Thursday, September 4, 2008

Non-Fiction

I've been keeping a list of books that I've read since November, to date I've read a lot. Just how much? That's classified for now, I have a list going that will be published on November 19th 2008. I know curiosity is just killing you all but as the old cliche goes "patience is a virtue". In any case, the majority of what I read falls under the Sci-fi/Fantasy realm with dashes of Mystery and Fiction. Very rarely do I read non-fiction stuff, in fact, I think there's only been one or two full books that I've read that's non-fiction just for fun. This brings me to the peculiar quandary I find myself in right now. So instead of doing my lovely philosophy homework I'm going to talk about reading.

When I started working at Borders back in November I began to realize just how much I read, I've always loved reading and, in fact, its the one thing I think I'm decent at. Actually aside from a certain person reading is about the only thing that makes me happy, I'm just lucky enough to have someone and not just my silly little books. So I started at Borders and naturally because its a bookstore my reading levels jumped! I now have access to millions more books and it definitely showed in my list. Perhaps I've always read a lot of books but it seemed to me that because I had more access to books suddenly I was reading even more, just how much will be shown come November. As I expected sci-fi/fantasy are the majority of my reads but I was surprised to see a few non-fictions creeping into my list. I'm thinking that because I'm now exposed to so many more non-fiction books I've slowly stopped thinking of them as super boring and lame and gradually began picking them up. I'm not sure where my bias came from exactly, but its been enough to keep me from reading a lot of excellent reads. Not only that, though, but I've actually learned a lot from the non-fictions I've read. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure everyone out there is thinking "no freaking duh Ry, they're based on reality" but come on my experience up til November was with text books.

In any case, I updated "what I'm reading" thing on a forum I participate on and to my surprise I'm reading not just one but two non-fiction books right now. This past year I've read non-fiction but its always been accompanied by a fiction of some sort. Now not only am I reading two, but they're fairly out of character for me. One of them is a fairly intense political book, alas not about either of our dear candidates or our current political situation cause those are all slander right now, and the other is a business-ish book. Indeed a mere two books ago I read another non-fiction book! This probably is rather boring to anyone that bothers to read this, but its rather fascinating to me. As a side note I just re-read this and good freaking god I'm not writing well at all! Oh well, this is far less formal than my usual stuff and because its not super controversial I don't have my usual flame. Another possible reason that I've come up with is rather weak: I've matured! Wow, it looks a whole hell of a lot worse in writing! I'm not gonna lie, I still love fantasy and space and not real stuff, but finally at almost twenty years old I can appreciate 'adult' things. Part of that is my own curiosity, I want to know more about the world around us. Once again I sound like an ass saying shit like that but oh well. There's actually a lot of really interesting stuff out there, you just gotta be able to find it I guess. It took me working at a bookstore to find some, but hell I know so many people that only read non-fiction which absolutely boggles my mind. I don't know about everyone else but one of the reasons I love to read is to escape and relax and give my head a break from the stresses of every day life non-fiction is a workout for the mind. It's nice every once and a while, but seriously? All the time? Nu-uh!

While I still don't think that non-fiction is worth more than the occasional read, it's nice to know there's some well written stuff out there. As for my reading list, like I said that'll be posted 12:01am November, 19th 2008 (thank you blogger for scheduled posting) if you're interested it should be kinda neat to see. Well Descartes calls.

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