I Havent Read a Fictional Book in Years

I've gone from writing a regular column on scifi books for The Guardian, to a twelvemonth without reading novels. What happened?

I keep having the same chat about novels. I tell people that I don't think anybody is reading novels whatsoever more. Usually, the response is outraged. I have a lot of author friends. Clearly, none of u.s. like the idea that the readers are drying upwards. Then I dig a bit and information technology becomes clear – they oasis't really read a novel themselves in years.

My chief testify for the decease of the reader is the death of my own reading. Information technology's been a year since I've read a novel. "Well yous must just be i of those dumbasses who doesn't read!" I hear some folks thinking. That would be less worrying, wouldn't it? But the truth is that, until quite recently, I was a professional person reader.

While I was writing my regular column on sci-fi books for The Guardian I was getting through five or 6 full books a month, and looking at maybe two dozen in part. Plus reading for reviews with SFX magazine and elsewhere. I would trawl through the new releases looking for anything promising. And while doing that, something happened.

I was finding less and less I wanted to read.

How the novel lost its magic.

I remember as a kid spending afternoons at the local library, selecting books as though I was selecting magical portals to step through. Then I would blitz abode and lose myself in the magic for hours, days at a time.

Of course we all grow up. We tin can't spend our whole alive teleporting to other realms. But, at every new phase of my life, new kinds of book would open up new kinds of magic for me. I found The Air current Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami when I was twenty-eight. A whole decade of new reading experiences began at that place, authors like Michael Chabon and Alice Munro came along and reading stayed electrical.

But at present in my early forties, I oasis't establish equivalent new voices. The concluding novel that really caught me was Noah Hawley's Before The Fall. Beautiful storytelling from the show-runner of Fargo, a real talent. Possibly I haven't looked hard enough. Perhaps it'south out there waiting to be found. The new seam of novelistic dazzler only waiting for me, the reader, to mine information technology.

But I don't think it's me. I remember, dear novel, that it's you.

Then…what happened?

There's no doubt the novel is facing some stiff competition for our attending. Hands upward who doesn't spend 100% more time on social media than they did 20 years ago when information technology didn't exist? The smartphone is engineered to swallow as much of your eyeball time as information technology can. Which, often, is all of it.

Simply I don't believe the novel is equally vulnerable to digital distractions every bit some might say. We're all HUNGRY for deeper experiences that cease as from paddling in the shallows of social media. When high quality tv drama of movie releases come forth, we're there for them. Simply not, it seems, for novels.

No, I think a more serious ailment is afflicting the novel. And I fright it'due south a cocky inflicted malady, that information technology's going to have quite some time and care to intendance get over. Merely that healing procedure can't even begin until the novel admits it has a trouble. Perchance at a kind of metaphysical AA coming together for dying art forms.

"Hi. I'm The Novel. And I've been arrogantly over sure of myself as the natural home of high quality storytelling."

The novel was ever where people who valued real high quality storytelling went to find it. Films and idiot box had their moments, but they were largely packed with junk. But over the terminal couple of decades the tables take turned. Prestige boob tube shows are where nosotros go now for the best storytelling. Novels seems more than and more junky. Call it the Dan Brown or Fifty Shades event. However information technology happened, I just don't await to find adept storytelling in novels anymore.

Ebooks aren't helping (but they could)

As a author, I detect NaNoWriMo inspiring. Yes new writers, you go for it!

As a reader, I find the idea of having to read anything written as function of NaNoWriMo truly horrifying. My time is precious, and your l,000 give-and-take novel written in a month ain't getting a 2nd of information technology.

Increasingly, this is my feeling about the entire field of digital publishing. It's hard to find anything polite to say about the Amazon Kindle self-publishing scene, the writerly equivalent of America'southward Got Talent, except without the talent.

If annihilation killed the magic of the novel, information technology'southward seeing the novel utterly degraded and disrespected by the fevered egos who crank out junk and self publish it on the Kindle. I really wish this didn't effect how I encounter the novel, but inevitably, it does.

And mainstream publishing isn't all that much amend. They don't seem to invest anywhere most enough into developing talented new writers. New writers are published too early, so disappear before they accept a chance to develop, which rarely happens earlier half a dozen lesser novels have been published.

All of which is really a great shame. Because ebooks and digital publishing could so hands unleash a renaissance in novel writing, as a infinite for experimentation and the evolution of new talent. But instead we just get countless greenbacks in genre novels, all with their cadre of fake reviews.

Can the novel redeem itself?

2019 has been my worst year as a reader. But I'thou hopeful, and excited, that 2022 will be improve.

Everything has a cycle. The novel has produced incredible richness of storytelling and works of fine art over the centuries. I'yard sure it will again. Correct now we're at the bottom of the cycle for the novel. It'southward swamped by actually awful work, packed full of imitative genre fiction. But it's when an fine art course is at its worst that you might offset to see greenish shoots of renewal popping upwardly.

If the novel's going to win me back every bit a reader, information technology will have to tear downward and rebuild how it does the fine art of storytelling. Equally the tv show went through a consummate revolution to give u.s.a. Mad Men or Breaking Bad, I can come across signs of the novel entering a similarly revolutionary period.

I suspect it won't be Kindle cocky publishers OR authors with traditional publishing deals showing us the way. The internet is so rich with unexplored publishing opportunities, I doubtable the novels that grab my attending back as a reader volition be quite untraditional in how they are published.

Have y'all spotted authors re-inventing the storytelling of the novel? Give me a lead, I'd love to read them.

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Source: https://damiengwalter.com/2019/11/17/i-stopped-reading-novels-last-year-i-think-you-did-too/