Mixed opinions of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing last week, but you were pretty confident that it's chick lit. Susan said, "If chick lit is defined as a book written by a woman author about woman's issues for a woman's entertainment then Yes, Hunting and Fishing fits the bill."

A bit of a kerfuffle was caused last week when Amanda Ross, who runs the Richard & Judy Book Club, said "We don't like to label anything 'literary', in fact, I really hate that word. For our readers, if we said a book was literary, it might put them off." She went on to say, "To the public, literary means inaccessible, or full of classical references, or with long passages in French."

I know just what she means - "literary" makes me think of school or university, of a difficult (and, dare I say it, boring) read. But having said that I read and enjoy a lot of so-called literary fiction. So this week's question: Is "literary" a dirty word? Yay or Nay and Why?