Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
"I don't know what you don't know and I can't take the time to explain it" sounds strangely like a cop out. Why don't you at least try? You can think of it as practice... since we obviously won't be the only idiots you encounter in life.
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If that was aimed at me, I'm not calling anyone an idiot, certainly not on the basis of being unfamiliar with literary fiction. I didn't say I don't know what Ransom doesn't know, I said s/he doesn't know what s/he doesn't know. With regard to literary fiction, Ransom has proven to be an
unconscious incompetent:
The only way I can "explain it" is to say go to your nearest community college and take a course or two in modern or contemporary literature, or at least grab the syllabus from such a course and do the reading and write up some critical responses.
At the very least, start with a book of short stories. This one is great, and definitely skews toward minimalism:
http://www.amazon.com/Vintage-Contem.../dp/0679745130
The first literary novel that caught my attention in my teens was Charles Baxter's
Shadow Play, though I'd recommend his more recent
The Feast of Love more highly. Hemingway or Chekhov's short stories are amazing. Almost everyone's read some Vonnegut, though I'd recommend
Cat's Cradle or
Deadeye Dick over
Slaughterhouse Five.
All of the above are quite approachable. A couple of my favorite books, Italo Calvino's
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller... and Jeannette Winterson's
Gut Symmetries, probably require a primer in the author's way of looking at things:
Invisible Cities or
The Baron in the Trees for Calvino, and
Sexing the Cherry or
The Passion for Winterson.
Again, if you have no interest, don't do any of that. Just don't go off half-cocked with stereotypes because you:
- Don't know how to find the literary stuff you'd like
- Don't know how to read the literary stuff you find