I applaud Aiculik when he says in #17:
Quote:
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The fact that someone knows his abc doesn't mean that they can read artistic texts. I see many people all around me - and some are real bookworms, mind you - that simply can't go below the most obvious, top layer of the book. They don't know what to think of the book unless they read the review or critic. And they often choose books because someone, somewhere said that this book is good and worthy, it's classic, it's in some canon or whatever. They ask the questions someone else told them to ask, find meanings someone else found in the text.
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This is what I'm always battling ("ranting") against. The propensity of people not to think for themselves, not choosing their own books to read, but slavishly copying the trends, the critics, the gurus. What the Guardian and the NYT "tells" them to read. While I do like to see what is being read in the world (the world, not only London and New York), I try to go my own way.
At present, I've decided to read some Icelandic, Finland-Swedish and Swedish poets. For no particular reason - except that I want to. I could Google to see whether this is the trendy thing to read (e.g. Iceland, bank failure, read their poets), but I can't be bothered. A whim, just now, makes me want to read such things. Next month it may we be prose from a completely different country.
So for me fiction is "important", in the sense that it expands my horizons: geographical, psychological, stylistic. If you look at my list of my 50 favourite books on another thread somewhere, you will find that while half of the authors are common to most other people here, the other half are by authors that no one on these threads may even have heard of. For me, that is the right balance. Neither totally conforming to every trend conjured up by newspaper critics (e.g. a certain author was born or died a hundred years ago this year); nor, on the other hand, turning up my nose at serious and well-regarded writers.
But I must
want to read the book, must be driven on to read beyond the first ten pages. I don't want to read through a 500-page novel just because there is pressure from critics, friends, TV, etc., to do so. ("Dostoevsky / Joyce / Mann / Goethe must be good, 'cos everybody says so.")