So I'm visiting my folks, and my old home town has turned into a cute lakeside resort town in my absence. A lot of young couples have moved here from some of the surrounding cities, in search of cute, small-town American life like they grew up watching on their teevees. And a lot of other young people come from the bigger cities to recreate in their summer cottages.

They're northern-midwesterners, overwhelmingly white, middle and upper-middle class, and like to think of themselves as having reasonably refined tastes. Thus, we have that rarest of American institutions, a small indy bookstore with a small supply of Fine Literature, lovingly hand-picked and beautifully displayed. It's not even divided into genres, just fiction, nonfiction and hobbies.

The selection is really good, especially for around here. There's a lot of book-club books, the kind with reader's guides in the back. The authors are well-chosen. Multiculti worldbeat lit seems to be in, even here. After happy perusal, I bought, and enjoyed, Sarah Addison Allen's "Garden Spells," a pretty little magical realist page-turner set in a South remarkably free of fundamentalists, WalMarts, or non-white people. I passed up Russel Banks's "Reserve," though it looked intriguing. Because I couldn't shell out the cost of the hardcover. I could barely shell out the cost for a large fancy paperback.

I wanted another book, but I didn't want to go back to that bookstore. In fact, I began to feel a little bit pissed off at that bookstore, because I wanted to read, and couldn't afford to buy any more books there.

So I drove to the local mall, headed for B. Daltons, and somehow felt instantly happier and at home. I bought three genre paperbacks for the price of one Contemporary Literature at the nicer bookstore, and have settled in for a contented week of reading.

I resent Literature. I resent the cost, and the uplifting messages, and the gestures toward dealing with issues without ever really pushing any edges, and the fact that the reading experience is often a lot less satisfying than finishing a well-written mystery or a really intelligent fantasy, because there's less enjoyment payoff for my money.

Am I a bad person?