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.

[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.