skygiants | (no subject)

First, an OFFICIAL-TYPE ANNOUNCEMENT for

genarti reminds me that we are halfway through the writing period, and probably should make mention of this! And thefore I would like to take a moment to remind people that there are two weeks left to finish (or start) your brilliant assignments and send them in to us. A few people have already sent stuff in; Gen and I are united in thinking that these people are AWESOME and also being a little bit terrified of them. (But, you say, as mods, surely you guys should already have your fics done and betaed well in advance and be prepared to dive into the process of being responsible and organizational! I think we would also be united in responding to you with hollow laughter.)

Something in which Gen and I are not united: our reading habits. Every few months Gen and I have the same discussion, and it goes something like this:

BECCA: Well, I will read this book that you recommend to me next time I have a slot for it in my reading quota system, which should be . . . hmmm, approximately four book from now.
GEN: I find your reading quota system strange and lolarious.
BECCA: See, if I did not mentally schedule my reading, I would pretty much just always read YA fantasy and never read nonfiction at all. And I want to read nonfiction, because learning things is useful and interesting, but it has less immediate appeal to me when I am grabbing the first book to catch my eye.
GEN: I do not understand this problem of yours. Nonfiction catches my eye all the time, it is enormously appealing! It is much more guaranteed to be interesting than fiction.
BECCA: But . . . plot! And characters! Make things much easier to read! Boring nonfiction is a lot harder to get through than boring fiction.
GEN: But if a novel is boring or frustrating, then it's just pointless and I don't care. At least in nonfiction you are guaranteed to learn some facts!
BECCA: BUT WHAT IF THEY'RE BORING FACTS, GEN. WHAT THEN.

Despite giving myself the last word in this fictionalized version of our debate, I think Gen probably has the moral high ground in this argument. But I stand by my position all the same.

As a partial result of these differing literary worldviews, pretty much every time Gen and I see each other, I foist some fantasy off on her and she foists some nonfiction off on me. The most recent trade ended up in me reading Women in the Middle Ages: The Lives of Real Women in a Vibrant Age of Transition. Fortunately this is not the kind of nonfiction book that is full of boring facts! The first half is pretty 101 on The Middle Ages, These Were Women's Roles, They Were More Interesting Than you Might Think; the second half is more specific, and traces the documented lives of some actual ladies, ranging from politically powerful noblewomen to guildswomen suing their employers to upwardly mobile merchant's wives defending their lands from siege by their neighbors. I wouldn't recommend it to the medievalists on here, but for someone who doesn't know that much about the era - or would just like a better idea of some of the scope available for a lady at that time period - it's pretty interesting. I don't really have that much more to say about it, though, so, instead: a poll!

[Poll #1622741]

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

But that's the best kind! At least, the kind you can turn into amusing stories afterwards.

Indeed. My latest is "a cigarette filter made of cheese?"

. . . I'm not sure whether that's better or worse than the nativity set made of cheese, which I heard rumors of but never encountered for myself.

See for yourself. (http://www.google.com/patents?id=NfdrAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4&source=gbs_overview_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Well, you learn something new every day.

Fluffy detective novels?

*mind is sufficiently boggled*

Please, provide a title/author, that I might read such a thing?

My nonfiction is generally based on animal stories. And paganism. And weird cultures from thousands of years ago (also known as, "how did they really make such and such weapon in that time period?").

My fiction is generally YA* or mysteries.

...or anything by Tanith Lee.

*Mostly because YA has the fantasy stories I crave and cannot find in the adult section.

About 80% of Agatha Christie's efforts, somewhat similar for Ellis Peters, and maybe 50% of Dorothy Sayers. :-)

Reading about historical weird cultures is always kind of fascinating! Although . . . the level of fascination for me does sort of depend on the writing style, I'll admit. Like, there's a lot of stuff that is objectively fascinating, but will send me to sleep if written in boring prose.

I am mostly fiction. Occasionally I read nonfiction, although one might call it cheating, since it's mostly mythology books. Or E/J nonfiction. Like stuff with the time eras of American Girls, and The Magic School Bus books.

Fact: I have a category of LJ memories devoted to people's posts about recommended or intriguing books!

Related fact: this category has SEVENTY JILLION ENTRIES.

I read metric tons of non-fiction for my classes, so for leisure reading I go almost exclusively for fiction. Occasionally, if something's caught my interest enough, I'll read a non-fiction book about it-- most recently I finished [both] a biography of a German Jesuit priest who was murdered during the Nazi era and [an] authorized history of the MI-5.

edit for confusing sentence structures

Edited 2010-09-23 17:57 (UTC)

I probably mostly read fiction. I just assume that somewhere in high school they already taught me everything I need to know, and if anything else comes up, I will look it up on Wikipedia. Sometimes I read essay collections or diaries or somesuch thing (but those are basically just blog posts from the past).

But vis a vis the lives of Women in the Middle Ages, I did recently read the Letters of Abelard and Heloise, which was super-sweet. Mostly because, despite being a famous (eunuch, hehe) philosopher and everything, Peter Abelard is totally annoying in his love letters. And Heloise d'Argentuil kicks ass. (I'm sure it must have been somewhere in your book. Abelard was tutoring Heloise in Latin and such and then he slept with her, and then her uncle castrated him, and sent her off to a convent, and then he become totally famous, and she became head abbess, and they started sending letters to each other where he mercilessly berates her, and she's all, you're a huge tool).

I can understand that. I've been more fond of it than not ever since I picked up a random book called The Only Alien on the Planet and it ended up being, if I recall correctly, some sort of teen angst-drama.

And, of course, everyone draws the lines differently. I don't read a lot of romance, but it seems to me that the Sharing Knife books, by Bujold, are more romance-with-fantasy-elements than fantasy-with-romance-plot, yet my old library categorized them as the latter.

When I am not working, fiction fiction fiction fiction fiction and occasional online nonfiction magazines.

When I am working, it's medieval fiction-equivalents, scholarly criticism and history.

I am torn on whether mythology books count. But E/J nonfiction totally counts! As mentioned above, I am totally going back for an epic reread of the Horrible Histories one of these days.

I usually read fiction, BUT nonfiction can grab me just as much. I'm a dreadful John Adams fangirl, for example, and anything with Abigail Adams in it (well, qualification: anything that portrays her as the badass she was) will be magically attracted to my reading list. And basically anything that looks interesting. It must be interesting, though. Life is too short to read boring books.

Also. (http://roz-mcclure.livejournal.com/1059789.html?style=mine)

I pretty much started reading nonfiction towards the end of my college career, in the long-ago region of, uh . . . two years ago, when I suddenly had a panic of 'oh no, what if when I leave college, I suddenly become stupid! MUST KEEP LEARNING THINGS. NON-FICTION READING MODE ENABLED.'

This may not have been a very logical panic, but.

Also, both of those books sound extremely interesting!

I think blog posts from the distant past count! Sei Shonagon, how very awesome you were.

Oh, I am VERY WELL AWARE of the awesomeness of Abelard and Heloise. (Including the fabulousness that was the very first Terrible Celebrity Baby Name. Poor, poor little Astrolabe.) I haven't actually read the letters all the way through, though, so that's definitely something I need to put on my list.

I think being in school/working on thesis does tend to affect your fiction-reading habits . . . like, I felt a lot more okay about never reading nonfiction ever when I was a student and in the business of learning stuff. Now I learn nothing that is not [day job industry-related] if I am not proactive about it.

I had heard the rest but not about Fierstein, I think! AND I AM SO EXCITED. *________*

Well, I mean, the Adamses were pretty awesome. (I imprinted on 1776 at a young age, it has this effect.)

You've heard about the (fiction) book that's basically Abigail Adam Fights Crime, right?

Fact: sometimes I skim that category of yours! But not very often, because my own SEVENTY JILLION mental entries do not really need adding to . . .

Well, and then there's the whole question of what people count as 'real literature' and it's a whole rant I don't want to go into. *laughing* But I admit I do get around the browsing problem by relying mostly on recommendations.

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