LOL, I had this really long response to your chat and hit publish only to have my wifi cut out and lose my comment. So, you get the less thought out and meticulous second effort. :)
I think you're onto something about people going through shifts in what they want or need from their reading. When you described your childhood preferences to your teens and twenties and into your thirties, I could remember clear breaks in my reading picks and habits, too. I've never completely abandoned a genre, but I do take sabbaticals from them when I feel the ingenue of sameness set in. For me, switching from mass market paperbacks and now mostly to ebook and audio was necessity more than preference because I've been losing more of my eyesight as I get older. At the risk of getting taken the wrong way, I will say that as to my need during the time of social upheaval and pandemic, this is not toward the latest books and authors in their respective genres, but quite the opposite. So many infuse their social or political messages into their stories even historicals and most especially sci-fi and fantasies that I don't find their books escapisms that I want from the news and the world outside my door. I've been on a huge re-read/re-listen binge of lots of oldies, but goodies from Agatha Christie to Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen.
LOL, I had this really long response to your chat and hit publish only to have my wifi cut out and lose my comment. So, you get the less thought out and meticulous second effort. :)
ReplyDeleteI think you're onto something about people going through shifts in what they want or need from their reading. When you described your childhood preferences to your teens and twenties and into your thirties, I could remember clear breaks in my reading picks and habits, too. I've never completely abandoned a genre, but I do take sabbaticals from them when I feel the ingenue of sameness set in. For me, switching from mass market paperbacks and now mostly to ebook and audio was necessity more than preference because I've been losing more of my eyesight as I get older.
At the risk of getting taken the wrong way, I will say that as to my need during the time of social upheaval and pandemic, this is not toward the latest books and authors in their respective genres, but quite the opposite. So many infuse their social or political messages into their stories even historicals and most especially sci-fi and fantasies that I don't find their books escapisms that I want from the news and the world outside my door. I've been on a huge re-read/re-listen binge of lots of oldies, but goodies from Agatha Christie to Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen.
Great discussion, Misty!