April 3, 2008
Apr
'08
Today’s Booking Through Thursday question is: When somebody mentions “literature,” what’s the first thing you think of? (Dickens? Tolstoy? Shakespeare?) Do you read “literature” (however you define it) for pleasure? Or is it something that you read only when you must?
Well, it really depends on who’s asking and where I am. It used to be the “classics” - Dickens, Twain, Tolstoy, Shelley, etc etc, no matter what. But when I started working at my current job, I started associating the word with what is contained in the actual “literature” section there. Anthologies, literary letters, books about authors or authors’ works, literary criticism, and so on. However, I only think of it this way at work. It has to be in that context, otherwise those sections are just what they are to me; they don’t belong under the “literature” heading.
Generally, though, now I suppose the word “literature” applies to “modern classics.” When I think of Dickens and those types of authors, I do think of the word “classics” (not to be confused with the word “classical,” which makes me think of Homer and Virgil and those fellows). I think of Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Annie Dillard, Ha Jin, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, etc. “Thinking” fiction, as I compared it to mainstream fiction in my most recent review of Once… by James Herbert. For lack of a better way to put it - it’s literary fiction. 
I do read literature how I define it outside of work. The “read when I must” doesn’t really apply to me since I’m not in school or anything, but when I was in school, I did find I read a lot of literary-ish stuff, but in even amounts to the less literary stuff I read. I definitely read more literature at this point in my life than I ever have before.
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