I was doing a book club last night (hi Sherry and everyone in Vermont!) and somehow Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella came up. I kind of went on this mini-rant slash tirade about how snooty people with monocles and top hats and who smoke pipes and talk about Literature(tm) shit on Kinsella's books, and books like them.

Which in turn comes on the heels of a couple of my literary friends going on Goodreads and seeing that I’ve read three of Kinsella’s novels so far. These goodnatured souls kind of poked a bit of fun at me, which got me thinking about how ridiculous our conceptions of high brow and low brow can be. Because here’s a secret: I’ve enjoyed The Shopaholic series more than a lot of the capital-L Literary Novels I’ve read in the past few years.

That opens up a Pandora’s Box about what makes capital-G Good Capital-L Literature, and bumps up against an idea that kind of runs through institutionalized readership. Good Literature, we’re told, should be painful or bland. Like medicine or peas. Blah blah. I’m not going to go into why that rubs me the wrong way, because there are plenty of reasons and I still have to feed my cat this morning. Instead, what I’d like to do is say a few things about Kinsella’s novels, and why I think they're great.

Here goes.

I’m probably as far away from the target audience for Kinsella’s novels as you can get. I’m a guy, I’m in my late-30s, I’m largely anti-consumerist, with tragic fashion sense. I don’t live in Britain or the US, and a lot of the values the Shopaholic series ostensibly presents don’t line up with my values.

All fact.

And that got me thinking: so why do I care about Becky Bloomwood, about her addiction to conspicuous consumption, her travails with boyfriend (then fiancé [then husband]) Luke Brandon, and about her Denny and George scarf?

This is where the magic of the series, and Kinsella’s abilities, lie. Because somehow she’s managed to make a guy who hasn’t shopped for clothes in years recognize that when Becky sells her Denny and George scarf at an auction, something really important is happening - something meaningful. I don’t even know what a Denny and George scarf is, really, except that it costs a lot of money and seems pretty stylish. But Kinsella has taught me that, for Becky, this object is a kind of totem, no different (pardon the analogy) than the world-destroying glove of Thanos, or Rosebud in Citizen Kane.

Over the course of 300-odd pages, Kinsella has slyly taught me to see the world as Becky does. Her concerns became my concerns, and I found myself outraged that the manager of Endwich Bank would have the temerity to suggest that Becky has a spending problem.

(Spoiler: she does, and in real life, I’d probably side with said bank manager, though of course I’m not a fan of the debt-spinning monetary system, but that’s a rant for another Saturday morning).

There’s something magical here, I think - something magical about Kinsella’s ability to make someone like me care about a Denny and George scarf. To my eye, that’s the lifeblood of fiction and storytelling. No other medium can give you VIP access to the inner world of someone completely unlike you. Even movies have a fourth wall between you and the people on screen. The best novels and short stories merge you and the characters together on the sly; you don’t even notice that you’ve become one of Atwood’s handmaidens, or Ishmael hunting his whale. Or, in this case, that you’ve inexplicably transformed from a grumpy 37 year old dude to a 20-something female financial journalist with a tortured credit card and a heart of gold.

Some people judge fiction based on its messaging, or how it takes on the grim angst of the human experience. Fine. I can get with that. But there’s another metric we can use to judge good fiction: how much it makes us care. I’ve always been partial to fiction that breaks my heart. And while the monocle-wearers might find it hard to believe, when Becky’s lost her job, her boyfriend, and her Denny and George scarf, I’m just as devastated as she is.

And that is, yes, to repeat myself, magical.