When I saw how lengthy "Consider the Lobster" was I just leaned back in my chair, sighed, and procrastinated a couple days until I felt ready to read it. I soon realized that I do the same thing when I write; I go into detail about the subject I'm writing about and later discover that I wrote too much. I wonder if he felt that way.
After days of debating with myself, I finally read it (well, listened to it). I completely understand how this can be considered a research paper. He tied in his writing skills and opinions with paragraph after paragraph of information about lobsters with immense detail . After reading the post, I not only felt informed about lobsters, but I could see his passion for writing about them. I lost track of the festival information and got lost in all his lobster talk, meat talk, tourist talk, and research until the end in which I realized he was still just writing about a festival.
To be honest, reading this still did not give me a huge idea of what a genre is. I also couldn't really understand how it challenged a genre. Of course I could see a genre or area where it affected people who eat meat and their opinion, or how much information about lobsters is critical to know, but my definition is still not clear. Sure, it was a new and interesting topic that most people wouldn't find interesting enough to write 7 pages about, but he did. All of the research put into this piece did make it a bit easier to understand research genres though, and I enjoyed the writing and it's style.
Wallace's mixture of a review, a line of opinions, and his research kept me interested in what he had to say, even though I'm not a fan of lobster. By reading it, I could imagine the overwhelming of the lobster festival and its effects on Wallace. I learned many things from this article and enjoyed that he didn’t just copy and paste Wikipedia information for a boring 7 pages, rather he went to this festival himself, and first handedly used what he saw to educate the audience about anything and everything lobster. I can sense his passion in what he wrote and that is what I believe makes it readable. I was never a fan of lobster to begin with, but if anything, I am even less of a fan now after 7 pages worth of lobster information.