presumptous: overstepping due bounds, taking liberties
Warning: at the risk of being catty and/or picky, here I go ....
Ok, you would think someone who writes and professes to read widely would not publish things that make them sound, well, not so bright.
Consider: "Mark's [Del Franco's Unshapely Things] book is probably the first I've read that I considered Urban Fantasy (I consider my own to be horror-comedy). That's not to say that I have a lot to compare it to. Before I started his book, I'd only read Bitten by Kelley Armstrong and Julie Kenner's Carpe Demon, they seemed to be urban fantasy, but one came off as overly literary, and the other while enjoyable was so light that I barely remember it."
I presume that Carpe Diem was the light one (it's much shorter) but, excuse me, Kelly Armstrong doesn't even pretend to be literary. I'd hazard a guess that she might even be insulted by that designation. It did have quite a few more words between the covers than Carpe Diem, but lots of words does not equal literary ...
It gets better: "A question: Do you think it's necessary to read your own Genre in order to write it well?"
I dunno. I'm an amateur, very part-time, non-MFA writer who'd like to dabble in this genre of writing, and in the year and a half or so that I've actively been interested, I've read something like an entire bookshelf of stuff in this genre and related ones. I don't consider that to be widely read, not yet, not nearly.
Every book I've read -- good or bad, liked or unliked -- informed my own ideas about the genre and about writing in some way or another. And I don't think I'd have gotten that knowledge in any MFA program. They do the 'literary' stuff.
Ps. He reviewed both those books on his blogspot: and this statement tells all: "Ms. Armstrong must admire Anne Rice [prolific vampire writer turned born again] a great deal, to focus so much on history and detail of the [werewolf] packs."