I'm not asking or demanding that you defend yourself or explain your preferences to the message board. You, however, immediately became defensive. That shows that you feel a NEED to defend yourself, which to my mind still means you're insecure about something I said. Perhaps I'm wrong.

This post was written in defense of other types of fiction as a response to the dialogue going on in the announced post regarding January's book club. People seemed to be of the mind that the book club should be primarily for Sci-Fi and Fantasy, a position that I disagree with for the reasons stated in this post. It's limiting and much of the genre is crap.

I take exception to your sentence "Equating one's choice of reading material with one's condition of intellectual achievement reeks of presumptuousness and elitism." No, it doesn't. Intellectual achievement and learning is a life-long process that ends only when we die, and reading remains one of the best ways to continue that process. I keep trying to think of other ways that people can effectively continue to learn, but nothing seems as effective as books. Continuing education, whether in the form of simple classes or yet another Ph.D., invariably involves a heavy volume of reading. Watching educational television is a poor and superficial substitute for reading. The same is doubly true for the internet.

As a result, to speak of a "condition" of intellectual achievement approaches the situation from the wrong perspective, as though intellectual achievement were a mountain to be scaled, where a certain point is reached and we are "finished". I therefore repeat my statement: someone who reads only unchallenging books is stagnating intellectually.

Whether I make this point by encouraging variety in a positive manner or as a reaction to choices suggested by others and hence by indicting a particular set of choices as bad, the result is the same.

As to your final point, "Again, with the presumption that I don't do this already. It would be amusing if it wasn't so annoying."
Grammar: if it weren't so annoying. Sorry. Back to the main point. You in your response said essentially that you don't read challenging books and are happy with it. As a result, my last point to which you responded as cited is not an assumption, but rather simply a statement based on the set of facts as you provided them to me. If they are incorrect, it is due to your misrepresentation of your reading habits to me.