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I hate sitting in a house full of books and feeling as though there is nothing I want to read. I suspect that a large part of this is due to having read so much fanfiction; I am reluctant even to pick up authors I know, now, because what if I don't like it as well as something else by them? What if I don't like the characters?
I know perfectly well that not all fanfiction hits the buttons I want it to hit, even when it's an author I trust (relatively) and characters I enjoy. But there's a part of my brain that seems to believe it's more likely I'll like the latest derivative work about X and Y by J. Random Author than the latest doorstop by Neal Stephenson, because I've heard not entirely positive things about the Stephenson and I haven't heard anything bad about the fanfic. Never mind that part of the denigration of the Stephenson was that it had a lot of digressions; my copy of Les Misérables and I will sit together and giggle over that some other time.
Another part of it is that I know exactly what it is I want to read, today. I want to read the story that's in my head that no one has yet written, that I am in the process of writing, and that I do not have energy to work on today because real life is occasionally more tiring than I'd like it to be, thereby interfering with my creative processes.
I suppose with fanfiction -- and the story in my head that I want to read is also fanfiction -- I have a greater expectation that I will like the characters. I remember how disappointed I was in The Sun Also Rises because I didn't like the prose and couldn't bear the characters. I don't want to pick up another book and have it turn out like that. If it has to have execrable prose, as some fanfic does, it ought to at least present people I know I'll enjoy reading about, after all.
In sum, I have become afraid of the literary unknown. As a long-term genre reader (SF/F) and someone who has been known to serially devour entire shelves of a particular author's work, I shouldn't be so surprised that this fault recurs, but it seems all the more piteous when I am surrounded by potentially wonderful works and paralyzed by the possibility that I will not actually like any of them.
I know perfectly well that not all fanfiction hits the buttons I want it to hit, even when it's an author I trust (relatively) and characters I enjoy. But there's a part of my brain that seems to believe it's more likely I'll like the latest derivative work about X and Y by J. Random Author than the latest doorstop by Neal Stephenson, because I've heard not entirely positive things about the Stephenson and I haven't heard anything bad about the fanfic. Never mind that part of the denigration of the Stephenson was that it had a lot of digressions; my copy of Les Misérables and I will sit together and giggle over that some other time.
Another part of it is that I know exactly what it is I want to read, today. I want to read the story that's in my head that no one has yet written, that I am in the process of writing, and that I do not have energy to work on today because real life is occasionally more tiring than I'd like it to be, thereby interfering with my creative processes.
I suppose with fanfiction -- and the story in my head that I want to read is also fanfiction -- I have a greater expectation that I will like the characters. I remember how disappointed I was in The Sun Also Rises because I didn't like the prose and couldn't bear the characters. I don't want to pick up another book and have it turn out like that. If it has to have execrable prose, as some fanfic does, it ought to at least present people I know I'll enjoy reading about, after all.
In sum, I have become afraid of the literary unknown. As a long-term genre reader (SF/F) and someone who has been known to serially devour entire shelves of a particular author's work, I shouldn't be so surprised that this fault recurs, but it seems all the more piteous when I am surrounded by potentially wonderful works and paralyzed by the possibility that I will not actually like any of them.