Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Am I Old-Fashioned?

I am somewhat conservative, even old-fashioned, about which novels I like to read. I generally don't read "experimental" fiction. I don't like genre fiction, except for the occasional mystery; I especially don't like science fiction, fantasy, spy fiction or thrillers. I don't generally read historical fiction, especially if the history involved is more than a hundred years old. I don't mean that I do not respect novels in these genres or of these types; I know that there are excellent examples of each of these types. I simply do not prefer them, or generally choose to read them myself; after all, our choices of what to read are very personal, very individual. What I like best are good old-fashioned story-driven, character-driven, idea-driven novels, in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century British novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy, as well as of early twentieth-century authors such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and E. M. Forster. I do love Virginia Woolf's novels; although at the time they were published they were considered experimental, they still contain strong stories and characters, as well as incredibly beautiful use of poetic language. The mid- and late twentieth-century and current novels I choose to read embody these same basic characteristics.
 
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