...for how ranty I'm about to be. The Globe and Mail published a seemingly innocuous article on good summer reads in which the author divided her fiction and non-fiction recommendations under the headings "Distract Me" and "Enlighten Me". It really pisses me off when people draw a distinction between fiction and non-fiction along the lines of usefulness/quality/potential for life-changing impact and lump the former into a category devoid of the preceding evaluative measures. Certainly some fiction is frivolous, just as some non-fiction is frivolous (e.g. easy target, Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose by Paris Hilton). Fiction is a distraction, but all books are. Reading steals you from the sensory world around you and immerses you in the interior world of the pages in front of you. The temperature and sounds of the place where you sit to read, your seat itself, are irrelevant. You could be anywhere because you are already elsewhere.
If someone must put a finer label on a book than General Diversion they should at least categorize the book according to the writing not according to whether the story is true. Fiction is rife with truth; with precise observations about humanity and jarringly real evocations of human emotion, and it can be just as enlightening as accounts of unimagined subjects. What rankles me most about the Globe piece is that the first example under "Distract Me" is Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. I haven't read it yet, but Lahiri's other work stands up against anything I've read (non-fiction or otherwise) as enlightening. I'm sure the author of the article meant no intentional disrespect when she formulated her summer reading categories, but maybe it's time to reconsider our collective mindset about the kinds of books that are distractingly enlightening and the kinds that are simply distracting.
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1 comment:
The most articulate rant I've ever encountered. Well said.
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