I’ve been thinking about Genre lately. Genre in its simplest form is the style or the type of books you like to read; crime, fantasy, romance. Genre has other uses in linguistic theory but I’ve mostly been thinking about literary genres.Often in conversation genre fans will clash with so-called literary fans. There’s a slippery slope of which is which but often it seems if something can be defined as genre it is by default not literary.I don’t agree with this. It’s why I brought it up because I would hate for anyone to hear us discuss a book and dismiss it offhand because it didn’t fit their idea of Genre.There’s a great article in the Guardian this week. Mary Anne Sieghart writes Why Do So Few Men Read Books by women? Sieghart is looking at how we are able to understand each other’s experiences of the world and how this relates to a range of pervasive gaps in gendered experience of the world.But I wondered about genre.Do perceptions about genre and which genres are read by which group play into the books we read?For instance if I introduced you to a book called Love, in Theory what would your reaction be?I think some people might hear ‘Love’ and automatically start classifying the type of book this might be.Well Love, in Theory by Elodie Cheesman is the book I’ve got for our book club today.It’s the story of a twenty something Sydneysider; dedicated to their career and adopting a novel approach to social life outside work.In a lot of ways this book is the perfect exploration of living in a world where boomer thinking dominates a world where millennials are shut out from many of the tropes of growing up their parents have told them to expect.Romy is a graduate lawyer. Her work sees her taking a deep dive into the relationships corporations have with their employees and she’s finding that many of these look more like romantic partnerships than anything she’s got on her personal calendar. Meanwhile her parents have challenged her with the theory of then optimal stopping point; a way of calculating the best time to make a decision when the choices seem to go on endlessly.Romy has to apply ruthless legal logic to the relationships in her work, why not try a little algorithmic thinking to her non-existent dating life.Love, in Theory flips between the arching narrative of Romy’s personal life and vignettes from her legal world of wrongful terminations turned sour. It’s an expose of how none of us are really equipped to work on our relationships because we rarely stop and think whether relationships are things that need work.As Romy grapples between trusting chemistry and doing the work she finds almost everyone subscribes to a varying notion of love and relationships. It’s amazing we ever get together for anything.See, from a genre perspective this might look like a romance novel, and romance smashes it in terms of looking at how we live our lives, but if you only saw that you might miss the savvy eye to critical thinking it applies to everyday relationships.Love in Theory wants us to think about things that we usually believe should be felt. It’s trying to upend our social positioning and show us a new perspective and that’s always worth having a look at...