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<p>Earlier this week, I saw a discussion about the simple joy Roger Ebert took in movies. In most movies really, not just the high-art bordering on incomprehensible that we might joke of as awards-bait.</p><p>The specific review of his being passed around was <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-mummy-1999" rel="nofollow">his 1999 review of</a><a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-mummy-1999" rel="nofollow">The Mummy</a>. The one with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.</p><p><p>There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased. There is a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it.</p></p><p>Ebert had a thing about meeting a film where it was and trying to judge it for what it was trying to do. Not every film is Citizen Kane or Casablanca. Nor is every movie trying to be. Nor should they.</p><p>That bit resonates with me. I took a whole lot of English classes in college. Composition was like the one requirement I couldn’t replace with a linguistics class or ill-advised symbolic logic course. During those classes, I was taught by English graduate students who wasted no time in prejudging what books their students might be reading outside of their class. Here, we were reading Real Literature, not genre stories. (And nevermind the fact that these classes are where I got my first exposures to Michael Chabon and Ursula K. LeGuin, by way of their short fiction.) I think about those statements separating Genre Fiction from Real Literature as I read LeGuin and Pratchett and Valente who all use language and metaphor in interesting ways, but are doing something different from something like The House of Mirth or The Yellow Wallpaper or Nada (one of my English comp classes turned out to be 20th Century Feminist Literature, interesting class).</p><p>I guess that’s a lot of words to say that what I’d like to do is learn to understand what I like (or don’t) in books and why so that I can make myself the Ebert to my English teachers’ Siskel, championing the things I like for achieving what they set out to do rather than judging them for not doing what The Great Books do (I mean, great books are great, but let’s not get carried away thinking only The Greats are great). Here’s to reading. May we never be bored, and sometimes, may we find ourselves unreasonably pleased.</p> <small class="notice" x-post-type-data="type=&#x27;Article&#x27; attributed_to=None"> Takahe has limited support for this type: <a href="https://alexanderkeane.com/2026/03/14/something-to-strive-for-in-reviews/">See Original Article</a> </small>