small epiphany

[truepenny]

I've just realized something.

oursin posted this morning (well, afternoon for her) about historiography and, as she put it, "Trying to get the balance between having to leave some things out, and having to put others in. The temptation of over-simplification and binarism."

My reply to her, and to matociquala, who had responded from the fictioneer's perspective, was a riff that anyone who was at WisCon probably heard me do, and maybe more than once, about the human need for patterns: we perceive them, we search for them, and sometimes we by-god MAKE them.

And I was thinking about that, and about my recent biography kick and all the rereading I've been doing lately, and about the shelf and a half of unread books I've got, some of which have been waiting to be read since Minicon, and I realized what has happened: I've gone off narrative.

I can't imagine this is a permanent state of affairs, since my narrative-CREATING impulse is certainly not on the fritz, but it does explain why I have all these books I sincerely want to read, and yet I can't bring myself to pick them up. I can't face the work of reading the narrative. With biographies (especially of people like Wilde and George Eliot, whom I already knew at least a little bit about), you know how it ends: the hero dies. And because it's history, there's a limit to the number of unexpected things that can happen. I'm LEARNING as I read, but I'm not being asked to invest in the reading in the same way that a novel asks one to invest. I just can't deal at the moment with having to learn a new pattern, or, for a different metaphor, having to start across a bridge when I can't see the other end.

I'm probably really not making sense with this at all. But it helps for me to know that there's a reason (even if a strange and neurotic one) that I'm not reading that huge stack of books. And maybe once the dissertation's done, I'll have the energy for new narratives again.

Comments

[marith.livejournal.com]

No, that makes a lot of sense. And I agree with you completely about the human brain being optimized for patterns. (Somewhere I read about an attempt to use human faces as a key to interpreting large masses of data; we are so sensitive to small changes in expression that it seems ideal. But people kept reading a data point as positive or negative based on the emotions they saw in its face, regardless of what the data said.)

And I've fallen back on mostly nonfiction and rereads of late for somewhat the same reason. Opening a new novel feels like getting on a roller coaster: once I start I won't be able to put it down, and it will be intense and unpredictable and possibly upsetting. Nonfiction allows one to keep more emotional distance. (Usually.)

(BTW, apologies for being bizarre in your journal the other day; that part of the brain has been recaptured and chained up, well away from the keyboard. Sheesh.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Please, feel free to be bizarre in my journal as often as you like. Being bizarre myself, I like to see bizarreness in others. :)

And "emotional distance" is a good way of putting it. Nonfiction is like going out for coffee with someone--the book itself, that is, not the author or the subject; a novel is like jumping into bed with them. And while I am literarily polyamorous to the nth degree, it seems that just at the moment what I need is coffee.

Or something like that.

What was I saying about bizarre?

[hedda62.livejournal.com]

Nonfiction is like going out for coffee with someone--the book itself, that is, not the author or the subject; a novel is like jumping into bed with them.

And a really good novel, particularly one that's part of a series or one by a prolific author, can be like entering into a long distracting love affair when all you wanted was a one-night stand...

Yes, well. I'm finding a similar pattern in my own reading (is there something going around?) but in my case it mostly seemed to be due to having a limited amount of time available for reading and a whole slew of research reading to do for what I'm writing. When I do have time to devote to, um, extramarital reading, though, I find I'm shying away from a) any historical novels or novels written in a historical period other than that I happen to be writing about at the time (and that would include plays, poetry, and prose as well -- it's an infection of syntax thing, I think), b) any modern novels with a similar theme to mine (infection of ideas), c) any novels that I suspect will suck me into a serious love affair. (I messed up on this one earlier this year when I was seduced into reading Dorothy Dunnett for the first time. And it was the wrong historical period, too. Two sins for the money.)

Which tends to leave shallow modern books. Also good for a quick coffee.

What a great subject!

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I have a similar reading pattern, except that I am reading more off the internet too. For the last few years I have been reading primarily non-fiction. Much of the fiction reading is not necessarily rereading, but it is primarily authors that I already know and like. I am picking up some new people from here, and lists at places like Endicott. I don't know that my reasons are the same but the pattern is. :-)

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

What a penetrating observation. I do admire how your brain works.

Mine's gone off narrative, too, a long time since. (Though it made an exception for papersky's latest, Tooth and Claw.) Right now I'm reading Manifesta, all about feminism, Gen X style. Rocks.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Just as an observation, whenever I have suffered from these symptoms, they've generally been caused by trauma. I re-read a great deal anyway, but a pattern of re-reading plus lots of non-fiction with little or no new fiction is usually, for me, a sign of being a bit down. I treat it with cod liver oil and new books by predictable authors.

I really am saying this as an observation, not as an attempt at long distance sympathetic hypochondria, but if it is that, the dissertation would probably be more than sufficient trauma to account for it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's definitely me rolling up into a ball like a hedgehog, and the dissertation and the looming self-imposed deadline (6 weeks! *rolls tighter*) is my best guess at the source of the trauma, although I don't really know that.

My epiphany was mostly a matter of moving from Enh, I don't want to read anything new,, to Oh! It's not that I don't want to read anything new, it's that I don't want to read new FICTION. And then trying to figure out what the difference was. And being relieved that it's not simple "laziness" that's keeping me from reading Kalpa Imperial or The Kappa Child or Light, but some actual and hopefully temporary mental block.

Things may get a little weird around here once the dissertation's done. That's all I'm saying.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I've gone off narrative.

Yeah, me, too. My book reading is way down since I started seriously novel-writing, and my tv/DVD watching has been nonexistent except for during my weekend trip to NYC. I can read novels, but not very challenging ones, and I keep putting them down and picking them up again. I started 5 or 6 different books and didn't get past their first chapters.

Am wondering what will happen to my writing/reading habits when choir starts up again in September.