recent reading

[bunrab]

Mostly, all those magazines.
About the only book I've read in the past week is, I've finally gotten around to Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. In general, memoir is not a genre I spend a lot of time with, but as with Sweet and Low last year, this one seemed odd enough to give it a go. And it is good, although the main thing I got out of it is: I haven't read most of the great western canon of fiction, and don't really want to. I've never read any James Joyce, nor any Henry James, and don't see it happening in the foreseeable future. Nor any Eliot, Dreiser, Woolf, Forster, Conrad, Hemngway, not even any Norman Mailer. I haven't even read John Updike, for pete's sake. It's odd - despite that I love the language and read well and enjoy it, and love words, and speak well, and all that - I can't stand literature. When I look at lists of great classics, well, I've read the assorted myths, and I've read a bunch of the stuff from before 1700 or so - but for fiction after that, it's been genre fiction all the way, friends. (Counting Austen and Dickens as romance writers, Dickens especially as pulp fiction.) I don't even have to mention anymore that I can't get past a page or two of Melville - everybody's already heard me whine about Melville. And you read in these very pages not so long ago my unsuccessful attempts to read Thackeray. I haven't even managed to read squirrel_magnet's collection of Galsworthy.

Oh well. I'll bet a lot of you out there who are horrified at this, and think the worse of me for not loving great literature, have not read even one edition of Edwin Colbert's Evolution of the Vertebrates, let alone three. I'll console myself with that.

Comments

[elfbiter.livejournal.com]

Not being fond of the tedious Finnish "classics" like Sillanpää (actually, I blame Stalin for his Nobel) I think I can sympathize somewhat...

[o-jenny.livejournal.com]

Nope, not horrified. I do love Forster though. :)

[evilsithlady.livejournal.com]

I'm with you; I don't care for literature either. It's dull, and moves way too slowly. I think it's kind of like people who talk to hear themselves talk and have nothing of any substance to say.