, magazines, comics etc. After this, it gets difficult to draw everything into a tree structure ( Sorry, the evil Visio-enabled work side of me takes over..) So, there's children's literature, there's classics, there's literature (what the heck is the line of demarcation between the latter two? Or the methodology for classification is the sophisticated "eeny-meeny-miny-mo"??), there's science fiction, there's fantasy, there's theater, there's biography/auto-biography, there's music, there's arts, there's romance novels. And then it becomes a bigger maze...There's the system of classification based on the first name or it could be on the second name within each section. If it's on the second name basis, it's of course easier ( except if you are a fellow Southie with an intital and the presumption that the second name basis rule can be bent so that for such cases, it could be your first name...)But then this particular book store that I visited had the classification on the basis of the first name. So, where's the trouble now? I wanted to pick the great gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald! So is it a classic or a literature or is it fiction or is it under " recommends" ??And if I manage to solve that mystery, where do I look under? F or S?! Now don't even get me started on the non-fiction genre/sub genre classifications!! I would expected a Calvin and Hobbes to be cozily sitting on a rack in the comic book section, but somehow these torch bearers of this maze called a bookstore guided me to the management section for it!!


Also this entire compulsive need to bracket everything and put it under a header got me thinking...If I were to put the story of my life under a genre, what would it be? As much as I am a fan of thematic stories and concept albums, I think I would rather that my stories resembled that of a comic strip of jughead lieing on a hammock, with the highs being all those tasty munchies that are perched up and balanced on his belly and the lows being all those efforts to shoo away or swat those flies aiming from a crumb of those precious potato chips...No seriously, I don't want no damn Dan Brown thriller (?!) or a rib-tickling Hornby comedy for a life..There are absolutely no frikking way that it can be like racy adventure like " The Beach" or whatever...And it ain't like I have a confused upbringing in a foreign soil ala one of those Jhumpa Lahiri protaganists...There are some streaks of a sci-fi/fantasy novel whenever the boss' ugly head pops into the cubicle and I substitute that sorta plain ugliness with a sorta ugliness which gets some cookie points on the coolness quotient (So out goes the creature formerly called The Boss, and in comes a Jabba the Hut-tish creature - only thing he has bigger warts on his face and he also comes with what looks like heavy labyrinth of horns, but it's actually his hair and oh yeah, he also has very VERY floppy ears :D)...Of late, there has been a continuous occurences of tragedies, what with my daily trips to the ATM and the subsequent discoveries of ever dwindling cash in the account...And of course, there are escapades to Romance-shire on rare occasions, limited to Gael Garcia Bernal movies....But then notwithstanding all those uncharacteristic lapses, I would like to continue my typical "bum-on-chair" routine, thankyew...So,maybe that can be the name of a new genre be the "unclassifieds"...Hell, so much for the modern day contraptions! I think I would rather order my books online from now on..