Since quarantine started, I’ve accrued a stack of books I’ve been meaning to read or re-read with all this new free time. But I’ve unfortunately been procrastinating. I think that, ironically, living in quarantine makes reading less attractive. I usually read to relax at the end of a long day, but since every day’s the same, it’s no longer as enticing an option.
It’s a fat stack, and it weighs on my soul. So now I’m gonna muse about reading instead of actually reading them.
Musings
To me, reading is like traveling for the mind. And each type of writing comes with its own style of travel. For example, popular non-fiction is sort of like public transportation because it presents information that’s just factual enough where the majority of people will cling to its loops and bars even if it rides unsteadily. Fantasy fiction is like traveling abroad. You board a plane and fly off to explore some surprise foreign country (usually medieval Europe) where the trip’s exciting, but like packing, preparing, and going through airport security, memorizing all the new fantasy lore is a buzzkill. It’s not so bad, though, because every fantasy story is kind of the same.
You know what I’m talking about. Every fantasy book has similar settings, conflicts, villains, and writing styles, whether it’s young-adult stuff like Harry Potter, Pendragon, or Redwall, or medium-to-old-adult stuff like Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, or The Dark Tower. They’re usually written in the third-person POV and set in a pseudo-Earth world where a hero must overcome odds to fight some physical embodiment(s) of evil. There’s a war, and elves, goblins, dwarves, and/or dragons are involved.
I’m not saying fantasy books are all exactly the same, or that it’s bad that their writing styles are similar—after all, they’re constructing massive fictional realities, so messing with POV and dialogue tags and voice would be a little much—I’m just saying they’re basically immersive anthropology lessons. I love them and will continue to read them, but let’s not pretend they’re anything else. Maybe one day, popular fantasy will slow down. Maybe we’ll get the quiet, A24-sponsored story about Harry Potter in his seventies, using his withering magical abilities to save his marriage by Accio’ing flowers and chocolates for Ginny one fine morning, driving the witnessing Hallmark store clerk to insanity and kicking off a promising insurgent Muggle subplot, but it seems that until that glorious day, we’re stuck with fan fiction.
Contemporary realistic fiction (regular old novels), on the other hand, involves no flights or tour guides. Actually, that’s not true. Your tour guide is an Uber driver who’s taking you to a surprise destination. You don’t need to prepare much, but you also don’t know what to expect. Novels, unlike fantasy, happen in our own world and use many clever tools to control how we view it: unreliable narrators, changes in point of view, moral ambiguity, page-long sentences, etc. So in essence, you don’t know how this mystery Uber ride will go, or where you’ll end up. You don’t know if your driver will talk the whole time or sit silently. You don’t know how long it’ll take. You don’t know who you’re gonna meet. You don’t even know if it’ll be in a car!
It’s at this point that I’m sorry to say my travel analogy begins to fall apart. Some fiction is historical—does your metaphorical tour guide have a time machine? Some fiction tells different stories in parallel—do you have (a) clone(s)?!? What about first-person-narrated stories—are you the Uber driver and the passenger? I just can’t safely generalize. It’s too hard. I was too ambitious.
My main point, I suppose, is that, in today’s age, where Game of Thrones, The Witcher, and Marvel movies are highly popular media franchises, and where bestselling books are either nonfiction or Stephen King’s latest diary, it seems to me like we’re overlooking novels. (At the very least, I’m overlooking them—none of the books in my pile is a novel.) I think it’s because novels don’t guarantee exciting escapism of fantasy or the grounding information of nonfiction, yet they have more lasting impact on culture. Maybe they’ll come back in style, and our culture will ebb and flow a bit.
But while we wait for that to happen, here are some other extensions of this analogy I’ve been scrapping together.
Analogy Scraps
Short-story collections are kind of like riding sidecar to a motorcycle, and essay collections are like…go-karting?
Instruction manuals of any sort are like lawnmowers. Or tractors? Utility vehicles? Those Jeeps with no doors or windows? Lawnmowers.
Reading news articles online is sort of like…bicycles, right? Because you’re…you can never quite get a handle on what’s true or not? Haha. But I guess that’d make them more like unicycles. We’ll workshop it.
Poetry’s like having someone carry you around while they do parkour. Either that or bumper cars. There is no in-between.
OK I think that was enough musing. Time to start reading. Until next week!
Other Things of Note
I thought of just a few fantasy works where redundant fantasy tropes are either subverted or minimized to the story’s benefit:
Looper (the movie where Joseph Gordon-Levitt grows up to become Bruce Willis)
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s about a guy who discovers that his dreams end up changing reality. Chaos ensues. That’s all I’ll say.
Saga (an amazing and subversive fantasy comic series that’s also in my stack of books)
This sort of preachy but admittedly valid rant on why we should be on time.
Legendary Indian musician S. P. Balasubrahmanyam passed away earlier this week. Most of y’all probably don’t know him, but he had a huge presence in my parents’ generation, singing over 40,000 songs in 16 Indian languages.
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—Chuckry Vengadam (@churrthing)
Liked all your analogies. I'd say reading essay collections is like going grocery shopping for staples. Essays pack all you need in plain black and white packaging.