I am not really what you would call a genre fiction type of guy. In school I specialize in the Renaissance period (currently referred to as the early modern period by other people who specialize in the period and almost no one else at all), which is the era of dead white guys who wrote books with titles longer than a Wikipedia article and actually had meaningful scholarly debate on whether fiction writing was a sin. Moreover, the author I focus on in this period is the captain of the literary dead white guy team as far as I am concerned, the one-time Puritan, all-the-time intellectual snob John Milton.
There was no genre fiction in the early modern period. There were no novels in the early modern period. And my appetite for fiction has largely consisted of the type of material one would find Mortimer Adler giving his grave and dignified seal of approval to in the back of his nearly joyless tome on how to read like an intellectual snob, entitled How to Read a Book. So I have read my Dostoevsky and enjoyed it; read my George Eliot and been transported; read my Dickens and laughed and cried; read my Melville and endured it.
Genre fiction was no doubt a delightful pastime for the rubes of the hinterland to enjoy in between episodes of NCIS, but it was not to be indulged in by serious minds such as mine. And then two things happened, serendipitously connected to one another: the first, I read Alan Jacobs’s excellent book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction; secondly, I bought a Kindle.
I had read Dr. Jacobs’s work before, his biography of C.S. Lewis is one of the best books I have ever read about anything, but it came as a revelation. I plan to interact with it more on this here old blog throughout this semester, but one of his main points that is germane to the current post was his idea of Whim being the guiding principle for leisure reading. Too many readers who want to think of themselves as serious readers get trapped into thinking that if a book is not on some distinguished publications Top 100 List of Books to Read If You Want to Feel Better Than Others then it is not worth their time. More than that, perhaps, to read the book is shameful. Jacobs, a professor of English himself and no stranger to the Top 100 lists, will have no truck with this mentality. Life is too short to read books merely because you are supposed to; you should also read what you want to. And there should be flexibility with your reading list. Don’t make long and complicated risks—be willing to let one book lead to the next.
Armed with this new found insight, a couple of days after finishing Jacobs’s work, I received my Kindle in the mail. The great thing about old books is that they are free; out of copyright works can be downloaded for free and read on this remarkable little device. And among the first two that I downloaded were Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly’s Frankenstein. Fiction is perfect for the Kindle, or, more aptly, the Kindle is perfect for fiction. I have tried reading nonfiction on it, but I still need a pencil in one hand and a highlighter in the other when I am reading nonfiction. And since it is silly to read fiction with a pencil in one hand and a highlighter in the other, the Kindle is perfectly equipped for this type of reading. And so I read these two books while I was splitting time between Colorado and Arizona for the holidays.
Also while on vacation I had read an article in The Atlantic Monthly, one of those old and venerated magazines, about the emerging genre of literary science-fiction. Two of the books they discussed were Justin Cronin’s The Passage, a science fiction book with the novel plot construction of a government experiment gone terribly wrong, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. So when I got back to Manhattan I went to the public library and picked them both up. Cronin’s book was nearly 800 pages long and I read it in a few days. I read Whitehead’s (significantly shorter) work in a few sittings.
In my next post I will reflect on what I learned from reading a month of horror fiction, but this post, if you will recall the title, was merely the how. And that is how. I read on the principle of Whim, and I was not disappointed.
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