Fiction, Once My Friend, Now... Not So Much.

me, circa 1920.

Well, here we are in the third week of quarantine. In my lifetime, I never thought I'd be typing that, in a blog I had kind of left abandoned after the first of this year, with no plans to make another post but here we are. Most of us stranded in our homes and apartments. Some displaced. Folks laid off, businesses struggling to figure out how to make ends meet so they can come back when this ends. I am one of the lucky ones, I know I am privileged to have a job that's paying me to not be there. I'm extremely lucky. So are my dogs. Because they are enjoying more Woodrow time than they could have ever dreamed of. They're the real winners in this whole shelter-in-place business.

This isn't news. You've read this on various people's facebook and twitter posts, articles and whatnot. It's also not what I wanted to talk about. 

When this first started, people were saying things like "Ooh I can finally do this project or learn how to do this or get back to an old hobby. But more than anything I heard from so many people about how they would finally have time to read. This was a thing I thought, too. I could just read. I had so many books on hand, why not, right?

Except the hardest thing for me to do during this has been reading. I can focus on doing a crossword or jigsaw puzzle. I can focus on a movie or TV show. But reading, I have just been struggling with. And I don't know why. Actually, I think I do know why. You see, when I was a kid, I loved and lived for fiction. I loved adventure classics, kid lit mysteries, and Bunnicula! Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexandre Dumas, and James Howe were among my favorites when I was younger, and I had my teenage Stephen King and Clive Barker phases as a teen. Then, in my 20's I was into mysteries and historical fiction. Comics and graphic novels were in there too, and have remained in my life to this day. But something happened in my 30s. I started reading... non-fiction. So much non-fiction that by the time I reached 40, I realized it was my preference. I know from having this discussion on Twitter that I am in the minority. Most people roll their eyes at non fic. And many people have room in their hearts for both. 

Here's what I am saying. I STILL try to read fiction like I love it and friends, I just do not. But I occasionally do. I can tell you the handful of  fiction I have truly loved from the last 5 or so years that didn't take months to read were Station 11, The Traitor Baru Cormorant (and its sequel), The Mothers, White Tears, My Sister the Serial Killer, and The Changeling. 

I'd need entire second post to tell you all the non-fiction I have read in the last 5 years that I loved. That I devoured in days. That I couldn't put down and could not stop raving about. That list is long. It's evident on my bookshelves at home. I often buy non-fic for myself, and cannot let it go the way I can donate novels to the booksale or the shelves of the Watershed.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of novels I have gotten through and thought, dang, that was pretty great. But for whatever reason, its almost like a fight between me and a novel for my attention span, while reading non-fiction, I can just bulldoze my way through, shoveling facts and ideas into my brain while I furiously flip the pages. I want to love fiction the way I love non-fic, but you know, its okay if I don't. And it's okay if YOU don't love non-fiction while swooning over your novels! There is room for everyone. 

I finished a Fantasy novel, Gideon the Ninth yesterday, and I plan to now read a book called Monster She Wrote, about the Women who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction. Gideon took me over 2 months to finish. Let's see how long Monster She Wrote takes.