(Why) Have we stopped reading fiction ?

I don't know anybody in real life who is a regular reader. It is some weird and recherché activity for my generation. This is one of many reasons I don't share my fiction with my friends. Most of them have forgotten how to truly read fiction or never knew in the first place. They would get as much out of a novel as reading a Wikipedia summary of its plot. Perhaps less.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Quote Originally Posted by ToALonelyPeace

@Robert Adam Gilmour: I understand your point, but I'm not sure anyone would call the Marx Brothers clowns. Absurdist and surrealist act silly in order to question reality. A clown acts silly for the sake of being funny.

Even Stewart Lee calls himself a clown. There's no way most of these guys acted silly only to be questioning or subversive, they obviously enjoyed it and its their voice. That's part of the reason to rebel against the po-faced section of the intelligentsia, defending their right to be silly.

[rhysaurus]

I read fiction every day of my life, or almost every day. So far this year I have read 14 novels, and every year I set myself a target of 50, not for the sake of setting a target but just to see if my reading rate is dropping or not. I don't own a television and this the main reason why I read more now than I used to when I was younger.

Since 2008 I have been keeping track of the fiction books I have read on Goodreads. Anyone who wants to connect with me there will be more than welcome...

https://www.goodreads.com/author/sho...31.Rhys_Hughes

[ToALonelyPeace]

I've found an article on the dead of the novel. Some key passages:

Quote

The seeming realists among the Gutenbergers say such things as: well, clearly, books are going to become a minority technology, but the beau livre will survive. The populist Gutenbergers prate on about how digital texts linked to social media will allow readers to take part in a public conversation. What none of the Gutenbergers are able to countenance, because it is quite literally – for once the intensifier is justified – out of their minds, is that the advent of digital media is not simply destructive of the codex, but of the Gutenberg mind itself. There is one question alone that you must ask yourself in order to establish whether the serious novel will still retain cultural primacy and centrality in another 20 years. This is the question: if you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.

Quote

As I said at the outset: I believe the serious novel will continue to be written and read, but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse. The current resistance of a lot of the literate public to difficulty in the form is only a subconscious response to having a moribund message pushed at them.

[Justin Isis]

I’m maybe in the minority here in that I think writing is just starting to get interesting.

If I can explain, the problem is that the “serious novel” in most cases isn’t what I’d consider very serious. What we think of as English-language novels and fictional books have only really been around for a few hundred years and until the 20th century I’d argue that very little of them went all that deep into human experience. The classical music analogy seems irrelevant to me, since even that evolved a lot during the 20th century and still seems to be evolving.

I think what most people mean when they talk about no one reading or books declining is that random teenagers aren’t reading Wuthering Heights or whatever. Except that…lots of them are, but even if they weren’t, I don’t think it would matter. A better analogy for me would be science. Now, if you go back a few hundred years, a layman could easily pick up things like Newtonian physics, some biology, rudimentary chemistry, etc. From the 19th through the 20th century though, it’s not so easy, and you have to spend significant time working at being a scientist. The body of knowledge has expanded, so you’re going to have to focus on physics, or biology, or chemistry or whatever. The same applies to mathematics.

I’d argue that from about 1880 to the present, writing took so many quantum leaps forward that most people still haven’t caught up. Flaubert, Zola, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Borges, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, a billion other writers I could name all pushed things much further than had ever been done. But rather than do the work of keeping up and trying to match that level, the rise of popular entertainment and narrative films made people think that writing was on the same level. But it’s not. Fictional writing doesn’t really have much in common with writing a screenplay, or anything else. Language is under no compulsion to confine itself to the visual, or to linearity in time, or really anything else.

The irony is that there are actual industries devoted to trying to limit progress. Go into any writing workshop or academic course and they’re immediately going to start talking about character, plot, “earning” things, “story arcs,” etc. None of these things have any real existence, but good luck getting anyone to admit that.

The overall movement in sophistication is forward, it just has to be admitted that popular taste doesn’t really matter. It’s the same reason literary science fiction is always about 40 years ahead of film or television science fiction. The TV stations are still dicking around with Westworld, an idea from about 1970. Whereas Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter are writing novels that have entire hypothetical physics books behind them. A popular movie like Avatar is something that might have come out from Ursula LeGuin in…around 1970 or so.

So the real issue is trying to write like it’s 2017 instead of 1830. I think that of the writers who are actually doing this, all of them are phenomenally more sophisticated and wide-ranging than their counterparts in the past, and I don’t really see this stopping. More people are writing now than have ever been writing in human history. That means there’s going to be a massive amount of derivative or forgettable material, but the overall amount of quality material will also be higher.

[qcrisp]

Quote Originally Posted by Justin Isis

So the real issue is trying to write like it’s 2017 instead of 1830. I think that of the writers who are actually doing this, all of them are phenomenally more sophisticated and wide-ranging than their counterparts in the past, and I don’t really see this stopping. More people are writing now than have ever been writing in human history. That means there’s going to be a massive amount of derivative or forgettable material, but the overall amount of quality material will also be higher.

I'm willing to believe that there is better writing around now, and that we simply can't see the wood for the mass of trees (or vice versa), but my own experience with reading, comparing past and present, is that there is a drop in sophistication. Let's say, a drop in average (mode) sophistication, and the outlying sophistication remains, to me at least, unknown.

My guess is this comes from a drop in the valuing of the humanities in education, with everything geared towards the utilitarian now.

I have the impression that even talented writers who can churn out fascinating sentences are now dedicating all this to a dead end of shallowness because of what might be called ideological reasons.

As a more general response to this thread, my non-fiction intake is rising, and is set to rise further, for various reasons, and I've even been wondering whether I'm losing interest in fiction, but then... something comes along like The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, which I've just started reading, and I think, "Ah, yes, this is why I read fiction."

The book's subtitle, by the way, is, "A Chronicle of 1830." Beneath that is written: "TO THE HAPPY FEW."

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp

and I've even been wondering whether I'm losing interest in fiction, but then... something comes along like The Red and the Black, by Stendhal, which I've just started reading, and I think, "Ah, yes, this is why I read fiction." The book's subtitle, by the way, is, "A Chronicle of 1830." Beneath that is written: "TO THE HAPPY FEW."

I studied this Stendhal book as part of French A Level in 1966.
Perhaps I should pick it up again and read it properly.

Meanwhile, I think I wrote the greatest novel of the 21st century, but anybody whom I don't know seems not to have read it. Somehow fits into this thread.

[ToALonelyPeace]

Quote Originally Posted by Justin Isis

So the real issue is trying to write like it’s 2017 instead of 1830. I think that of the writers who are actually doing this, all of them are phenomenally more sophisticated and wide-ranging than their counterparts in the past, and I don’t really see this stopping. More people are writing now than have ever been writing in human history. That means there’s going to be a massive amount of derivative or forgettable material, but the overall amount of quality material will also be higher.

What does 2000s writing look like? Where can I find such a work? Other than through this forum, I don't see the possible mean of getting to great contemporary writing.

[Justin Isis]

Quote Originally Posted by ToALonelyPeace

What does 2000s writing look like? Where can I find such a work? Other than through this forum, I don't see the possible mean of getting to great contemporary writing.

There are a good five or six writers just on here that are well beyond anything currently coming out on major publishers, or that is going to get attention in the mainstream. Quentin S. Crisp, Brendan Connell, Rhys Hughes, D.F. Lewis have all posted on here. They've all put out things that would easily boggle the mind of anyone reading 50 years ago, and other things that are at least on the level of a lot of Modernist classics from the past. Not really seeing many easy genre shortcuts for their writing either. I'm still getting caught up and am always inspired.

Beyond that, follow the thread of your interests - everyone is going to find different things that appeal to them. There's no shortage of great writing out there.

[qcrisp]

Short rant:

Being a writer really is a terrible business:

http://www.alcs.co.uk/Documents/Fina...ation-(2).aspx

I've heard the figure that writers, on average (based on what sample, I don't know) start earning a living at the age of fifty. Please imagine those conditions for any other vocation. The report linked to also mentions that earnings suffer a "sharp decline", after fifty. Being positioned as I am, at the age of 44, I prefer the first figure, depressing as it is, to the second, but if we combine them, we get a picture of waiting all your life to be able to earn a living, reaching that goal at fifty, and then swiftly declining thereafter.

The word "decline" features a lot in that report. The writer's position in society is materially worse than it was in 2006, for instance.

Well, that's all...