A Book Nomad

                  

Over the last four years, I have become something of a book nomad, reading a variety of books, but calling no genre home. This has both pluses and minuses. 

Ever since I started reading the Tom Swift Jr books in the 5th grade, I've considered myself a fan of science fiction. By my late teens and early 20's I had branched out into detective and mystery stories, old adventure stories, and then sea stories and various types of stories set in England. Most of these stories were written before I was born; in the first half of the twentieth century, or a few decades earlier. Used book stores and rummage sales with books were a delight to find. And yet, despite reading all these other types of books, I still would've said I was a science fiction fan.

So it is no surprise that when I started writing my own stories, they were some flavor of science fiction.

For the better part of four decades, I collected books. All sorts of books, eventually acquiring more than 1500 books by the turn of this century. Then , knowing that I would, some day, have to move all of them, decided that I had enough of them, and pretty much stopped buying books. I was quite content to read library books. And once I started writing my own books, I didn't even do much of that. 

However, some five years ago, I realized by reading blogs devoted to science fiction, that I was an edge case reader when it came to science fiction. To illustrate this; after almost fifty years of considering myself a fan of it, in any list of the hundred most influential sf books, I might have read, or at least tried, sixteen or so books. Indeed, I just recently came across another 100 best SF books, and could only claim to have read seven. The fact of the matter was that I wasn't reading sf for what most sf fans were reading it for. I wasn't looking for stories about some strange, mind-blowing science fiction concept. I was in fact, a fan of romances, romances in the old definition of the term; adventures in exotic lands. Science fiction just provided the exotic lands, and the sf books I enjoyed were mostly just adventure stories in space or on alien worlds. Moreover, I wasn't finding contemporary science fiction appealing, so I turned in my science fiction membership card, and walked away.

But then I had no place to call home. What type of reader was I?

I set out to find the answer to that question.

Though, as I said, I've always been reading a variety of books, three years ago, I decided to seek out a new genre to call home, and downloaded a bunch of free books from Amazon in a variety of genres to see if I could find something to love. While some were fine, I generally found that traditionally published books, written decades ago, where still the ones that appealed to me the most.

I also started watching YouTube videos with people talking about books. In the beginning they were ones featuring science fiction books, and then I gradually shifted to ones talking about fantasy, event though I was never much of a fantasy reader. The thing is, I enjoy hearing people talk about books, and learning about books, even ones I know I never have any interest in reading. Still, over the years, I've read a number of books they praised, some fantasy, but others included such titles as Lonesome Dove, Shogun, and Under the Greenwood Tree. However, for the most part, they talk about books I've no interest in ever reading; epic, grimdark, or romantic fantasy, so I'm not watching them primarily to find new books to read. I'm left to find those books myself. So far I have been trying this and that, but given my preferences, they are almost always old books.

The issue is that I'm hard to please. My taste in subject matter and writing style are rather narrow. I don't like the way they write books these days. And while I enjoy being a nomad and the search for books to discover and delight in, I must admit that it would be nice to be able to say that I am a fan of - fill in the blank. 

Thinking about it, maybe I can answer that question. The most likely candidate for that blank is the broad category of historical fiction, including both (relatively) contemporary fiction about the past, and fiction written eighty to a hundred or more years ago about then contemporary times.

This issue with this is that historical fiction is hardly a genre at all. It is too broad to be a single one. There are so many sub-genres within the term that, applying  my broad definition of historical fiction, the term "historical fiction" becomes rather meaningless. The fact is that all you have to do is take any genre  fiction -adventure stories, nautical tales, mysteries, westerns, war stories, fantasies, horror, or romances - set the the story somewhere in a past historical time, and you have historical fiction. 

It seems to me that historical fiction is more of an open range, than a home on the range of fiction. I really doubt I will be able to find a cozy literary home. A reading life of roaming on the range looks likely to be my home going forward.