Blog Post
How Times Have Changed.... and along with it my taste in reading material.
Do you ever look back on your adult reading history and realize you don't gravitate toward the same type of books you did, say, twenty or thirty years ago?
For myself I have to make a few exceptions to that, and suspect you might too. Anne of Green Gables, perhaps, or Gone With the Wind? These are the books that can be read every few years and savored once again. They never loose their appeal.
Those aside, it causes me a bit of embarrassment to even admit to some of the books I devoured as a young woman. Put the babies to bed at night and collapse in the bathtub with a juicy romance by Rosemary Rodgers to unwind... those were the days. While volunteering at the local used bookstore I perused one of these for the first time in eons and thought, "really?" Did I really read about a dozen of these?
Now no offense to anyone who loves to relax with a romance novel. But if that is the primary theme without a whole lot more to the plot they no longer interest me, and haven't for a long time.
Everybody knows I enjoy a good mystery - good being open for interpretation by the party reading the book. But my personal preferences have changed here as well. Agatha Christie was my absolute favor for years, but bless her, no more. The same goes for Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr. They've been replaced by the likes of Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, Rex Stout, and Jacqueline Winspear. The first time I read a Nero Wolfe mystery I didn't even finish it. A number of years later my reaction was quite different.
It is the same with non-fiction. Books I've devoured and savored in the last half of my life were not appreciated before. Sometimes they seemed boring. Now a ravishing beauty with not a penny to her name carried off by a pirate is boring. A true account of surviving the devastation of of a prisoner of war camp is not.
One of the reasons for the turnabout may be reading more slowly and picking up the complete story line instead of being in such a hurry. And perhaps time and experience opened my mind to greater understanding of certain subject matters.
Does that indicate greater maturity and patience? Oh I hope so!
My tastes are changing, too. Even though I have read historical romance for the history, that now bores me. The book has to be well written for me to give it a chance. Right now I am reading Zion Chronicles by Bodie Thoene for the history, although there is a romance brewing. And I have sworn off new secular fiction even if it has a good review. It makes me mad how the LGBT people are so powerfully they have made demands on the book industry and are getting away with it. Somebody needs to tell them to get over themselves!
ReplyDeleteChanging subjects -- what have you decided to do now that you blog will stop sending out notices that you have published? It seems you could send your readers an email letting us know of a new post. Just wondering.
Well, of course I have made a mistake and found it after I clicked publish! "...what have you decided to do now that "YOUR" blog will stop sending out notices..." 😏
DeleteMaryJo introduced me to the Zion Chronicles, and I thoroughly enjoyed them . . . but I found a lot of flaws the second time through and didn't enjoy them nearly as much.
DeleteI, too, have lost interest in contemporary fiction -- too much "woke" propaganda and too little story, too many unpleasant caricatures in lieu of well developed characters, too much virtue signaling and too little virtue, and, all too often, flat writing (at best) relying on obscenity and profanity for emotion and emphasis.
I read an awful lot of trash when I was very young! My grandmother tried, and failed, to persuade my mother to restrict my reading but my mother insisted that allowing me to read (pretty much) anything would develop a taste for good reading. For once, my mother was wiser than her mother because that's exactly what happened and I find that I become more discriminating as I grow older. With the explosion of e-publishing, I've rediscovered former favorites . . . and found myself wondering why I ever read them, much less enjoyed them.
ReplyDeleteFor the past 40 years, I've been rereading Jane Austen on an annual basis. I read "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" in high school, but I read the rest of Thomas Hardy's novels because I like them. So, too, with Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare, among others. Of course, I still read a lot of what some people call "mind candy" -- but it is generally better written than the light fiction of my younger years. Lucy Maud Montgomery also gets frequent, if not annual, re-reading. If anything, I read more "children's fiction" as an adult than I did as a child.
Reading the comments here is a strong indication as we have grown up as individuals we have grown as readers - our taste hasn't just changed in what we like, but it does indicate a maturity to mind and heart too.
DeleteOne read that passed me by until the past decade - and I probably wouldn't have appreciated as a young reader - is Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather.
Blogger.com, the service I use to post here, definitely isn't perfect either; today there is
ReplyDeleteno 'REPLY" after your comments, Linda, for me to click and answer you directly.
But to the subject at hand, yes, they certainly need to "get over themselves" but will not as long
as they are a political pathway to power and corruption that continues to be touted by news media and social media alike.
And of course it has found its way into the current book market by placing pressure on the publishing companies and authors.
Personally I can enjoy romance in any well written account - romance with depth to it!
After all, one of my first book recommendations was Sheldon Vanaken's A Severe Mercy.
The one thing I would not read until a few years ago was romance. I had tried two or three, books belonging to college roommates or friends I was visiting, and I deemed them nothing less than badly written soft-core pornography. In recent years, though, I have been finding some novels which must be considered romance but which never depict sexual encounters, and I am enjoying them very much.
DeleteOf course, they were written years ago.
One more thing: my next post will announce my decisions regarding the future of Upbeat Book Chat.
ReplyDelete