During the height of covid I kept hearing people proclaim they just couldn’t read some specific genre anymore. It was fiction. Or it was nonfiction. Or it was poetry. Or they couldn’t read at all and sat outside watching the grass grow all summer. People had reading problems then and they have them now. This is a post about my reading problems now, in 2024.
Most of my life I read fiction, all kinds of it: Laura Ingalls Wilder as a kid1 followed by Piers Anthony, master of the ridiculous pun,2 the classics in school. Faulkner in college. Once I took a Hemingway class. When I started teaching at Two Eagle I stumbled upon the pantheon of Indigenous authors and I’ve read many of those multiple times and have been lucky to meet them too. I love to tell the story of when James Welch came to my class to talk to my kids about writing.
As an older adult I have slowly danced into the nonfiction section. I’ve read like every shipwreck book imaginable, from Endurance to The Madhouse at the End of the World to The Wager and some Amazon exploration books like The River of Doubt and Peter Stark’s Astoria which he signed for me the other day. I ***love*** books like that.
But you know, I’ve been quilting a lot. And when I quilt I like to listen, so I thought I’d try to listen to fiction. It often carries one along a little better, as long as the narrator is decent, than nonfiction sometimes does, though I’ve also listened to plenty of very good nonfiction audiobooks.
Finally we have arrived at my reading problem: I cannot read fiction anymore or perhaps just right now, particularly in audio form. Often, something about the narrators makes me want to scratch my ears out, the same way I react to a long day wearing my hearing aids. And then there are the simpering, silly topics. For example, I made it all the way through Lessons in Chemistry only because the narrator was phenomenal but that book just beat the reader over the head with the unfairness of being a woman. Was the book written so men could learn about this? (Obviously no, it has a pink cover) but what woman doesn’t already know that stuff? Argue with me if you want. Now I’ve got Tom Lake going and I hate it. Not only because Meryl Streep reads the book and her smarmy rendition of the mom makes me want to poke someone repeatedly with a sharp stick, but I cannot figure out what this book is about.
Try not to get mad here because I hated your beloved book. I’ve already been through this with Blind Your Ponies which is the very worst book I ever quit reading 280 pages in and then had to have a dragged-out argument on the socials about it. Evidently a lot of people like reading purple prose and unrepentant garbage and then defending it.
Oh you say, maybe I should try something more serious? I had to put down Louise Erdrich, one of my favorite writers of all time, because LaRose bludgeoned me with sadness. If the devastated parents of the dead child aren’t crying, and the devastated parents of the living child whom they’ve given to the other parents aren’t walking through the world like zombies, then the poor five-year-old is heartbroken and it’s horrible. I need to read none of that to feel like a human being, you know?
So it’s back to nonfiction. Unlike with fiction, which tenses me, I noticed I felt relief, a total absence of anxiety, as one narrator told me about his newfound interest in discomfort. A Canadian named Adam Shoalts canoed across the Yukon and his story Beyond the Trees was riveting, especially when you realize there’s not just one single waterway and he was alone and had to portage sometimes miles with his canoe and all his shit…it was nuts! Tyson Yunkaporta transported me with his thoughts in Sand Talk about how to think differently. Robin Wall Kimmerer entranced me with her description of mosses. Really.
The same way I used to long for the predictable, magical lands of Xanth, I find these no-nonsense narratives safe and comforting. One day I may return to chick lit or novels about family tragedies, but not today. There are too many real adventure stories to read.
I AM SORRY FOR THIS SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY but that’s what they gave me and that’s what I read. I was like 7.
I really enjoyed his Immortality series more than Xanth.
1. Gathering Moss contains some of the best essays I've ever read ever. Sometimes, when I'm in a lonely little nook outside that I'm pretty sure no one has visited for years, I feel a tingle in my belly and think, "I am inside the circle." And one of my kids used some moss growing in the backyard for a diorama and asked me just yesterday if moss transplants well, and I was transported to the estate with the mansion and the buckets of "moss fertilizer" painted on rocks, and my home turf near the Oregon Coastal range, where sphagnum is poached for potted plants.
2. A narrator makes such a difference. I sometimes wonder how much of what I like or dislike about a book is due to the narrator. I'm listening to "I, Robot" right now, and really disliking it, but I'm not sure how much is actually the words, and how much is the delivery. And I really struggled with reading "Pilgrim's Progress", but found one with a top-notch narrator who could convey meaning through his inflection, even if I didn't understand all of the words.
3. I also disliked "Blind Your Ponies".
If you read enough books, you’re bound to have a few that you abandon. I am impressed you read so many pages. That’s true dedication. I think listening to the stories while you quilting is part of many cultures. Audiobooks allows you to do that.