AquaBlue said:
So would you say that you have a deep (mature) appreciation for books?
I have an appreciation for words; moreso words than books.
How would one develop such an appreciation for books- how does someone start to mature as a reader?
As I recall, I just found myself getting bored by the authors that I was reading. I remember reading almost exclusively Koontz, Herbert, Barker, Rice, Brite, King, and Laymon.
Laymon fell to the side first - I started to see the same things appearing in his novels - mysogeny, gore, and implausible situations. And it wasn't that he was exploring mysogeny as a theme; the women were just getting chopped up, raped, etc. There was no purpose to it.
Koontz was another one that began to bore me. I read several of his novels and then one came along,
The Bad Place, which was just so stupid the fact of its publication made it hard to take the man serious anymore.
Brite, to be honest, I sort of liked. She gave up horror though and went off to write gay fiction in contemporary settings. No vampires, no ghosts, no serial killers. I haven't seen any of her latest novels in the shops - that said, I don't venture into the gay/lesbian section of shops. If it's good enough to be on a shelf then its content should not matter and it should be amongst the A to Z shelves. Makes me think it's just porn. With words.
Herbert just died as a writer. His stories became dull.
While I liked King, I never could engage with his characters that much. And when
Insomnia came out, I wasted days reading it. Then
Desperation. I even bought
Bag Of Bones, but gave it away before reading it. His voice was, when I think about it, too plain.
Rice became too obsessed with her vampires to think about new ideas. Thus we got several books after the closure of the Vampire Chronicles detailing the history of other vampires who had been bit players in the original series. Dull, dull, dull. Then, as sales dipped, she brought back LeStat. Now she's just lost it!
What did you do at twenty to broaden your mind to reading?
I tried other authors. I tried other horror authors (Caitlyn R. Kiernan springs to mind) but soon tired of that. I had seen
Naked Lunch so bought the book by William S. Burroughs. I had seen
Crash so bought the book by JG Ballard. I had seen
The Virgin Suicides so bought the book by Jeffrey Eugenides.
I found myself gravitating away from the horror shelves into, for me, uncharted territory. There was so much variety that I'd never before considered. I just jumped in and tried a few. Found some I liked, some I didn't. The more I read the more I came to appreciate the skill of writing and I now prefer writing to storytelling. I've tried going back to certain authors from my youth but I can see that I've grown out of them because I no longer find anything worthwhile in their prose.
I find it best just to vary one's reading as much as possible and don't feel like you have to finish something if it isn't grabbing you. Of the
books I've read this year I think there is a great variety of writing styles on display. I know there's more out there. And I'm willing to try. Horror, when I was younger, was a comfort zone. I no longer feel the need to be comfortable.
