I’m fat. I’m grey haired. I’m in my forties. I’m English.
I’m a Sheffield United fan.
Does any of the above make you automatically like me any
less? (I’ll excuse you if it’s the Sheffield United part. Some things can’t be
helped) I hope not. In these so-called enlightened days I’d hope that most of
us would be able to see past the superficial and make our own judgements
(unless we’ve brainwashed by some ‘religion’ into thinking that all people who
think differently to us are evil – I still can’t get my head round that one).
Still with me? Good. So you can think for yourself. And you
read stuff. I know you do, you’ve made it this far.
But what kind of books do you read? What sections of a
bookshop do you automatically walk towards? What if a book has a pink cover bearing
a cartoon of a young woman walking a poodle. Or a rocket ship blasting off into
space. Or a couple making use of some bondage gear. Would you even take it from
the shelf or would you just dismiss it automatically because you already know
that kind of thing isn’t for you?
Book covers are designed to tempt us into thinking ‘I’ve
read and enjoyed something that looked similar before, therefore I will
probably like this book too’. But it’s all too easy to fall into their idle
trap and become complacent. We see certain types of books as being aimed
specifically at a particular demographic and sometimes find it difficult to
think outside of this box. But why should that be? We’re smart folks aren’t we?
We can think for ourselves? Why can’t we enjoy writing that ‘they’ won’t aim at
us?
And isn’t automatically dismissing a particular genre of
book (and even, by extension, giving books any genre label) a form of
discrimination? Enlightened people don’t do discrimination. Suggest that war
stories or sci-fi are just for men and love stories are solely the domain for
women and you really should be slapped with a sexist label quicker than you can
say ‘Caitlin Moran’.
So why do many of us pull our noses up and say ‘Fantasy
books? Urgh, no. I can’t be doing with trolls and such’ or ‘crime fiction? It’s
all clichés isn’t it?’ even though we’ve never actually read any of the objects
of our derision? Apparently we just know we won’t like it so we don’t even try.
I thought I’d left all that behind in my teenage years – ‘I
can’t listen to that stuff, it’s Mod music. Look – there’s a kid wearing a
parka on the cover, so I definitely won’t like it’. I never understood that
kind of argument any more than the one that that haughtily says ‘of course, the
finest science fiction is allegorical in nature’. Huh? That’s as idiotic as
saying that the erotica works at its best when it has something to say about
the socio-economic condition of Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Where’s the difference between an ignorant person saying ‘I
don’t like westerns’ and ‘I don’t like ginger haired people’?
Book readers are supposedly intelligent people so act like
one. Don’t take pride in your total rejection of a particular style of writing.
That’s prejudice, pure and simple. Have an open mind. Expand your horizons.
Read a different kind of book or better still, get out of the mind-set of
pigeonholing literature and just think of all books as just, well, books. There are so many authors whose
work deserves at least a look.
Graham Green and Günter Grass. Jasper Fforde or Katie
Fforde. HP Lovecraft and MC Beaton. Even the wildly differing political views
of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. They’re all classics if you’re prepared to step
outside your normal reading habits and give them a go. That’s why reading
groups are such a great idea. They force their members out of their comfort
zones. Sometimes it works, sometimes it backfires horribly. But at least it
exposes the reader to something new, and that’s always a good thing.
It’s International Book week. Go on. Try something new.
© Shaun Finnie 2012
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