Has your taste in books changed over the years? While I’m sure that your range has expanded over the years, or decades, has it changed so much that it has closed doors to books you’ve read in your past?
I seemed to have closed a lot of reading doors behind me. Most of them, it would seem.
I still have the books I read in my teens and early 20’s on my book shelf. Several hundred of them. Most of them I have absolutely no recollection of ever reading. Every so often, I come across a review of one of those old books, and after reading the review, I wonder how I ever enjoyed the story in the first place. Assuming I did, of course.
I pretty much stopped buying books 20 years ago, when I had two walls of them. I figured that someday I’d have to move them, and that reading library books was good enough. Well, I did move them last year, and consolidated them into one floor to ceiling packed wall. I moved all those books I’ll never reread, simply because they’re my life-long companions. Plus, a room with books makes for a cozy room.
Still, every once and in while I pick out one of my favorite old books and give it a try.
Last week, I picked out my copy of Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber. This was a favorite book and series. I have four or five other Zelazny books beyond the Amber series, but I have no recollection of them. Well, I started reading it, only to put it back on the shelf after reaching page 93. (About half way through.) The book should have still been a winner, since it has many of the elements I still like in a story – it has a first person narrator, an adventure involving a quest, plus good, witty writing, and lots of imagination. (Heck, it even has a very nice cover. My edition has a black knight on a skirted black horse.) But I found myself skim reading through it. All those descriptions of traveling through the shadow worlds no longer engaged me. The same for recounting his past while he was walking the pattern. It just didn’t interest me. Maybe I didn’t know enough about the character of Corwin to care about him. Or maybe I lack the patience I once had. And even though I don’t remember what happened next, I found that I didn’t care enough about either Corwin or Amber to finish the book.
Perhaps part of the issue is that for the last decade I’ve ween writing my own stories. I’ve grown used to stories where I know a whole lot about the characters and settings. Much more than ever finds its way into the story. And so, in my spare time, instead of reading, I’m imagining scenes and playing them over and over in my mind before ever setting them into words on the screen. The stories I’m creating leave little room in my head for stories from the outside.
And maybe another part of this phenomena is that at the age of 70, I’ve fallen behind the times. I don’t like many of the popular storytelling techniques contemporary authors are using. For example, I hate jumping between multiple points of view even more than jumping back and forth in time. Plus it seems that many speculative fiction stories today need to embrace unbelievable (for this old man) premises in order to write something original. I’ve tried reading sample chapters, but for one reason or another, none have clicked with me enough to order it up from the library. Of course there a lot of familiar SF tropes in the indie speculative fiction space. I’ve sampled a few, only to find that their understanding of SF seem to have been derived from the SF that they watched on TV or in the movies -- they read like fan fiction. All in all, I guess that's why I have to write my own stories.
Still, it seems that for whatever reason, as thing stand today, I used to be a reader.
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