"There's an unwritten compact between you and the reader. If someone enters a bookstore and sets down hard earned money (energy) for your book, you owe that person some entertainment and as much more as you can give." ~Frank Herbert in Forward of Heretics of Dune (1984)

All these great writers are giving up fiction. A few speculate in this article that maybe they are giving up fiction because they've lived enough of life to know that novels aren't true to form or there is a saturation of storytelling. For me, I stopped fervently reading fiction after my first Master's degree in History. I read so much non-fiction at that point that I just couldn't comfortably transition back into fiction. I read books on Buddhism, psychology, society and it's ills, dogs, travel - you name it. Everything but fiction. Now, I'm the fiction librarian at my library. I order all the fiction for the entire system. And I'll confess . . . I still don't really read that much fiction. I read reviews and listen to what my co-workers and patrons are saying and it works very well. I like the book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. It's easy to do this and I learned very well from my time working in the bookstores that you certainly don't have to read everything you can talk about!

This being said, there are a few novels that make me swoon. I just finished The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid - it was written very differently and had me riveted to the end. I finished it in four hours. 2030 by Albert Brooks was interesting because it was nearly non-fictional. You can clearly see how we can get ourselves in this healthcare/economic bind. Likewise, The Olive Readers by Christine Aziz is a dystopian future you can logically see happening. And there are the ever-present Dune novels - you can count on Brian Herbert to continue to milk this literary cow and regardless of the terrible reviews, I will still read them, soaking in every last bit of Frank Herbert's creativity, no matter how bastardized Brian and Kevin Anderson make it.

But you know what I'm really into now? Short stories. Maybe this is because I'm a victim of short-attention-span-itis with all of the gadgets and facebook and Internet articles and blurbs and blogs. I'm not sure why, but I'm finding that short stories tell me a better story than dragging on too long with a character or story line I don't care about. I feel like I just read half of The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb because I truly did not care to read the letters of that other character. So, flip, flip, flip -- it made the book go by so much faster! Which is good, because I'm too busy reading short stories and blogging. :)