I was putting this together a little while ago before procrastination got the better of me and was going to ask if anyone else was annoyed by the spurious distinction between literary fiction and other categories of fiction. In particular the way literary authors are reviewed differently and categorized differently in bookshops. That question was answered however when I noticed John Quiggin saying something similar.
While the fiction bookshops are divided up into genre, what determines the books genre appears to be how the author is perceived not by content of the book. For example I’ve recently finished reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, who of course is a “literary� writer. The book is out and out science fiction, even more so than her earlier Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret prefers the name speculative fiction, a nice euphemism to avoid the trashy connotations which is strange because she often makes references to Sci-Fi in her non-scifi writings such as in the Blind Assassin.
Now you won’t find Margret Atwood’s books on the sci-fi shelves but generally amongst literature or perhaps in general fiction depending how its split up. Now don’t get me wrong I like Margret Atwood’s books, and I thought Oryx and Crake was good but not exceptional. Its just a little odd that although she writes sci-fi some of the time there is no fear of her work appearing on the sci-fi shelves.
For the reverse example take Neal Stephenson who’s been getting good coverage around here lately. Now while his early work was clearly sci-fi his last three books are probably the best historical fiction I’ve read. You won’t find them amongst whereever the rest of the historical fiction usually sit, because Stephenson is considered sci-fi.
Salman Rushdie can write a book about kids with superpowers without getting himself relegated. Kurt Vonnegut can write mostly sci-fi and usually not find himself relegated to sci-fi, although I have seen him placed in both.
This doesn’t happen for non-fiction, where the book is categorized based on its content. Bill Bryson’s recent book on the history of science for example doesn’t get shoved amongst the travel writing.
Its pretty clear that behind whatever categories fiction is being placed in there more than a classification of genre. There is an implicit difference in the way the two types of books are viewed and an implicit snobbishness that some genres are of lesser worth. While I’m not suggesting that you can’t make judgements between the worth of different works, to be doing it casually on the basis of genre seems absurd.
While thinking about this, and looking around at some things I came across an interview with Neal Stephenson where he was asked for his opinion about this divide. I’m not sure I agree with it all but it was an interesting take. Firstly a conversation he had with another writer at a conference:
To set it up, a brief anecdote: a while back, I went to a writers’ conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we’d exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me “And where do you teach?” …
I was taken aback. “I don’t teach anywhere,” I said.
Her turn to be taken aback. “Then what do you do?”
“I’m…a writer,” I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.
“Yes, but what do you do?”
I couldn’t think of how to answer the question—I’d already answered it!
“You can’t make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?” she tried.
“From…being a writer,” I stammered.At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn’t snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.
And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.
His argument is that while not everyone fits into this, there are two cultures of authors, one set who are accountable to patrons, the other directly to the market. In the past the patrons were the wealthy, but now it is generally universities or government grants. Either way, a patron wants to know they are getting something of worth and given the fickleness of the market they look to critics to judge this. Thus the authors sponsored by patrons are ones that are likely to write to seek critical acclaim. The other set of writers for the most part just write what interests them although some may also try to write what will sell. Most of these never sell much, but some do and become famous.
Stephenson comments (NB he doesn’t like the terms literary and commercial so replaces them with Dante and Beowulf respectively).
…hence the odd conversation that I had with my fellow author at the writer’s conference. Because she’d never heard of me, she made the quite reasonable assumption that I was a Dante writer—one so new or obscure that she’d never seen me mentioned in a journal of literary criticism, and never bumped into me at a conference. Therefore, I couldn’t be making any money at it. Therefore, I was most likely teaching somewhere. All perfectly logical. In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.
He goes on to discuss how he has been reviewed by critics,
Occasionally I’ll take a hit from a critic for being somehow arrogant or egomaniacal… I don’t understand why they think that this is relevant enough to rate mention in a review. After all, if I’m going to eat at a restaurant, I don’t care about the chef’s personality flaws—I just want to eat good food. I was slagged for entitling my latest book “The System of the World” by one critic who found that title arrogant. That criticism is simply wrong; the critic has completely misunderstood why I chose that title. Why on earth would anyone think it was arrogant? Well, on the Dante side of the bifurcation it’s implicit that authority comes from the top down, and you need to get in the habit of deferring to people who are older and grander than you. In that world, apparently one must never select a grand-sounding title for one’s book until one has reached Nobel Prize status. But on my side, if I’m trying to write a book about a bunch of historical figures who were consciously trying to understand and invent the System of the World, then this is an obvious choice for the title of the book. The same argument, I believe, explains why the accusation of having a big ego is considered relevant for inclusion in a book review.
He eventually concludes that he doesn’t really care about critics, because their role is only really important for those who are trying to make it through the literary avenue. In my view it seems he does still care because he seems to have put a fair bit of thought into it.
you really must not use the term “Sci-Fi” for written science fiction, the correct short term is SF, you can use “Sci-Fi” for books but only moving picture & TV related material, like from Star Trek or Star Wars.
don’t you know anything!!
as for publishing go read this
http://alg.livejournal.com/76744.html
Yeah, that’s a distinction I’m proud not knowing.
but now you do, now you are tainted with the knowledge, now you can only be proud of not caring two hoots, its not the same let me tell you…
Great link, Meika. Thanks.
Kurt Vonnegut is so science fiction. Umberto Eco writes detective novels, too.
I hate genre distinctions. They only exist for the benefits of libraries and “oh, I don’t read science fiction/romance/westerns/crime thrillers” types.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. Genre can be useful but when it’s used as a way of sorting out chaff from wheat it’s pointless and serves only to reinforce prejudices.
Kate, I think the separation can be useful as its fair enough to like crime novels or romance or whatever and be able to find these grouped together. However it is bizzare to group them based on how the author is perceived.
I only read good writing. Crap writing I skim.
Perhaps this pressure also comes from readers. I’m sure there are Stephenson fans who wouldn’t even think of looking for him in the literary section of the bookshop.
Gummo: “I only read good writing. Crap writing I skim.”
As a rule, that’s a wise modus operandi indeed. But in the case of SF (the genre, not San Francisco) it gets a trifle complicated (hmm, what does “good” “writing” *mean*?) — the value of truly great SF often reposes in the sense of the ideas, which are often relayed in prose that is quite bad, and sometimes impenetrable. Philip Dick is a great example. The prose of the VALIS trilogy must be attacked with a pneumatic drill, but the ideas make it worth it. I’ll take Philip Dick over Philip Roth any day of the week, and I bet history will judge PDK the vastly more important writer. But as a writer of, um, “prose,” Dick is, well… I dunno, really.
Borges was the same way (only different) — too lazy to write an entire novel espousing his views, he was content to write book reviews of imaginary novels, thus gamely summarizing the views in question, and saving us all a lot of time and trouble.
When it’s literature (which is not always, or even often), SF must be judged by a slightly different standard than say George Eliot or James Salter or n’importe qui. But the good stuff stays good; and it sticks to your ribs, and reveals reality, in ways that ‘ringing prose’ of the competent but unimaginative variety often cannot.
Silver Surfer, Galactus, PDK, Blondie, Dagwood and Las Locas: art.
Jonathan Franzen, John Updike, Martin Amis: eh, do what you like. I guess *somebody* has got to listen to Bruckner.
Andrew, obviously we become accustomed to the way things are laid out and then in turn the lay out is repeated because that is what we are accustomed to. I don’t know what came first.
I would also think that most Attwood readers wouldn’t look for her in SF. Still both authors could perhaps benefit from having the work exposed to the different respective audiences.
jpz,
No way I’d ever skim Dick - even when his prose gets bad, he usually has more ideas packed into a single page than some hacks in the genre can produce in an entire novel.
The crap books that I end up skimming - when it comes to SF - are those sold by the pound space opera sagas where every throwaway idea has to be given about ten pages of exposition (because the author’s decided to milk it). My personal best for skimming was a fantasy trilogy of about 400 pages in one volume skimmed in twenty minutes. No style, no ideas, nothing to read.
And when reading Agatha Christie, I always start with the last two chapters. Not that I read Christie much these days.
PS - the ultimate in book snobbery. The first Harry Potter book came out in two editions. the kiddies edition had a bright colourful cover illustration. The adult edition had a decorous black cover with a monochrome illustration of a steam train. So you could read the book on the tram on your morning commute without anyone realising that you were reading kiddy fiction.
Gummo, not just the first, all of them. I remember someone telling me they were reading the adults version as though the text were somehow different.
I read the last potter on my trusty old apple newton… bookshelves in bookshops… what be they i wonder
who has been skimming Cecilia Dart-Thornton recently
Gummo — re the “adult” Harry Potter covers for commuters: that’s hilarious. I recall when I was much shorter and higher-voiced, commuting to school on the NYC subways, they had these fake-sombre slip-over “book covers” for prim business-type commuters who were actually reading thick, trashy, soft-core paperback romance novels and other lurid nonsense. I used to read them over people’s shoulders — hilarious stuff. Then you’d see the “cover” and it would be this sober, serious thing. Then you’d go back to your Hofstadter or “A Confederacy of Dunces.”
What did it matter whether you were reading HP in adult cover or kids cover? Everyone else on the bus was reading it too!
Of course, now, everyone is still reading the Da Bloody Vinci Bloody Code, which has to be close to the worst and most completely lame piece of writing that I’ve ever suffered through.
of course the reason Atwood is literary is because her male characters are so thin anddistant
About time for some truth in bookshop category labelling I’d say. Eg:
“Books you really should read someday but not right now.”
“Books everyone’s hyping up but never finish.”
“Crap books you secretly want to read.”
“Porn passed off as edgy no holes barred literature.”
“Highly implausible roman a clefs.”
“Books for middle-age blokes who wished they could execute crisp command decisions.”
“Dead bodies and the career woman who probe them.”
“Fey and coy tales of strange love.”
“Books in a never-ending series.”
My particular bane is all those “Chronicles of Fiddlefang. Volume 8: The Ostrich of Iron.” fantasy epics. I think they’re all churned out now by some advanced piece of software originally developed for the Pentagon’s Budget Office.That would certainly account for the turgid prose and pointlessly convoluted yet predictable plots.
Steve,
I stand corrected you smart-arsed bastard! There goes my pop-culture cred again.
Are you sure that there’s no difference between the Adult versions and the normal edition (which was all I saw on sale last time I went Harry Pottering). Sure we don’t get a bit of bedroom action between Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall? One thing you have to say for magic - it gives real meaning to the phrase “doggy-doggy style”.
Don’t forget:
Meika… that might be the point.
I wanted to disagree with j_p_z - I actually think Dick does good prose - something like Valis isn’t the best example as it was never intended for publication in that form. He has a very distinctive style. It’s also quite peculiar to him - as you can tell from some of the homages like those by Michael Bishop and K. W. Jeter who don’t quite capture it.
Though I do agree that SF is a better term (and I’m not just saying that coz I used to live in San Francisco!) - it can also stand for “speculative fiction” which is kinda more accurate.
Of course, the easiest solution to the dilemma Steve poses in the post is to patronise a specialist SF Bookstore like Pulp Fiction in Brisbane.
As usual I don’t geddit, here. What’s wrong with putting SF in the SF shelf, the romance in the romance shelf and the literay stuff on the literary shelf? Seems like common-sense to me.
The alternative is to just stick all fiction on one shelf which only works if you are a small bookshop that doesn’t carry all the genres.
But not to separate out the genres in a big shop is simply bad shop design. Snobbery? Nothing to do with it. It’s effective retailing is all. Why would I want to wade thru the SF when all I want is to browse thru the current list of literary titles for eg?
Plus they don’t look so good all mixed in together- completely different cover design approaches etc.
The real issue here is why do SF people feel so insecure?
Kim — re Phil Dick’s prose… yeah, of course you’ve got a perfectly fair point. ‘De gustibus,’ and so on, but I see what you mean. Really I’m vastly more impressed that so many people here have read and dug VALIS. That’s enough to make me shut up and grin. (btw, when I wrote ‘PDK’ above, I meant ‘PKD’ of course. Now I’m just being kind of anal.)
Speaking of ideas vs. prose, what do people here make of Samuel Delany and Kim Stanley Robinson? Any fans of Lord Dunsany, Tanith Lee, or HP Lovecraft out there?
wbb — yeah, good point. Good shop design is just good shop design. If anything, the quarrel should be with tastemakers and compilers of syllabi, but that sort of fight runs its own course. Cream rises to the top, and ‘breeding will out,’ and so on. Time to just order another round of Bushmills for the house, and relax for the day.
Wbb,
I wouldn’t call myself a SF person although I do enjoy it on occassion, so I certainly don’t feel insecure about it. Neither do I have problems with seperation into genre. However, I am puzzled about separation into genre by author, rather than by book. Its not done in non-fiction, where seperation is by subject matter, rather than by typcasting the author as a particular type of writer. Its the fact that we do that, seperate into genre by author in fiction that makes it smell snobbish.
Steve - cool post (and cool thread it’s spawned…) How is it, do you think, that the task of finding something to read should be structured? The world is awash in books and the field has to be classified up somehow in order to make it manageable. It’s done differently in different situations (libraries, bookshops, syllabi etc) but in each setting the system uses a combination of factors: genre or kind, author’s name, subject matter.
It’s very rare that these systems have any internal hierarchy of quality going on. There is no sign in the bookstore that says “true crime (crap) down the back…Booker Prizewinners (worthy) on the left.” The bookstore just wants you to buy something, anything. The hot books of the moment are piled near the cash register.
Where exclusions and rankings come into play is in deciding what will get into the bookstore or library in the first place. Again the logic is utilitarian, I think, rather than strictly evaluative. Publishers are interested in books they think they can sell, and that means books that don’t require too much explaining. Thus books that fit into pre-existing categories, author, genre etc. Hightoned literary novels obviously fit that description in the requisite superficial way. I don’t agree there is any real & consequential snobbery involved.
I would also have to argue that genre is not necessarily the same thing as subject matter. I think it fundamentally has more to do with the technical features of the writing - extending from the big categories of novel, play, poem etc, down to things like whether the language of narration is heavily metaphorised (eg, Ray Bradbury) or straightforwardly transparent and functional (Dick). Form follows function, of course, and certain kinds of form become very closely associated with certain kinds of subject matter. But they’re not indivisible, and lots of the most successful writers do great things by making surprising recombinations. Innovation only makes sense when seen against a background of tradition, so writing that breaks moulds and crosses boundaries is heavily dependent on stuff that it seems to be rejecting.
Looked at in this way, you can make a case that the types of book which are typically nominated for big-deal literary prizes do constitute an internally coherent genre (as coherent as any other genre) because they tend to borrow from each other technically and to work with similar assumptions about the reading experiences shared by their audiences.
I’m sorry this is such a long comment - there are interesting things to ponder about why Atwood is invariably cited as an example of genre boundary policing at its evillest, and also that anecdote of Stephenson’s is pretty fascinating: I seriously can’t imagine a real practicing novelist & writing teacher of any stripe who hadn’t heard of Neal Stephenson…. that’s like the Premier of Tasmania not knowing who Kofi Annan was…
Another death of the novel/fiction article in today’s Weekend Australian. It’s just so depressing.
Mmmm….yes - it’s a depressing article all right, but I got the feeling that the writer of the article meant it to be depressing regardless of other interpretations that might be put on the facts reported. Eg, moving to a local indie publisher seems to have been a pretty good thing for both Brian Castro and Kate Grenville.
The issues facing the Australian literary world are both more and less complicated than that article really explains.
In any case it’s a very different kettle of fish to debating whether the high modernist novel is no longer the uncontested king of the literary pile. If people are buying and reading fewer “quality” novels than formerly it is almost certainly because genres once considered lesser - biography, literary journalism, SF - now openly compete for the same slice of the market.
The statistics box in that article excludes “genre fiction”: why? and how different might the picture look if it included genre fiction? Bizarre stuff. It’s darkly comic that Mark Davis, of all people, is doing research into Australian literature & publishing which excludes everything but that which is marketed as quality/elite reading matter.
Ivor Indyk is represented as having said that Australian Literature is no longer taught as a standalone discipline in universities - I don’t understand what that means. Does it mean you can’t major in Austlit anymore but once upon a time you could? Because depending on where you go to study, it would be quite easy to construct an English major that consisted of units solely or mostly about Australian literature. Long way of saying, he’s wrong.
The short shelf-life may be an important factor too.
Last week I had difficulty in finding “The Best Australian Stories 2005″ Edited by Frank Moorhouse published Nov 2005 and “Do Not Disturb - Is the Media Failing Australia?” Edited by Robert Manne published Aug 2005.
The publisher, Black Inc, (who also publish ‘The Monthly’ and ‘The Quarterly Essay’) do not sell books directly to the public.
I eventually located copies at GleeBooks who are now trying to find “The Best Australian Stories 2004″.
Incidentally, these story collections are excellent with the two mentioned here being better collections than the earlier ones edited by Peter Craven. Moorehouse has included stories by new writers which is a nice change from short story collections which include the same-old.
wbb: I don’t think genre should be abolished. I just think genre snobs should be abolished. (Or people who say, “well, I really enjoyed ‘Oryx and Crake’ but I hate science fiction, you know it’s not really science fiction because it’s so well written blah blah blah.”)
I think the reason why SF and fantasy fans in particular find this so exasperating is because it happens so regularly.
I know this is a decidedly low-brow example, but last year fantasy author Terry Pratchett took JK Rowling to task because JK Rowling said, “oh, I didn’t realise I was writing fantasy novels when I wrote Harry Potter, I just write about wizards and so forth.”
Coverage here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4732385.stm
Rowling also wrote about trying to ’subvert’ the genre which, considering she doesn’t read the genre, strikes me as a bit odd.
Pratchett hit back essentially saying, “of course you write fantasy novels, and fantasy can be deeply subversive, writers have been subverting if for years, and didn’t you think the wizards etc gave you a clue that you were writing a fantasy novel?”
And I’d personally say Pratchett’s work, (along with China Meiville and Susannah Clarke and Neal Stephenson and Ray Bradbury and so on) is far more subversive of the genre and its traditions, as shallow as they may be, than Rowling’s ‘famous five with magic in’ series. I mean, I enjoyed Harry Potter and I read the children’s editions on the bus and all; but they were just reasonably pacy well-written children’s books. Maybe if Harry comes out as a gay wizard and runs off with Voldemort to open an alternative magic shop in San Francisco we might be onto something…
Anyway, I’m not an obsessive SF and fantasy reader, I don’t consider it “my genre”. However, I really enoy a lot of SF and fantasy and it bothers me immensely that this immediately makes my taste suspect. It bothers me when someone who writes fantasy wants to disown it as thoroughly as Rowling does.
*putting my nerdy self back in the box now*
Of course Laura makes several far more intelligent points about how genre is merely one way of classifying novels. I’ll have to read that story in the Australian but right now I’m reading several novels so it might have to wait…
j_p_z - Delany is a case in point. He’s a Professor of Literature, his novels are dense, complex, owe much to Borges, Joyce, etc, but are marketed as genre fiction. I doubt he worries about this.
Moorcock’s interesting too - shortlisted for the Booker, and some bookstores will place some of his stuff in the “sf/fantasy” shelves and others in the “literary fiction” shelves whereas others place it all under sf/fantasy.
Laura,
Thanks for the thoughts, I had been sitting on this for a while not entirely happy with what I was trying to say, but thought it might be a good time to break from discussing more heated political topics and to hell with worrying about badly thought out ideas!
Anyway, yes you make a good point about genre being different from subject and also about style. Although not only about style China Meiville’s stuff is written much more in a literary style and even to some extent in themes, even if the setting and plot is pure fantasy. Also interesting your point about literary prizes going to what could be considered a specific genre.
Its true that also bookstores are trying to sort them in the way that sells most books rather than infer something about the works quality. However perhaps they are still reflecting people’s ideas about what is quality. Or perhaps I’m generalizing from individuals I know who think this way and would read say Attwood writing SF, but never something of a SF shelf.
As for Neal Stephenson’s annecdote. I can only say it was from an interview a few years ago, about a conference that happenned sometime earlier so he may have been less well known.
My Atwood example was merely a result of me reading Oryx and Crake and thinking why is this not sitting on the SF shelves. Kurt Vonnegut is actually the person I find most confusing placed generally.
Kate says:
C’mon this is the internet. Us nerds can be out and proud!
Rowling subverting the fantasy genre? It is to laugh. The Harry Potter books are basically Billy Bunter with special effects for crying out loud.
SF is the key contested category in this discussion, isn’t it. It’s like we agree that the best of SF is genuinely hard to separate from the best of what I’ll continue to lamely call hightoned fiction. What we don’t like is sweeping generalisations about the betterness of one over the other.
(Sturgeon’s Law is very usefully trotted out in arguments with literary snobs.)
The late Octavia Butler wrote as sharply about the subaltern experience of colonisation as just about anyone else, but it’s much harder to imagine her being awarded the Nobel Prize than some of her contemporaries who deal with the same psychological territory, because her colonisers are giant tentacled tri-gendered slugs called Oankali.
But there are also those genres which just about everyone (except their enthusiasts) is keen to disavow: in particular, the chick lit / romance spectrum. That’s a “female” genre, by and for women: SF used to be just as strongly coded male - technology, exploration, the public sphere - and while that’s not quite how it’s perceived any more, I don’t doubt that the manliness associated with SF helped break it out of the ghetto in a way that woman-genres will find much more difficult.
This isn’t the first time these kinds of battles have been fought in the literary arena; two hundred years ago everyone read Gothic fiction and historical romances, but the tastemakers managed to convince everybody that those were bad, girly books and novels about individuals in conflict with social systems were the only ‘good’ reading matter.
Perhaps the reason the Atwood book was not on the SF shelf, was that it is read by literary genre readers more than SF readers. And besides, snobbish Atwood herself, says it is not SF.
It’s in the running for the Booker et al - is it up for an SF gong?
Yes as I said she considers it speculative fiction. The distinction I think is spurious, its mostly about the effects and implications on the world of the advance of genetic engineering and modification in the future. If it was an author’s first book there is no way they would get away without it being classed as SF.
As for awards Handmaid’s Tail won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year, and was a finalist for the Nebula Awards. Oryx and Crake appears to be have shortlisted for some Canadian SF awards but other than that I don’t of any.
I suspect that Neal Stephenson would get more readers for his System of the World series by being in the SF bookshelf than the “literary fiction” shelf in most bookshops. And even though it is nothing like SF, it is still chock full of ideas - the development of markets and economics is fantastic, for example.
But that’s the real snobbery - the literary fiction shelf. Every bookshop I’ve been to has one, and also a general fiction shelf. I can’t give you examples off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are many authors who have started in one, and should mostly be in the other one. But I suspect that there is a lot of the literary shelf that gets bought by people who believe that’s what they should be reading, not because they actually enjoy it.
I’m a voracious reader who does like good writing, but generally likes either plot or character or ideas to go with it, and too often literary fiction seems to be written by people who believe sentence structure is enough.
I haven’t time to read through the thread again so I hope this hasn’t been mentioned already but Margaret Atwood has a new book of fictional essays out - Tent.
Have you noticed that bookshops have also changed. eg there ussed to be a stand in A&R titled ‘history’ where you could chase a Henry Reynolds or similar. Now it seems to come under ‘Australiana’. Is there anything to this or am I just getting paranoid?
An alert for you other PhilDickians out there. He’s gone missing.The
Of course the real question though is how do we know it wasn’t the real Dick all along? Andis it now striding through a village campfire scattering embers among the terrified Eskimos.
And if you like a bit of Dick, why not check out one of his acolytes Tim Powers or the initimable Jack Womack who took the mise en scence of “The Man In The High Castle” ten steps further to the sun.
Incidentally someone here once recommended Peter Hamilton’s “Pandora’s Star.” Who was it? C’mon, own up. Boy, was that a crock of shit. Like Iain M Banks without the wit or imagination. Or E E “Doc” Smith without the energy.
However that was owes me $24.95. Or they should go out and buy Ian MacDonald’s “River of Gods.” and read how to handle really big ideas in an understandable but still shocking future.
I dunno Nabs, I spent $24.95 on “River of Gods” but I’ve been too busy to read it. I find myself reading stuff I’ve read before when I’ve got the leisure to read fiction (which is pretty rare at the moment sadly) because it’s easier to re-enter an old familiar world than a new one that takes some getting into.