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Someone posted these lightbulb jokes about white male novelists:
http://the-toast.net/2013/11/04/male-novelist-jokes/
I don't read horror. The closest I come is Shari Tepper's Beauty which is enough to put you off horror altogether. In fact, I don't read books about terrible people and how pointless their lives are-- that would be the entire literary output of the second half of the twentieth century. That leaves me not a lot, you know? Especially if I don't read 'men's fiction' genres.
I gave up on modern literary fiction in general after majoring in English and then encountering Barthleme's Snow White (from a class I was bright enough NOT to take). Boring white guys and their problems. I complained in high school about taking a short fiction class at a college where we had to read Miss Lonelyhearts among other stuff. My mother said, basically, we are all having to read books about middle aged white guys feeling how much their lives suck (or young white guys feeling how much their lives suck) because that's what middle aged white guys writing at that time-- and they were all middle aged white guys-- were thinking about. Basically, it's all just fridge horror. Think of Jude the Obscure. When I finished it, I upset the entire class by saying "Thank goodness. I'd been praying he'd have the guts to off himself for the last six chapters." (It was a spoiler, you see; not everyone else had actually kept up with the assigned reading.)
Now, if I want to deal with terrible things happening, I read non-fiction. I read more non-fiction than you'd think. But for fiction, I'm not all that interested in fiction that goes nowhere except up its own anus. And that covers so much 'adult' 'literary' fiction that it's just not worth it to keep trying. If I hate dark chocolate, and 95% of the wrapped candies are dark chocolate, but it's unclear which ones, why would I buy wrapped candy?
http://the-toast.net/2013/11/04/male-novelist-jokes/
I don't read horror. The closest I come is Shari Tepper's Beauty which is enough to put you off horror altogether. In fact, I don't read books about terrible people and how pointless their lives are-- that would be the entire literary output of the second half of the twentieth century. That leaves me not a lot, you know? Especially if I don't read 'men's fiction' genres.
I gave up on modern literary fiction in general after majoring in English and then encountering Barthleme's Snow White (from a class I was bright enough NOT to take). Boring white guys and their problems. I complained in high school about taking a short fiction class at a college where we had to read Miss Lonelyhearts among other stuff. My mother said, basically, we are all having to read books about middle aged white guys feeling how much their lives suck (or young white guys feeling how much their lives suck) because that's what middle aged white guys writing at that time-- and they were all middle aged white guys-- were thinking about. Basically, it's all just fridge horror. Think of Jude the Obscure. When I finished it, I upset the entire class by saying "Thank goodness. I'd been praying he'd have the guts to off himself for the last six chapters." (It was a spoiler, you see; not everyone else had actually kept up with the assigned reading.)
Now, if I want to deal with terrible things happening, I read non-fiction. I read more non-fiction than you'd think. But for fiction, I'm not all that interested in fiction that goes nowhere except up its own anus. And that covers so much 'adult' 'literary' fiction that it's just not worth it to keep trying. If I hate dark chocolate, and 95% of the wrapped candies are dark chocolate, but it's unclear which ones, why would I buy wrapped candy?
