(Haven't read much) fiction...

I had the loveliest old copy of Wuthering Heights that i stole from a pub i worked in when i was 18. No idea where its gone :broken_heart:

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Oh that’s sad! Hope it turns up again.

What sort of stories do you like?

I mean you must have an idea or do you not even watch films/tv?

I mostly read sci-fi/horror short stories.

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That focus on male writers is probably a mirror to how most of our government is made up of white male highly privileged types.

Surprised it’s as high as 20%, tbh.

Just to be clear: I don’t mind if you don’t like fiction. I’ve known a few people like that. You don’t have to enjoy it, sure. But the instigating post is technically here

, where you read an amateur short story and used it to imply all fiction was rubbish :wink: - and that is what I pulled you up for!!

I’m not sure I recall you ever being into genre fiction in film/TV, but this is why I asked him about the type of stories he likes.

I mean @thewza that is an odd scattergun list of books and so I’d be interested to know how you ended up with them. E.g. why one of the least interesting Iain M Banks instead of his classic ‘The Wasp Factory’? Why ‘Filth’ and not ‘Trainspotting’? etc

not sure I’m parsing this right but that post was talking about ash sarkar saying something a bit silly in that article, not directed at wza at all.

:+1:

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Oooh, sorry, on my phone and I obviously didn’t get the flow there!

Oh wait, it was your other post I meant to reply to. Will edit!!!

Oh maybe not. Fuck it. I have no idea!!! :smiley:

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Yeah that article is really bad, probably intentionally so

If people are reading anything it is good. No use telling anyone what is right and wrong to read

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Wtf even is literary fiction. that name means nothing

Have decided it’s just how the cover looks / marketing. Utter bs

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Basically anything that’s not genre fiction I think?

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I’m fairly sad for a man who thinks Red Mars is absolutely riveting but reckons Jane Austen is ‘chitter chatter’. (I have only read the opening bit of this article.)

I mean James SA Corey is loads of ‘chitter chatter’ but is also very interesting political sci-fi which Red Mars sort of explores but at a glacial and tiresome pace.

I don’t think anything that isn’t ‘genre fiction’ is a coherent and distinct category in and of itself tbh.

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I honestly until this point had no idea that ‘literary fiction’ was a thing.

If you’d used the term to me previously I’d have just assumed it was just to make the point you meant fiction in books rather than TV or film. Fucking hell.

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it’s mad the amount of obviously smart people who treat speculative fiction as though it’s still 100% guys in rocket boots saving green women, with zero underlying depth or meaning

remember reading an ishiguro interview after he released buried giant, where he was like “im not a fantasy author, i wanted to use a fantasy setting, but to use it to explore a deep truth about memory, not just swords and wizards” (paraphrase obvs) like yeah mate. well done. literally no one had thought to try anything like that before, good of you to slum it and show everyone how it’s done

like there’s not been 75+ years worth of thought and discussion about how it can and should be used as a tool to understand humanity better. like le guin hasn’t written countless fantastic essays about it

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I don’t think Ash Shankar is quite dismissing sci fi in the way some ‘serious authors’ do. But tbh I don’t see the point in being annoyed at anyone for reading the wrong type of book (unless it’s like Jordan Peterson or something worse). Reading anything is good!

Tbh I think that article was written to get a big response on twitter. And it has! But it’s not a well thought out argument

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I enjoyed Ursula LeGuin’s response to that.

Mr Ishiguro said to the interviewer, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

Well, yes, they probably will. Why not?

It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.

To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response…

‘Surface elements,’ by which I take it he means ogres, dragons, Arthurian knights, mysterious boatmen, etc., which occur in certain works of great literary merit such as Beowulf , the Morte d’Arthur , and The Lord of the Rings , are also much imitated in contemporary commercial hackwork. Their presence or absence is not what constitutes a fantasy. Literary fantasy is the result of a vivid, powerful, coherent imagination drawing plausible impossibilities together into a vivid, powerful and coherent story, such as those mentioned, or The Odyssey , or Alice in Wonderland

I respect what I think he was trying to do, but for me it didn’t work. It couldn’t work. No writer can successfully use the ‘surface elements’ of a literary genre — far less its profound capacities — for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it. I found reading the book painful. It was like watching a man falling from a high wire while he shouts to the audience, “Are they going say I’m a tight-rope walker?”

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That’s absolutely fine. Was the last one any good one?

Probably My Pal Spadger, The Comforts Of Madness, 1984, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time*, The Outsider. I’ll say a bit more about each separately from this reply.

MsWza read it and recommended it.

None of note that I can recall. There’ll be a couple or so that have cropped up in magazines along the way, I suppose. Have had a look at/considered poetry and flash fiction as a more digestible option, but that hasn’t ended up happening.

That previous paragraph is a partial lie, if the two or three compendiums of erotic short stories are brought into consideration. But I think that can be put to one side for the time being.

I read …Denisovich in a tent. And there’s plenty of disappointment in that book. And I was pretty contented for sure.

Certainly none of this is a boast. I don’t consider it’s personal failing either, as I’ve read plenty of other stuff. But I suppose I’m curious as to what it might be like to have delved into and entered the world of so many made up stories and created worlds. Books are a much more private affair, right? Compared to TV/film. Kinda like how listening to podcasts tend to be more personal thing than music or even radio. Even though you can discuss books/podcasts, it’ll usually be after the event, whereas there’s usually (not necessarily, but often) some sort of shared experience at the time of watching TV/films (even if they’re discussed and dissected after they’ve been watched).

Yeah, all of them, pretty much. Aside from number9dream. And…

Heh. Yeah. It was perfectly readable. But ultimately tosh (especially in comparison to the billing it was given).

Dunno. Definitely not fantasy, though. I think it’s differed as I’ve aged. I suppose I’ve been drawn to a dystopian vibe (hi there, Ash! :slightly_smiling_face:). Started reading Brave New World but didn’t see it through. I suppose The Road is another biggie that perhaps holds a certain appeal, but the likelihood of me reading it is evidently low. And with the state of the world lately, the urge to read about the world being fucked up has waned somewhat. Down And Out In Paris And London and Fever Pitch are two books I enjoyed at the time. But they’re, y’know, non-fiction. Although they’re certainly both stories which go beyond being dry autobiographies. So maybe that’s the answer. And looking through the five favourites I listed, I can’t properly recall if they’re all first person or not, but they all seem to be very centred on telling a story from the inside of someone’s head, in nonstandard circumstances. Hadn’t really made that connection before. This might be useful. I’ve heard good things about The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which feels like a good fit. So maybe I’ll try that. I’ve got really shit facial recognition, so that’s of interest. I often find following TV/film quite difficult because of it. Two characters looking vaguely similar? Hnnnnng. So, yeah, I watch films, but haven’t done so voraciously. I’m drawn to vibes and fairly linear plots rather than cleverly crafted interwoven plot complexity (though I dig Borgen’s twists, and Better Call Saul is a winner on account of the vibe rather than me being able to keep track of everything that’s going on). Can’t be arsed with TV built around working out who the killer is, cos I struggle to give a shot about a dead character (The Bridge and Shetland are probably the only exceptions to this).

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Ishiguro was still doing it in his Adam Buxton podcast interview where he was talking about Klara and the Sun which is very clearly a Sci-Fi book. A weird moment (in a podcast ep where most of the weird was from Buxton).

My sister-in-law has an assumption she won’t like sci-fi but then she actually does acknowledge she reads and enjoys books like Klara and the Sun and the recent Emily St. John Mandel and the like. I think there’s a lot of bad genre categorising that goes on with literature that feeds into prejudice rather than trying to break it.

It’s like books are stuck where music was in the 90s when people were much more pushed into liking specific genres.

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