What Your Reading Says About You?

What does your reading say about you? I love a good mystery and lots of suspense. You know the kind that keeps you on the end of your seat and makes you want to put the book in the freezer? You remember that segment of Friends where Rachel and Joey exchanged books to out smart the other in "scary" books.

And the classic monalogue of the group in the coffee house where Joey says: Oh! All blank and no blank makes blank a blank blank. Oh no-no, no! The end, when Jack almost kills them all with that blank, but then at the last second they get away. And Rachel says: Joey! I can't believe you just did that! And then the classic where Chandler says: I can't believe she cracked your code!" Too funny....

The science fiction and fantasy is a bit of weird and wonderous People tend to come to science fiction and fantasy for the familiarity -- most children's fairy tales are deeply fantastical -- but they stay for reasons as varied as why people read at all.

The editor Teresa Nielsen-Hayden wisely says, "If you ask 20 different readers why they read, they will all be right." People read straight-out non-genre fiction to enjoy a world that is not their own, to live someone's life tangentially and vicariously. People read fiction to be informed, to be entertained, to escape, etc. there are million reasons from all readers, but I read to relax and escape into a world of mystery and challenge and work my mind trying to discover the plot.

Reading is an escapist hobby, but science fiction and fantasy reading even more so -- people escape out of their own worlds into places and times that do not exist nor ever will.

Genre stories are set in worlds that are unknown and disparate to us, and we automatically reorder them; at the same time, the main characters set fundamental wrongs to right. Readers of science fiction have the luxury of extrapolating a positive future or predicting and hopefully avoiding negative ones. But if one liked to read equations and logic puzzles, one would stick with non-fiction. Science fiction and fantasy also appeal to other temperaments, including readers of a "romantic" nature.

"SF is called the literature of ideas, and it really is, but the ideas aren't about fusion or nanotubules or seven schools of magic; they're the same ideas of love and anger and the human heart in conflict with itself (tm William Faulkner) that drive all other stories, but foregrounded and made new," says Maroney.

I like the natural fundamental pscotic killer mystery and the one that develops into a quesionable end. Stephen King is great at that. But it is the suspense of not knowing why that intriques many and I for one cannot get enough of the "high!"