(no subject)

[coraa]

Another poll. This one's on reading habits, and for no better reason than because I'm shamelessly curious.

For the purposes of this poll, I'm counting physical books, audiobooks and ebooks of the type you would read in an ebook reader. I'm not counting stuff you read on the web, not because I don't think it's 'real' writing but because I think there's considerably less deliberateness -- one of the beautiful things about the Internet, to me, is that you can spend thirty minutes clicking around and wind up reading about quantum physics or the history of cheese without really realizing how you got there. Which is awesome! But doesn't really say much about what you prefer to read.

EDIT: And I'm counting manga and Western graphic novels that have been collected into books. Basically, as meganbmoore put it, if it has a spine, I count it.



[Poll #1167420]

EDIT: I meant to mention manga and graphic novels under Fiction, and Politics under Non-Fiction, and then I goofed and didn't. Whoops.

Comments

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

I tried to answer as if I have time to read (not-grad-school reading, that is), ever. Like Pava, though, I do oscillate, so the frequency choice is an average of how frequently I read when I have time to read as I choose.

I think the last thing I read before UCSB started up was S. King's Lisey's Story, which was very good. 'Course, for me it is hard for Monsieur King to go wrong (hence the trashy tickybox), although Cell was kind of a pile. An interesting pile with Real Characters, but really not very good.

Right now (as in, this week, simultaneously) I'm reading The Selfish Gene (I've never read it! Yay for being assigned something interesting and fun to read!), an evolutionary-psych text book, and a couple chapters from multivariate statistics books.

You forgot young-adult fic, although it's hard to disentangle that when it is also genre fic. I also like fantastical/magical realism, which isn't generic literature per se but isn't really fantasy per se either. I mean, maybe American Gods can be shoehorned into fantasy, but A Series of Unfortunate Events?

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I actually left YA off on purpose, but only after a bit of consideration. I think it's mostly also categorizable into other genres -- the fantasy tropes of YA fantasy are much like the fantasy tropes of adult fantasy, and books flipflop between categories (Tanith Lee's Black Unicorn switches sections so often it's practically got spineburn, and a lot of modern urban fantasy is shelved in either or even both). But there are some YA subgenres that don't really have adult fic counterparts, so probably I should've included something for that. (One that springs immediately to mind is the Endless Bunch-of-Friends Series, a la Babysitter's Club or Saddle Club or Sweet Valley et cetera ad infinitum, and which doesn't have an adult counterpart that springs to mind except, sort of maybe chicklit -- and there are probably examples that are a bit less trashy, too.)

I do a lot of cross-genre and slipstream-type reading, too; ASOUE is notoriously hard to classify. (In my head it's 'steampunk,' actually, but that's too finegrained a category to fit in a list like this....)

(I would've made manga its own category if I had it to do over because it often does follow very different genre tropes than prose fantasy or romance... or at least, than prose fantasy or romance in this country. I have no idea how similar or dissimilar it is to Japanese prose fantasy or romance.)