Would swallowing your teeth be more interesting than fiction?

[rinue]

People who say to me, "I don't read fiction. Real life is interesting enough" - fuck you people. Fuck your interesting lives which are not usually interesting. I act nice when you ask me what I am reading as a setup to tell me that you don't read fiction because real life is interesting enough, but what I am thinking every time is "fuck you." Jesus Christ, you arrogant fucks. Like you have a monopoly on truth. Your preferences are no more than preferences, and the books you read could be fakedy fake fake fake and you would never know because they are more removed from your personal frame of reference than most literature. Shut up. I read nonfiction too, and even if I didn't, shut up.

Comments

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Part of the reason I'm reading less fiction lately is that I keep picking up (meaning, buying) highly-praised fiction and finding it overhyped, in other words, disappointing. Joshua Ferris's Then We Came To The End is an example; it was transparent and I was extremely put off by the cancer thing, having seen it coming; in fact I can't imagine who did not see it coming, including the characters in the book. Jedediah Berry's almost-wonderful Manual of Detection was aggravating; he didn't go far enough into his own story, and the same is true of China Mieville's much-praised The City and the City, whose ending I found (a) boringly predictable and (b) kind of a cop-out. (That said, I went through a lot of Jhumpa Lahiri this year. Very satisfying, genuine emotion.)

But when I read a book about drift currents, polar bears, or whatever, at least I can be reasonably sure that I'm going to get something interesting about the subject to take away and think about later, instead of acquiring a mental scab to pick at.

[rinue.livejournal.com]

I thought fiction last year was kind of a wash - I didn't read anything I really cared about that was recent, and didn't fail to buy anything that piqued my interest. I tend to feel publishers are a little out of touch right now, trying to sell to us (and chain book stores) rather than bringing out stuff they really love themselves. I also feel like the publishing world is very New York insular right now and I don't like the attitudes coming out of New York.

Maybe I'm way off base in thinking that and am being horribly unfair to publishers, but that's my instinct and what I've been hearing from agents. It leads to a lot of sameyness and a lot of pandering and a lot of stuff that strikes me as exploitative rather than thoughtful. And there's a lot of great nonfiction out there, which I really appreciate as someone who loves nonfiction, and particularly good histories.

What upsets me is when I'm reading something that I've clearly chosen to read and somebody who hasn't read it tries to tell me that I'm inferior because the book is fiction. Not because the book is bad, but because the book is fiction and fiction is not worthwhile ever, period, because it's imaginary. It's doubly offensive when I say specifically that it's a book by a friend and that I'm enjoying it. Never mind that I myself am a fiction writer and fiction filmmaker (who also writes nonfiction and also makes documentaries) and the implication is that all of my very careful work is, by default, worthless (and unserious and girly, unlike true stories about football players who get injured).

There are ways to say "intereting, but not my bag" without asserting moral eliteness, you know?

[rinue.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, thanks for confirming my suspicions about Joshua Ferris and the Mieville. I've never heard of Lahiri - I'll have to check that out.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

...inferior because the book is fiction...

"Only a novel!" et cetera as Jane Austen so aptly and still-accurately observed.

Lahiri may work for me because I am familiar with the physical, if not the social, landscapes her characters inhabit in America. You've probably heard of her but don't connect name with work---one of her books is The Namesake.

An air of writers' workshop strain hangs around too much of the recent fiction I have read (the Ferris especially, and to a certain extent the Berry). There's a kind of preaching-to-the-choir, or performance-for-in-crowd, feeling to so much of it, that neither engages nor impresses those not members of the elite. I think this is plaguing genre fiction as well. But, when did it not? The books that endure are the good ones.

[valancy.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. Oddly, Cath suffers this in two kinds of reverse - if she reads at work, they think she's bizarre and academic (and a wild dresser; they're all business majors), and whenever she mentions she's mostly a nonfiction reader to fiction-reading friends, they tend to tell her that isn't real reading. It's singularly depressing that a group that ought to be united in defense against one another (possibly against business majors ;) should so often be so critical.

Even me - I've been obsessively re-reading Jane Austen and intend to watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers today as my usual comforting transition moving material, and I don't know how many people have decided my reading preference and/or viewing material is snooty and intentionally insulting.