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Notes -
I’m curious to know if I’m truly the only person on TM who finds reading fiction to be extremely difficult…
I was always a "smart kid" growing up but I hated reading. Of course I discovered blogs 10 years ago and I enjoy reading Discourse about news and current events (and i don't do it to learn about the issues or the events).
I realized a couple years ago that I just don't like fiction and narratives that much. There are dozens of us maybe!
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That's fascinating. Can you elaborate on how and why that's the case?
It doesn’t mean I’ve never read it, I’ve read a lot of fiction that I like, including most of the classics of old science fiction, but a lot of it is also a drag.
My father was a voracious reader all his life and loved his science fiction. But back when he was in high school he tried reading all the Dune books in sequence and said he just couldn’t do it because he abhorred Herbert’s literary style. He said Herbert is overly descriptive, he felt suffocated by reading him and didn’t let you as a reader use your imagination. And then one day he picked it up again and read every Dune book back to back in the same day and felt pumped up afterward; somehow he was able to just do it.
I’ve read all the Dune books too except for a couple from the prelude series that Brian wrote. I had the exact ‘opposite’ reaction my father had. I absolutely loved Herbert’s writing style because you didn’t have to do any work. Everything is given to you. I found myself not having to do any intellectual heavy lifting and everything simply fell into place.
I’m sure it’s related to other odd quirks I have. I also can’t stand Quentin Tarantino films for instance. God, I hate his movies. And it comes down to his non-linear storytelling. I intensely hate that. Watching that stuff leaves me feeling schizophrenic and nauseated and confused as hell.
Mentally I tend to be a holistic thinker. I naturally operate in the mode of “seeing the big picture.” I struggle mightily proceeding with a story in piecemeal (it’s probably why I was also bad at cardboard puzzles as a kid). I lose my sense of reference when things tend to go “off script” from the plot and much of the time don’t even recognize when it’s happening. I remember once, my dad and I went back and watched old black and white episodes of the Twilight Zone and he got frustrated at me for failing to pickup the moral of the story and he was guiding me through each episode as we were watching it.
There’s a lot of fiction I love and even more I dislike, but it varies widely depending on who the author is. I’m sure it’s all fundamentally related to the same thing. I tend not to pickup and context very well. Maybe my friends were right and I am a high functioning autistic. Who knows.
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