On Not Reading

Here is a problem I have. I wonder if you share it. Not reading new things. Specifically, new fiction. And in that I mostly mean “genre” books, like mysteries and sci-fi.

When I was young I’d go down to Grayling where they had a paperback swap store which specialized in, or at least had a large section of, sci-fi. Not unusually, they also had a ladies room, an actual separate room, for Harlequins and those other numbered(!) romance books. Hard by the sci-fi were the westerns and mysteries. The general books sat by themselves, rather forlorn.

Anyway, I grabbed tons of this stuff. I even read the bad books. Not knowing they’d be bad in advance, of course, but I’d stick through the poorly written ones to see how they’d come out. I recall hearing Harlan Ellison wrote dirty books, and as a teen, I was avid to find them. I did. One collection had a story of a being with three pertinents, which he found relief only in the holes of a bowling ball. Yes, really.

That might have been in an anthology, and maybe not by Ellison himself. But that was all I needed of him. I wanted girls, not weirdos.

Anthologies were big then, too. Short stories and novellas crammed in cheap print book club editions. This was also before collector mania hit and nobody cared about the form, only the words. These were a good inexpensive ways to get a lot of them.

Do they still have book clubs?

But then sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s, books got bigger and thicker. Older novels didn’t run to more than 250 or 300 pages. They fit nicely in pocket paperbacks.

Which incidentally no longer exist. The last of them are stopping being printed even as you read this. No more orange- and green-colored edges!

Anyway, to be a proper well considered book somehow meant becoming obese in pages. And authors, and publishers, were never satisfied by single books. How many times have you (in the old days) gone into a used bookstore, seen an intriguing cover, read the blurb, found something of interest, then saw the small print “Book 12 of the acclaimed 38 part series” or the like? Back on the shelf it goes. I hadn’t, and haven’t, the patience to search for its mates.

A short while ago I saw that a noted author died, one Dan Simmons, of whom I had never heard. But many who I respect had, and they lamented his loss as they gushed about his prose. I looked him up. I quote Google search: “The Hyperion Cantos is a critically acclaimed four-novel science fiction tetralogy…”

Tetralogy.

Used to be a trilogy was de rigueur in sci-fi. Inflation hit and now it’s tetralogy. Or whatever numbers comes after. Frank Herbert ruined me on series: he should have stuck with Dune alone. He’s dead, but books in his name, or rather namesake, still appear. Energy is going into squeezing old wine skins that have dried up decades before.

Here is a portion of the books done in the name of Dune (I couldn’t get more in the screenshot):

If you’re in love with the world of Dune, then this isn’t enough. If you aren’t, then the size is intimidating—and off-putting. Why should I start on this?

But size is a silly complaint. If Simmons’s, or anybody’s, books are as good as my mutuals say they are (one said an ending brought him to tears), then what’s four more books?

Yet, in my weakness, I find my interest wanes.

It isn’t that size is always a barrier. I am currently on my eighth pass through Patrick O’Brian’s Maturin-Martin twenty volume book, the greatest in the English language. (The horrible old Leopard has just landed on Desolation Island after running into an iceberg, and an American whaler with its valuable forge has been spotted.) It’s the same situation as Dune. You can pick up a book mid-series and get something out of it, but not nearly as much as starting from the beginning. And that means a commitment. (One advantage O’Brian had: he wrote all his books alone.)

So size isn’t the real problem. It’s not that now I read less, or that I won’t read new things, but what I read has changed. I just finished a book, new to me, another compilation, this of Ellery Queen mysteries. Biographies, history written by non-current academics, memoirs, philosophy and the like still hold interest. I shy away from many newly written books, though. They worry me. How woke will they be? Did AI “write” this? (One notable sci-fi author, I was told, boasts of his use of AI.)

But I haven’t read any new sci-fi in a long time, in spite of what are very likely terrific new entries, such as issued by friends at the Based Book Sale. Is this a symptom of advancing age? A buildup of cussedness? A sadness of the passing the great unfulfilled, and (now I see) unfillable, promises of science?

I don’t think I’m the only one who suffers this malaise. A good author says he now takes to giving away electronic copies of his books, in the hopes true fans buy paper copies. He said, what I think is true of new writers, “Writing is a side-gig to your real life. The age of the Stephen King rockstar is over.”

It isn’t screens, either. I haven’t been to the movies in more than fifteen years. I have no cable, pay for no streaming services. I have an antenna, but up where we live I can only reliably get one channel (I can’t even remember what it is). I do watch electronic repair videos and old movies on YouTube (and not on a phone).

And, as said, I still read widely, but for fiction only old novels. It seems the promise of new fiction isn’t there; at least, for me. Is this just me?

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