The husband, on the other hand, prefers mind-scrambling, beautifully crafted short stories in “The New Yorker.” Problem: he constantly asks me if I ever heard of so-and-so word – at least half the time I haven’t – before consulting the dictionary he keeps on his nightstand.

Where’s the fun in that?

But it does seem that one gravitates toward one or the other of these types of fiction – whether as a writer or a reader – remaining immovable after settling in.

A few years ago, at a writers’ conference, I had the misfortune of being seated between an agent who represented literary fiction and a woman who wrote it. I thought he was going to backhand me when I admitted that the last “good book” I had read was by Grisham. Instead, he dismissed me with a sniff, pretending I had gone invisible (I even tried passing my hand through my mid-section to be sure I hadn’t) as he proceeded to talk across me and pass his business card through my vaporous self to his version of a “real” writer.

A pox on his house!. Only good thing is: he had on the rattiest looking jacket I have seen on a person who, purportedly, had a roof over their head.