For me, all books are good. Read a book? Good on you!

There is no such thing as a guilty pleasure. If it's whipped cream, what harm does it do? Read whatever you want, whenever you want. Reading one thing doesn't mean you can't read another thing.

When I first bought the store the impulse I had was to welcome all comers without judgement. I don't know that I truly respected comics (yet! I was totally won over within a year or so) but I respected people's predilection to reading them.  

But a store like mine? It ill behooves me to judge. It's almost the very reason for our existence.

On the other hand, if something doesn't sell? That's another story.

Anyway, I noticed early on that people were pretty picky about the terms they used for what they were reading. Books that I thought of as potboilers were considered "literature" by those who read them. People who read "romance" often didn't like that term. I never have figured out exactly what "historical" books meant, except as a label by the publishers.  

Roughly speaking, it's "literature" if that's what you read. 

The one area where I'm a bit of a snob is SF and Fantasy, but by now I'm so dated that I can't really judge what people consider good or bad. (In other words, I haven't enjoyed a lot the new bestsellers and award winners in the genre.) I burned out on fantasy long ago--and believe me, I read a TON of it in the day. 

Out of the best new SF series I have read lately, two of them were originally self-published: Dungeon Crawler Carl and We are Legion: we are Bob. Neither of them take themselves too seriously, but are strong stories and characters. I think it's interesting that the pipeline to new fiction is so constricted that the authors had to do it on their own, originally.

The third series I really liked was Murderbot, which also doesn't take itself too seriously. It's also a great TV series on Apple, which the store-crew gets together to watch each week, along with Poker Face. (So many IN jokes!)  

Anyway, I try to find non-pejorative terms for genres.  I mix SF and Fantasy together--it's up to you to be snobs about one over the other. (I put Romantasy in either regular fantasy or in the TikTok book section.

The TikTok book section is strictly a merchandising term and refers to a number of genres. 

I use the term "Rom-com" for the new version of romance novels. I stick in my historical novels section whatever books the customers refer to as historical (while the vast bulk goes into "regular" fiction.

Yes, I use the term "regular" fiction because I'm damned if I know which books are literary and which are not. 

That's totally up to the reader.