Changing Tastes

I was reading over book recommendations, as I always do when I can’t think of anything better to do (and need inspiration for a blog post that doesn’t involve spilling my guts about my private life) and came across a bunch of recommendations based on stuff I bought many years ago. I guess they’re finally scraping the bottom of the barrel for me now, I think I’ve exhausted Amazon. One of the recommendations was for a new Anne Rice book, about angels. Angels? Really? When did angels become the new, cool undead thing? Is Micheal the new Lestat? Gabriel the new Louis? Who will stand in for Claudia? I used to love Anne Rice, to the point that my friend (you really need a code name, since most of my past memories involve you somehow!) and I stood outside her home and played with her dog, just to say we could. We met her husband and left her a note. It was all creepily stalkerish in an innocent teenager sort of way, although we were far from innocent back then. But then Anne found god and I found myself with precious few hours to read after taking care of my son all day. So Anne found herself on the “not interested” list. Dean Koontz, another past favorite, is going to find himself there as well if he keeps churning out psuedo-intellectual thrillers that make very little sense and eat up hours of my time trying to get through them out of some sense of loyalty to the author. Dean used to write such cool and creepy tomes. Now he churns those suckers out two a year and is riding a wave of success based on little more than his moniker. Same with Dan Brown, who devastated me with his less than mediocre Lost Symbol.

I’m noticing a new pattern emerging though. All the authors I used to love seem to disappoint me lately. Maybe because I have such high expectations for them. New authors can skate by with a few thin plot lines or over-used devices. I cut them slack because there is a freshness to their characters and writing style that I don’t have with tried-and-true favorites. I also seem to be reading less intellectual fiction these days. Like movies, I want my fiction to transport me to a world that is completely different than my own and give me a break from the overwhelming anxiety I face in my day to day life. For instance, I love those urban fantasy fiction books like “Magic Burns” and “Ghouls Gone Wild.”  They’re pretty mindless, completely void of any sort of true reality, occasionally silly yet very satisfying. Much like the satisfaction of eating empty calories in Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. I still read a lot of non-fiction because I love learning new things and no one can survive on junk food alone, but these days I lean more towards the “chew it up and spit it out” fare that I used to be so down on.

Funny how tastes change so much over the years. I do think a person’s bookshelf can tell you more about them than just about anything else. My bookshelf these days screams “brain-addled mom with the attention span of a gnat.” That’s probably better than five years ago, when it screamed “paranoid conspiracy theorist on the verge of a mental breakdown!”