There’s No Accounting for Taste: Literature

 

Light Reading

There really is no accounting for taste, is there? Preference migrates, culturally, individually, personally.

Indeed, consider what once dominated the shelves of bookstores, compared with now. Long ago, in a decade, far, far, away, I recall rows of slim Harlequin Romances striking provocative poses; Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey governing a now long banished Westerns section; World War 2 setting the stage for adventure thrillers; and classic literature retaining shelf space.

How things have changed. All the above are things of the past. Westerns appear to have disappeared. The last great spymaster would appear to have been John le Carre. I rarely see Dickens on the shelves, anymore. Signet Classics of Shakespeare, to say nothing of Coles Notes, have all but disappeared (Coles Notes, certainly). Science Fiction has taken a back seat to Fantasy; or shall I say Romantasy.

Not that these genres have completely disappeared. All the above are available, and perhaps even alive and well, on eBay and Amazon. And in superstores, I imagine. Superstores have very large selection; but that does not change a simple fact: stores stock what sells. And what sold then does not necessarily sell now. Thus, begun ye bestsellers of old!

Browsing online is not quite the same as haunting bookshelves, though. One must, usually, know what one is looking for to find it. So too, sometimes, in superstores. My memory always seems paralysed in superstores. I find myself pacing about, glancing at spines and covers of authors I've never heard of, overwhelmed, finally pursuing only those tried and true I do.

This is all neither here nor there, here. This is about reading taste: mine, particularly. Mine migrates, as you might have surmised from the first paragraph. All power to those who’ve found their true love decades and stuck with it; were that my experience. But mine is far from theirs. Honestly, I can’t account for how my taste in books has evolved. Maybe I can. More on that later.

I was not a reader when young. I struggled. I lagged behind my classmates; until I was held back in Grade 2. This is not to say that I read, even as my reading skills improved. I was an active kid. Perhaps overactive. Even when I did read, what I read was not what one might call enlightened: I recall books with badgers, and the like. Books with pictures.

It was not until I borrowed Arthur C. Clarke’s Islands in the Sky, in middle school, from my school library, that I caught the bug. I did not dive directly into SF, however. The next two books I read, that summer, were two novelizations of films I was too young, then, to be allowed entrance to: Alien, and Nightwing, both horror stories. The first was better than the second.

Those two books led me to Stephen King. I read a lot of King. I did not abandon SF. I read Clarke’s 2001, A Space Odyssey, then more of his ouvre. Then Asimov. And John Wyndham. I thank Mr. Scully, an English teacher, for keeping me in touch with SF. He was a rare breed of teacher, insofar as he chose to assign stories he thought his students would like, and thus read, and not just those school boards might prefer. Maybe he just liked SF, and loathed classics and contemporary “literary” literature. I don't know. I never asked him. It's not like a lot of teens like to talk to their teachers.

In latter high school I found my way to Fantasy literature because I was introduced to D&D. I read far too much of it. Some of it was good. Some of it was extraordinary: Le Guin, Moorcock, Tolkien. Most of it was bad. Some of it was bloody awful. Gory. Hypersexualised. Infantile. The Gor series, for instance. I suffered through six of them, if I remember correctly; and only because a friend loved them. Like I said, there's no accounting for taste.

My mother disliked my momentary Fantasy fixation (rightly so, I'd say now), and insisted I read other things. She offered to buy me a novel one day, but only if I chose one that was not Fantasy. I chose a Clive Cussler title: Raise the Titanic. I was a lifeguard, then, and the thought of reading a story about the sea and submersibles appealed to me. It was alright, good enough that I opted to read other books Cussler wrote. I began to read adventure thrillers alongside Fantasy titles (I expect that disappointed my mother - the continued consumption of Fantasy), books by Tom Clancy and Wilbur Smith, Jack Higgins, Robert Ludlum. You know the type.

I read a lot more classic SF as my interest in Fantasy waned. It was the glut of TSR/Wizards of the Coast titles that largely turned me away from the genre. The more of them I read, the less I liked them. So too ever bloated, cliched, trilogies, like those of Tad Williams. To say nothing of series that never seemed to end, The Black Company, for instance.

It was about this time, now largely disgusted with Fantasy, that I turned to Hemingway. I believe I read The Sun Also Rises, first. Then For Whom the Bell Tolls. Then A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway led to F. Scott Fitzgerald: Gatsby. Fitzgerald led to The New Canadian Library, from Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart. It was the 90s and the growing I Am Canadian era. I wanted to read our own stories, our own history. And do to this day.

It’s been a merry ride since then. Ever more "high brow" literary lit. Victorian stuff. Turn of the century Modern. Histories. A few memoirs, and biographies. These days I’ve dipped my toe into philosophy. And the Greeks and the Romans. Also postmodern and ergodic lit.

How’d I come to choose the things I did? Taste. I was attracted to what I knew and liked. I grew up watching Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, The Night Gallery and Kolchak, The Night Stalker. The Outer Limits. The Hulk. Doctor Who. The Six Million Dollar Man. Epic miniseries, like Shogun, Roots, The Winds of War. Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Star Wars, CE3K, and 2001. But also, more westerns and war films than one might imagine. So, it comes as no surprise that I was drawn to the fantastic and the supernatural fare, at first. But I also grew up watching “classic” film with my parents on Saturday nights; it also comes as no surprise then, that I was drawn to 1920s expat writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, to Steinbeck, Dickens and Twain, to Harper Lee, to Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy. Salinger. And also, to Ray Bradbury and Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.

It has become impossible to pin down what I like. I like good prose. Poetic language. Even poetry, now; something that I’d hitherto neglected. I suppose what I’m drawn to story, tales that explore the human condition, narratives that, however long or short, have insight into the human soul.

As you might expect, I do not read Fantasy, anymore.