Entries in the Category "reading"
Interesting Literary Debate!
...and nobody is still reading.
I wrote recently about Twilight and why I don’t care to sample that particular cultural phenomenon. Basically, literature is important to me, and all the accounts that I’ve had of Twilight suggest that in those books the literary development is subordinated to sensationalism and girlish squealing. I tend to get those things in other places.
In that post, I said that I didn’t care to read romance novels, but a debate that’s been percolating online has clued me in to the fact that I should be less dismissive and tease out my aversion to the genre in a way that’s not patronizing. Learning!
The post, about why we shouldn’t judge romance novels by the Fabio on the cover, is here at Smart Bitches Trashy Books. (Yes, that’s the name of the site.) They’re commenting on a post that appeared over at the Huffington Post written by some old man (who, it appears, is mostly concerned with promoting his own book). (I was tipped to the debate, as usual, by Linda from Monkey See.)
The writer over at SB makes the excellent point that the old guy has no right to draw a broad generalization based on checking a random stack of romances out of the library. She acknowledges, as do the numerous commenters on the site, that the romance genre is replete with crap writers and the fill-in-the-blanks style of plotting. But what the site appears to be designed for is acknowledging the romantic fiction that goes the extra mile and is good. SB makes a strong case that romance is a broader category than people generally realize and that, to employ a cliché in a post about good and bad writing, there are diamonds in that rough.
I don’t doubt it. And some of the commenters at SB made really good observations about the fallibility of the old guy’s argument. One says, “I don’t want someone who’s not familiar with pop music reviewing the latest CDs for me,” and another says, “Maybe what he really needs to do is take a statistics class and get a refresher on what it would take to get a statistically relevant sample.” Yes, absolutely. He was not qualified to make the judgment that he did, and yet! that fact points towards why I tend to avoid romance novels altogether.
I don’t know how to filter the bad from the good. I don’t know where to start. I don’t want to have to read ten bad romance novels to discover one terrific writer. I never know whose opinion I can trust—except for my own—and I just don’t have the reading time; my to-be-read list is long enough already, thanks.
Even catching one good one does not guarantee others. I remember reading Circle of Friends by Maeve Binchy in college because I really liked the movie. That was a terrific book (which has since disappeared from my shelves—I think, in fact, that it may have been absorbed by my sister’s bookshelf, ahem). It took me four more mediocre Binchy novels to decide that Circle of Friends was an anomaly.
In literary fiction, I’ve made inroads. I know which authors I like, I know which authors are like the ones I like; basically, I know the lay of the land. It would be a substantial project to explore a new genre and the takeaway—I would get to read really good romance novels—is not good enough. I read plenty of really good books and some of them have romance in them, and that’s enough for me.
It Doesn't Kindle My Desire
Sorry for the pun. It's late!
There’s been a Kindle-themed controversy in the news this week. You can read here for the complete story and here for a pretty shrewd prediction of the fallout Amazon can expect to experience; if you want my concise summary, here it is. Basically, two classic books by George Orwell which were purchased by Kindle readers were deleted from the readers’ systems when the publisher decided against making them electronically available. Money was refunded, but the situation has reminded consumers of the difference between purchasing a physical product and purchasing electronic data from a public network. It would be the equivalent of me waking up to discover all the Jane Austen books had been removed from my shelves over night, with a ten-dollar bill in the place of each. (Ten and a five for those fancy Broadview editions.)
It’s an interesting situation, and I think it’s a good thing that it came up; now policies can be developed and instated that will protect the consumer from this kind of ambiguity of possession (or, that will protect the producer/publisher from this kind of thing and sink the product, as the second link shows).
In the meantime, I am contentedly avoiding electronic books. It’s hard to explain what doesn’t interest me about the Kindle without sounding like Andy Rooney, but I can give it a shot.
I’m used to the tactile experience of holding a physical book in my hands, and turning pages. The Kindle is attractively small and light (so I hear; I’ve never seen one in person), but I expect there are elements of the reading experience I would miss—for example, the feeling of progress I get when I can see that I have read more than halfway through the book and will most likely finish it. If I get in bed and notice that my bedtable book has got just a small sliver of pages left to be read, I might pick it up that night when I wouldn’t dream of picking up a Kindle. For purely sentimental reasons, I would miss the smooth, glossy covers, the heft of the pages, and the springiness of the binding. (You will find I am not one of those people who fetishize the smell of books. In fact, I prefer my books to have no odor at all.)
Another factor is that I keep books. I can see the extreme benefit of consuming newspapers and magazines via the Kindle; getting a full newspaper delivered every day generates a lot of paper and a lot of clutter. I always hate throwing away magazines, too, because they cost so much, whether I subscribe to them or pay the newsstand price. But if you keep them, they pile up overwhelmingly. That’s why on TV those weird shut-in characters always have piles of newspapers built into forts around their furniture. I had an entire trunkful of old New Yorkers until my boyfriend made me throw them all away.
Some people don’t keep books, either—that’s why you’ve got programs like PaperBack Swap and Swaptree and Book Mooch and Title Trader, not to mention eBay, used bookstores and libraries. But I do. My book shelves have grown more and more packed—and that’s a huge commitment, considering how many times we’ve moved in the past few years—and they give me a sense of accomplishment when I look at them. I think, "I’ve read that, and that, and that. Oh, and I haven’t read that yet; I’ll get around to it sooner or later."
Another benefit of the Kindle is that it can hold multiple books at a time. I do tend to be in the middle of more than one book at a time, but I don’t need to be offered my pick of any of them at any time. I read different books on different occasions (this one is the bedside book, this one is in the afternoons, this one I only read in the library, etc.). Also, sometimes I am more likely to finish a book when it’s the only book available to me at a given moment. There have been times when I’ve read from a book I’m only lukewarm about when the book I really want to read is in the next room, all because I’m too lazy to get up and get the good one. And I have to embrace any limitations of access which end up having a positive motivational effect on me.
This may all become moot in a year; I hear some colleges are going to begin equipping their students with Kindles instead of requiring physical textbooks. Case is among them.
But for now I'm pretty happy with my paperbacks.