I’ve been writing this new column for several weeks now, telling you all about the books I love and suggesting that you read them. This week I thought you might like to know what I don’t read.
First, I must tell you that I read some good non-fiction, but my main joy in reading is literary fiction. This type of writing is described by Wikipedia as “realistic stories of human character” or “all serious prose fiction outside the market genres,” genres being such subjects as romance, crime, mystery or science fiction. Literary fiction has to be based on reality.
Good literary fiction writers that I’ve enjoyed are Anne Tyler, Fredrik Backman, Alexander McCall Smith, Barbara Kingsolver and Kristin Hannah. Good classic literary fiction was produced by England’s Charles Dickens, Russia’s Leo Tolstoy and Norway’s Ole Rolvaag.
In genre fiction, the plot or story is the central feature. In literary fiction the themes or the insights into real life are the primary features.
One category that I have found unworthy of my time under the reading lamp is the romance novel. Romances seem to be written by women mostly, who are writing about a subject they know little about—real relationships between men and women. These authors want us to believe that romantic love is the answer to everything and that marriage is the goal of life. Romances thus end with the wedding, and we are to assume that the couple “lived happily ever after” and spent the rest of their 50 years gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes while they eat romantic candlelight dinners at expensive restaurants in tropical countries.
Anyone who has been married for more than a year knows that’s not the way it works. Expensive dinners start interfering with the spare cash you’ve put back to get the septic tank cleaned out. It’s hard to see what’s on your plate if you’re eating by candlelight, and your husband learns that you may try to pawn off yet another a tuna casserole on him if he doesn’t keep the lights on. In real life, somebody has to clean the toilets, and real people have dental appointments and crabby mothers-in-law to deal with.
I hate that so many romance readers get married thinking that the novelist’s fictional pattern for love will be what they experience every day. So I avoid authors like Nora Roberts, Danielle Steele and Nicholas Sparks.
Another genre I don’t read is the psychological thriller. I get enough of a scare just looking in the mirror every morning, and I don’t need any more tension in my life. What you read all the time is what you begin to believe, and I don’t want to start believing again that there’s a monster hiding under my bed. I just got over that from dealing with my childhood fears!
I don’t read what I call “prurient interest” books either, in which every human encounter leads to amazing stuff going on in a bedroom. So no Fifty Shades of Gray for me!
I don’t read science fiction because it is too often illogical. I mean, we don’t know that there’s anything out there in space in the first place, much less little green men or Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. So nothing the science fiction author makes up has to be realistic at all. It just seems like cheating somehow.
The exception might be the books by Ray Bradbury, like Farenheit 451 or the short stories in his collection The Illustrated Man. Though their genre is science fiction, they read more like literary fiction and are thus more satisfying for those who of us who want at least a hint of reality in what we read.
I don’t read spy fiction thrillers like The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Legacy because I can’t keep up with who’s chasing whom and why and who the bad guys are and who the good guys are. But if you can keep up with all the intrigue, have at it.
Like the teeshirt says, “So many books, so little time.” I don’t want to waste my time under the reading lamp on material that is completely unrealistic, misleading, frightening, too complex to follow— or just plain stupid.
