Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

HerbaciousTea t1_j1mj4zj wrote

Tastes change constantly. Sometimes as a response to some change in your life, but just as often completely arbitrarily.

Sometimes you simply no longer get anything meaningful from a genre or subject matter, and sometimes it is pure random chance that you are in the right headspace to read a particular book at that moment to have it leave a meaningful impact on you.

We are not even remotely static. A book I can find exasperating to read one day could be enthralling the next day simply because something completely unrelated got me excited about some little aspect of it.

I would hesitate to say that we necessarily 'grow out' of certain types of books, because I don't think it's a linear path of immature -> mature, it's a spectrum of many different axis and between the random noise of our day to day interests and influences, and our larger life experiences changing us, we are never quite at the same exact coordinates twice.

3

HarrisonRyeGraham t1_j1oiuzx wrote

I think there’s a lot to be said about this as well—the part about not getting anything meaningful out of it anymore. For example, I recently tried reading a romance novel that had a fun title and had a promising set up and the writing itself was fun and accessible. But holy shit…it was infuriating. It seemed like an AI wrote a romcom. It was like the author wrote down every single beat and cliche story point a book like this usually has and shoehorned it in every step of the way. I was so irritated.

Yet…I imagine I would’ve completely enjoyed it without a thought in my early twenties when I’d seen less movies, read less books, and hadn’t yet studied screen writing. The exposure to stories is exactly what made me dislike it, because to me it was derivative. Even though to many others I bet it was just a fun read.

In high school I read countless books by Stephen king and lovecraft and loved dark depressing YA books. Because it was cathartic and it felt deep and important and cool to me at the time. And now I can still enjoy books like that, but I’d rather spend my time reading something hopeful and interesting, and I try to find voices and stories I haven’t read before.

2

alohadave t1_j1otl68 wrote

> Sometimes you simply no longer get anything meaningful from a genre or subject matter,

I read a ton of sci-fi in my youth, and kind of burned out on it for many years, and I'm really selective on what sci-fi I read now. It's a lot harder to find engaging works that are good.

> and sometimes it is pure random chance that you are in the right headspace to read a particular book at that moment to have it leave a meaningful impact on you.

I read a few romances (magical romance) that really resonated with me, so it's something I keep an eye out for now.

1