Some Thoughts on Series Novels

When I was in elementary school, I used to read a lot of series novels. I started out with mysteries: The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, and The Hardy Boys were my all-time favorites. I ripped through every new installment of these classics of mass production with a fervor that dazed most of my classmates. Then I moved on to those staples of the Young Adult section in the library: Fear Street and Sweet Valley High. To me, all of these series function sort of like comfort food, or a favorite song that you want to play over and over and over again when you’re in a certain mood.

The most attractive thing about these types of series is the way that readers can inhabit their worlds so fully and for such a prolonged period of time (since the texts are never-ending). The characters represent certain things – for example, Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield from the idyllic Sweet Valley lead the epitome of perfect contemporary teenage lives, while Nancy embodies (a much more admirable) womanly independence. Readers want to have the kinds of experiences that these characters have, and live these kinds of romantic or adventurous lives; we want to be these characters. We step into their worlds over and over again because we enjoy putting on their skin. I’ll admit it – I went around pretending to be Elizabeth Wakefield for a while. She was the less-flirtatious twin who liked to read and was the editor of the school paper, but still managed to have a lot of friends and a cute steady boyfriend. I envisioned her as a prettier and more well-liked version of myself, which gave me hope that perhaps I would blossom into a more popular person in high school. And who didn’t want to be as cool as the adventurous Nancy Drew? I kept pestering my mom to let me take judo lessons so that I could kick some bad guy butt, just like her friend George Fayne (another independent female, for the uneducated in our audience).

But there’s another type of series – the kind that likewise allows readers to inhabit a world more attractive then their own, but doesn’t exist in some kind of time warp. The characters age, change and even occasionally die. While Nancy Drew, Elizabeth Wakefield, and all their friends remained immortally frozen as eighteen-year-old-blonds, other characters graduate high school, go to college, get jobs, watch parents and godfathers and headmasters die, and even (shock!) get married and have kids. Kids would have been the death of the Nancy Drew series, unless our heroine could figure out how to hide herself in the trunk of a roadster with a baby strapped to her chest in a sling. Nancy Drew was never really about reality – but many of the series that later became my favorites don’t indulge their readers by freezing time. Even many contemporary series fiction featuring immortal characters such as centaurs, vampires and werewolves have started dealing more realistically with the concepts of aging. (Check out Bella's fear of growing older than Edward in the Twilight series...)

Nancy Drew was definitely my favorite series while I was growing up, but while the character will always remain amongst my most important role models, several more emotionally developed series have surpassed her franchise in my heart. Topping the list are: The Chronicles of Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, His Dark Materials and most importantly, Harry Potter. I appreciate the way that L.M. Montgomery and J.K. Rowling in particular depict the complexity of adolescent emotion and do not shy away from series topics that other YA authors have typically avoided.

Montgomery created a eccentric, dramatic and ultimately lovable young literature fanatic – and then followed her through high school, college, career, marriage and motherhood. While the publishing industry and Hollywood both seem to believe that life after marriage brings death to the narrative, Montgomery understood that marriage and family simply bring about new types of conflict and drama, including grief. Anne is confronted with choices about career as both a teacher and a writer, and deal with how those will work in conjunction with her marriage. She also must face the deaths of first Matthew and then Marilla – and while children’s literature is awfully fond of presenting us with orphan characters, it doesn’t usually like to depict the actual death and grieving process too often. I love the fact that Montgomery managed to write a series that doesn’t shy away from the realities of marriage and death, but still makes me constantly laugh out loud.

Likewise, Rowling’s Harry Potter is clever and funny, yet seriously confronts loss, death and the resulting grief. (This is, in fact, the subject on which I wrote my Master’s Thesis.) It may seem odd to label a fantasy series like Harry Potter as “more realistic” than so-called contemporary fiction, but in my mind, Rowling’s novels are far more emotionally genuine than anything produced by one of the many Carolyn Keenes and Francine Pascals.

I hesitate to say that this makes Montgomery’s and Rowling’s novels better than the Sweet Valley High Series or Nancy Drew (although I certainly think they’re better than Fear Street, hands down). Despite the fact that both types of series are written to entertain the reader, one is meant to lull the audience into a comfort zone so that we return again and again for the same kind of adventure. The other series boast more emotional complexity; novels like Anne and Harry likely have more to teach us and provide a more cathartic experience. In one, we rehearse our ideal lives (as a popular high school student or an amateur sleuth) while in another, we rehearse the realities of life that we are not yet prepared to face – loss, death and grief. Although I once believed that one purpose was higher than another, I think I am coming to see that both have value to all kinds of readers.

What are your thoughts on series fiction? What were your favorites growing up, and what are your favorites now? Please leave me a comment and/or a link to your post on a similar subject!

This post is inspired by the 30 Day Book Meme that I've been seeing on several other book blogs, but I've modified it somewhat. Here's the original meme, in case you'd like to participate:

Day 01 – The best book you read last year
Day 02 – A book that you’ve read more than 3 times
Day 03 – Your favorite series
Day 04 – Favorite book of your favorite series
Day 05 – A book that makes you happy
Day 06 – A book that makes you sad
Day 07 – Most underrated book
Day 08 – Most overrated book
Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 10 – Favorite classic book
Day 11 – A book you hated
Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore
Day 13 – Your favorite writer
Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer
Day 15 – Favorite male character
Day 16 – Favorite female character
Day 17 – Favorite quote from your favorite book
Day 18 – A book that disappointed you
Day 19 – Favorite book turned into a movie
Day 20 – Favorite romance book
Day 21 – Favorite book from your childhood
Day 22 – Favorite book you own
Day 23 – A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t
Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read
Day 25 – A character who you can relate to the most
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favorite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favorite book of all time

Some Thoughts on Literary Snobbery, Part Three

Or, the post in which I write a Mini-Treatise on the Subject of Translating Books into Movies.

As I explained in Part One and Part Two of My Thoughts On Literary Snobbery, a literary snob is someone who has very picky tastes in reading materials and their own definition of what makes something “high quality literature.” Many literary snobs, myself included, can have a very elitist mentality that often keeps us from reading some very entertaining books, and so generally I consider literary snobbery to be a negative thing. In my previous posts, I offered nine opinions about things literary snobs need to get over, already so that we can enjoy all kinds of literature and avoid alienating our fellow readers who may have (very) different literary tastes. A love of reading and stories should join us all together on some level, whether or not we enjoy the same books, and if we should happen to disagree on whether something is well-written or not, we should take the opportunity to have an interesting intellectual debate on it without getting our panties all twisted up in a bunch (there’s an additional opinion for you, free of charge).

Today I want to post on literary snobbery and the translation of novels (particularly classics) into films.

Opinion #10: Literary snobs and book lovers need to leave behind the mentality that “the book is always better than the movie” because we don’t need to establish an either/or preference. Instead, we need to realize that the book and the movie are two completely different animals, entirely different entities with different creators, and make our judgments about the film as a separate work of art from the book.

The book is always different from the movie because it has to be – the story is being translated from one medium (a written medium) to a completely different medium (a visual medium with auditory elements). Generally, we go see a movie expecting a vastly different experience than when we curl up on the couch with a book – but for some reason, we suddenly expect the two types of experiences to echo each other when we go to watch the film version of a novel. The same rules apply, though – film is still a visual medium, an auditory medium. Appreciate the way that your senses are engaged by the movie version. Understand that because it’s mode of storytelling, it will inevitably evolve into a somewhat different story.

This happens because the director, producers and all the other creative individuals involved in the production of a film envision the story differently than you do. When we read a novel, it takes on a life of its own in our imagination. It becomes a different story, a whole world within our minds – and this happens to everyone in a slightly different way for each reader, even with the same book. Your Wuthering Heights is not my Wuthering Heights. My Dracula is not your Dracula. And so when a novel is translated into a movie, it is the depiction of one of these much more personal worlds.

Opinion #10b: Because of this, we should not expect a film version of a novel to be the same as the book. More than that, though, once we understand the nature of movies, we shouldn’t want the film version to be exactly the same as the novel. We need to stop watching movies with the expectation that we will see our own interpretation and vision up there on the screen (unless we’re willing and motivated enough to produce our own interpretation – as in, go make our own movie so that our own ideas get some air time). Instead, we need to understand that every story has multiple incarnations, and learn to enjoy a different version of a novel. Film adaptation is an act of translation, and so film versions may offer us new insights into the story, new twists to the plot, new details that expand the original world of the story. Relish the development and exploration of that world. Don’t hate on the film version – just understand that it was never intended to replicate your own very personal experience of reading the novel. (And for the record, while there are certainly some film adaptations that are meant to simply replicate your reading experience, those are usually the adaptations that turn out to be bland or even horrible movies if viewed separately from a positive reading experience. For example, the first two Harry Potter films are far less dynamic then the later films in the series, in part because they stick so closely to novels.)

My prime example (and my own personal soap box) of how literary snobs get up in arms over film adaptations: the Jane Austen fan reaction to the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice. I have to admit that while I’m an Austen fan, I’ve never been able to enjoy the 6 hour BBC version of this wonderful novel, despite the presence of Colin Firth. But those of you who love that version, please set aside your shock and horror for a minute to hear me out on the subject of the 2005 version. Many Austen fans have told me that that the movie isn't faithful to the book, and that Keira Knightly doesn’t portray Elizabeth Bennett anything like the way she is in the novels. While I’m not convinced of either of these things, I want to challenge you with several other questions for the moment: should these things really be the main criteria for evaluating Knightly’s performance and/or the film? Should fidelity to the book be the first priority? In my opinion, no.

First, let’s address the question of whether a film version should maintain a strict fidelity to the plot of a novel. People swear up and down that the 6 hour version is much truer to Austen’s text – but in truth, if you go through the 2005 version, you find that it contains at least 1/2 to 2/3 of the novel almost word-for-word. It cuts out a lot of the slower-paced drawing room conversation in the second half, and here’s why: because the filmmakers understood the extremely important truth that film is such a vastly different medium from written text that the pacing has to be different. The very conversations that keep us reading with tense anticipation over whether Darcy and Elizabeth will get together are the very conversations that will start to bore a movie audience if the climax is put off indefinitely. So chop, chop and we get a lot more consistently rising action up to the scene where Judi Dench shows up in the middle of the night at Elizabeth’s house, and then a quick resolution after that. Some people think that it changes the spirit of the whole story, whereas others disagree – and that’s an interesting debate worth having. But ultimately, I don’t think that exact fidelity should be part of the criteria used to decide whether or not the 2005 Pride and Prejudice is a good movie, independent of the novel.

And let’s talk about Knightly herself for a minute. Whether or not we believe she stays true to the Elizabeth Bennett that Austen originally created, we should be able to enjoy someone else’s interpretation of the character. Maybe Joe Wright (the director) and Keira Knightly saw something in the text that some readers didn’t notice, didn’t quite understand, or chose to ignore in favor of focusing on Elizabeth’s other characteristics. Maybe Wright and Knightly decided to play up certain aspects of the character that we wouldn’t have chosen – but does that mean that we can’t enjoy the story any more? We literary snobs need to realize that while it may or may not be our Lizzie up on the screen the way that we imagined her when we first read Austen’s novel, Knightly still gives her audience an interesting, intelligent, thoughtful but feisty, and ultimately very lovable character.

In the end, it’s not the same story. It will never be the same story because it’s not Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it’s actually Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice, mashed with Roman Osin (the cinematographer)’s Pride and Prejudice… it’s a communal vision that comments upon the original story. And it’s gorgeous. I have to admit that I’m completely in love with it – it’s visually beautiful, the music is amazing, and simply put, I find it stunning. But so many literary snobs miss the beauty of this film because it doesn’t line up with their expectations.

In the end, it always boils down to dealing with your own expectations – and that’s the main point that I want to make through all of these posts. We all need to learn to set aside our expectations (as much as possible) and come to a story with the ability to enjoy it for whatever it may actually be, not what we want it to be. We will always have our own preferences, and we will always gravitate toward the books and films that fit nicely within those preferences. But don’t decide that you hate a book or a movie because it isn’t what you wanted/thought it would be. If you do that, you might miss out on the insight and beauty that is present in the work.

This post participates in the Weekly Geeks Challenge for Saturday, March 26. Share your own thoughts on books and movies, post the link here in the comments section if you'd like, and make sure to link back to the Weekly Geeks site too. I'd be really interested in hearing your thoughts on this subject...

Some Thoughts on Literary Snobbery, Part Two

As I explained in my first post on literary snobbery, a literary snob is someone who has very picky tastes in reading materials and their own definition of what makes something “high quality literature.” Literature snobs prefer novels that they believe are either old enough to be “respectable,” or inventive/ challenging enough to be fairly obscure. Many literary snobs, myself included, can have a very elitist mentality that often keeps us from reading some very entertaining books, and so generally I consider literary snobbery to be a negative thing. But let me offer some (more) thoughts on both the pros and cons of being a literary snob:

(Opinions#1-5 are to be found in my first post.)

Opinion #6: One positive aspect of being a literary snob is that many of us understand that genre is not a description or a declaration of quality, and so therefore we don’t tend to let genre preferences dictate our reading habits as often as other readers. A genre is a category (of books, movies, music, etc.) that is defined by elements of style, form and content. In other words, genre is a short-hand way of describing something so that we can understand and discuss some of its basic characteristics. A statement about genre shouldn’t be a value judgment – and this is where many literary snobs fall short. As I mentioned in my earlier post, most literary snobs place genre authors and novels at the very bottom of the culture junk heap; they tend to be very dismissive of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, etc. Not all Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels are the same, though – those serialized novels that reiterate the same basic storyline over and over again are not the same as The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or the work of Orson Scott Card. (Side note: I plan to post more specifically on the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres at a later date, so check back for more Thoughts on Literature postings.)

Once you realize that genre is not a value judgment and should not be used as an assessment tool, it opens up a lot of new horizons. This isn’t to say that you should feel obligated to like all kinds of literature – maybe you will always prefer stories about witches and wizards, unicorns and time travel, dystopian words, or Medieval lords and ladies simply because you enjoy the flavor that these elements lend to a story. But you might discover other artists whose lyrical prose you enjoy, despite the fact that they’re writing about much more mundane experiences. You might find a novel or two about the Revolutionary War that you find entertaining – and learn more about yourself through this process of discovery.

The important thing is that you shouldn’t feel bound by genre. It has even really started to bug me when people want to peg my reading (and viewing) interests by genre. I get the line, “Oh, you wrote your Master’s Thesis on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Harry Potter? Have I got a Fantasy/Sci-Fi novel for you…” When they say something like that, they’re making the assumption that the primary reason(s) that I like those two series have to do with the Fantasy elements, when in reality, I chose to write about those two series in terms of how the adolescents in both deal with the death of their parents and other parental figures. I was interested in the emotional portrayals of the adolescents set within fantasy worlds, so FYI – I am not indiscriminately drawn to all Fantasy Literature. I like complex metaphors and well-developed adolescent characters, which are ultimately two of the most important qualities that Buffy and Harry share.

Opinion #7: Despite the fact that many literary snobs have a bias against genres, many of us have a secret guilty pleasure hidden on the back of our bookshelf, and this is why we shouldn’t judge other people’s reading habits. Come on, admit it. Some of us like comic books, but we tell ourselves that they are “graphic novels” so that we feel better about reading something with pictures and stilted dialog. And a lot of us (myself included) like Twilight – we literary snobs need to have a coming out party for this one. But even though I admit to liking Stephanie Meyer’s famous, notorious, fabulous vampire love triangle novels, I’m able to maintain my literary snobbery by quoting Meyer herself, who admits that she is not “a good writer,” but instead is a “good storyteller.” And I agree – her prose is pretty flaccid most of the time, but she can really create some interesting characters and intricate plot lines. No matter whether or not we can find a way of justifying the pop-literature we enjoy, though, we would do well to remember that Charles Dickens was first published in serialized form and was also considered to be pop culture fodder. We should stop worrying about our own tastes, stop looking down our noses at what other people enjoy reading, and just enjoy ourselves.

Opinion #8: This is more of a hint, rather than a opinion. If you’re a literary snob who just can’t bring yourself to come out of the closet about your Twilight obsession (or something similar), but you want to carry your guilty pleasure pop book with you on the bus, I’ve found the perfect solution for this embarrassment. Buy the book(s) in hardback and simply remove the dust jacket. That way, as long as your hand is over the spine, no one will really pay much attention to what you’re reading because it will have a blank cover…

Opinion #9: This is another admonishment regarding the literary snob’s ability to just enjoy books, no matter what the genre/subject. If you’re not a literary snob, you should know that there is a certain amount of pressure amongst the snobs to love the classics. “You haven’t read Proust?? You don’t like Milton??!” Some snobs enjoy works such as Dante’s Inferno with an excitement that borders on zealotry, whereas other literary snobs simply feel like they ought to enjoy all the classics and so spend time trying very hard to find something entertaining about Proust, Milton and Dante. We snobs need to liberate ourselves, which involves not only admitting to some low-brow tastes, but admitting when we don’t enjoy the high-brow stuff. So here’s my confession: I’ve yet to read Proust, but I don’t like Shakespeare’s history plays, I didn’t enjoy Milton’s Paradise Lost, and I totally missed the point of Dante’s Inferno... maybe the video game would be better. I’m told that if I read the rest of The Divine Comedy, it would make all the difference – but honestly, I just don’t care. Although Inferno may appeal to fans of horror literature, investigating the different levels of hell just didn’t do it for me. But just so that I can still feel like an elitist, let me remind everyone that I love love LOVE Virginia Woolf, in all her lyrical obscurity.

Since this has already become quite a long post, I’m going to save my last Opinion Statement about Literary Snobbery for another day – so stay tuned for my thoughts on literary snobs and the film versions of novels.

Some Thoughts on Literary Snobbery, Part One

Literary Snobbery is defined as having very particular, selective tastes in reading materials, favoring the classics. Literature snobs prefer books that they believe are either old enough to be respectable or inventive/challenging enough to be fairly obscure. They define these types of novels “high quality,” while turning up their noses at other books that they do not deem to be worthy of the title “literature.” Most literary snobs place genre authors and novels in particular at the very bottom of the culture junk heap.

I myself was a literary snob to a certain extent long before I entered the somewhat stuck-up world of academia to earn my Master’s in Literature. I believe that I even broadened my tastes and horizons because of the courses that I took during the course of my program, despite the general snobbery of academia and certain people in my department. I’m trying to over-come my snobbery to a certain extent: I want to learn more about genre fiction, including the roots of Science Fiction and Horror Literature. (Note: Dracula is an awesome novel.) But I have to admit that I’m content to remain a snob when it comes to Romance novels, especially the kind that you find in the grocery check-out aisle.

Opinion #1: Every literary snob has his or her own definition of “high quality literature,” thank you very much, and it can actually be quite interesting to learn about their criteria. Certain snobby academics will only read Aristotle, Plato and Homer, while others are more broad-minded – they only turn up their noses at anything published after the Romantic Period. Most literary snobs tend to disdain contemporary authors, although some snobs make exceptions for modern authors who write intellectually challenging and/or depressing books. Snobs definitely reject authors like Steven King and Stephanie Meyer, though – and notice that both King and Meyer are largely genre authors. My own brand of snobbery involves all forms of media – I’m a huge proponent of labeling Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dollhouse and other series created by Joss Whedon “Quality Television” and I’m a fan of the very witty Douglas Adams, both of which would make many academics roll their eyes. Yet I have plenty of books, movies and television shows that I look down upon myself, if I’m honest.

Opinion #2: You can genuinely enjoy a classic novel, and many people do. But it’s also perfectly acceptable to simply appreciate a classic, without enjoying it as much as your favorite Harry Potter novel. Sometimes appreciation for a novel comes from an understanding of how a work was influential and contributed to the evolution of a particular genre, philosophy or movement. Sometimes you can even find something fascinating in the same way that a train wreck or a natural disaster can be fascinating to watch. Humans have a morbid sense of curiosity and an appetite for dramatic catastrophe – that was what kept me reading Wuthering Heights, for example. I really didn’t understand how/why so many readers have loved Cathy and Heathcliff throughout the ages, declaring them to be one of the most romantic couples of all time, but once I started reading, I was interested to see what happened. I think Bronte’s novel is more fascinating as a depiction of cruelty and mental illness (as opposed to a romance) and I’m glad that I read it – but I can’t exactly say I enjoyed it.

Opinion #3: “Bad” (i.e. badly written) literature isn’t bad for you. Plenty of kids, myself included, have grown up reading a steady diet of Sweet Valley Twins novels, Seventeen Magazine, and other such junk. I still became a Virginia Woolf-loving literature snob when I grew up, so clearly a person's reading habits will evolve. That’s the genius of the Captain Underpants novels by Dav Pilkey, in fact. I really believe that if you get little boys excited about reading by giving them books about wedgies, boogers and alien spaceships, they are still much more likely to love James Joyce when they get older than if they never learn to enjoy reading at all. As adults, we may or may not choose to leave the "junk" reading behind, but we'll probably expand our tastes past novels about boyfriends and boogers.

Opinion #4: Even though it’s perfectly fine to enjoy “bad” literature, there is a difference between loving a book because it’s well-written, loving a book because it’s entertaining, and loving a book for nostalgic reasons – and we ought to be able to tell the difference. Academia sings the praises of wordsmiths such as Jane Austen and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I must admit that I sometimes enjoy my Nancy Drews just as much as my Austen novels. Both have female characters that are strong and empowered in terms of their contexts, and there is something that makes me a little bit giddy when I read about these feisty women. But I know the difference between Austen’s prose – full of intelligent comments and witty repartee – and the text churned out by the anonymous authors employed by the Stratemyer Syndicate. I love the latter because Nancy was such an awesome role model when I was younger, but I'm not sure if I would love her quite as much if I was reading her for the first time as an adult (even an adult who admittedly loves Children's and YA Literature).

Opinion #5: Literary snobs may prefer the beautiful, weighty feel of an actual book in their hands, but that doesn’t mean that we should look down on the Kindle, the Nook and other e-book readers. These devices encourage a lot of people to read who wouldn’t be reading otherwise, so we should appreciate e-books for the same reasons that we should appreciate Captain Underpants. Anything that ignites and fosters a love of the written word is a good thing! Let’s cheer on the inventions that make reading more comfortable for others – as long as we can still get beautiful tomes for ourselves!

And for those of us who don’t think that we’d ever like to use an e-book reader, consider what at least one of my fellow book bloggers has pointed out: e-book readers make it a lot easier to read while eating, since you don’t have to try and hold open the book. It’s admittedly quite difficult to juggle a novel and a spoon or a sandwich, so this alone might be enough to convince me to buy a Kindle some day. For now though, I just surf the web while I’m eating – I usually find a solitary meal time to be ideal for catching up on other book blogs or surfing Amazon for something new to read.

This post attempts to answer the question and participate in the Weekly Geeks Challenge for the week of March 20, 2011 – although it evolved into a bit of a different monster. Stay tuned for Part Two, where I list my other five declarations on literary snobbery.

Some Thoughts on Short Stories and Novellas

I’m the kind of girl who likes to get involved in a story. I mean really involved. I like to delve into a book and develop a relationship with at least one of the characters, otherwise the reading experience isn’t as meaningful for me. Likewise, once I find a TV show that I like, I really become attached to the characters and loyally follow them to the end of the series – even if the writing goes downhill in the later years of the show, I stick with it because I have to know what happens to those characters once I’ve bonded with them. And that’s a major part of what I enjoy about stories – building “relationships” with the characters.

You can’t build the same kind of relationship with the characters of a stand-alone movie or a short story as you can with a TV show or a long novel/series of novels, which is why I’m not as much of a fan of the short story format. Don’t get me wrong – there are many movies that I enjoy (even love) and many short stories that I consider to be quite good. But when I’m going to sit down to read something on my own, I have to admit that I’m quite biased against the short story format because even if a story is well-written, creative and thirty pages long, I still can’t bond with the characters the way that I can in a novel that’s a couple hundred pages long. Twenty or thirty pages in to a story, I feel as though I’m just starting to get to know a character – and I want to know much, much more about them. A short story basically feels like a tease to me. The author is taunting me with the tip of the iceberg.

I feel a bit guilty that I'm not really that fond of short stories – I’m a “literary” person with a Master’s Degree in Literature, so I’m supposed to like a lot of things that other “Literature people” consider to be good. But since I’ve graduated (and even more since I’ve moved in to a new career field), I’ve learned to be honest about my preferences. I don’t have anything against short stories – I just don’t personally enjoy them as much as novels. You don’t get the experience of immersion.

I don’t have a particular stance on novellas because I’ve realized that a truly engaging reading experience isn’t only dependent on the form and length. Since novellas are defined as being shorter than a novel, they don’t tend to offer the same kind of total/long-term immersion in another world as a longer novel. But if I can become engrossed in the story of a novella – even if it is just for a few hours – and bond with at least one of the characters, then I’m happy. There are several short novels/novellas that I have found very interesting and absorbing. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold is probably my favorite of these because once you unwind its twisty, circular narrative, the characters are interesting, mysterious and compelling. (I will be posting a review of Chronicle before the end of the week.) In other words, I’ve realized that the writer’s ability to absorb a reader like me has less to do with the number of pages, and much more to do with how deeply they develop their characters.

I realize that not everyone reads and/or watches TV to develop deeply engaging “relationships” with the characters, which is why the short story, the short film, poetry, comedic sketches and more avant-garde novels all have enthusiastic (if some times small audiences). And I can enjoy some of these other story forms to a certain extent. But while I might be glad that I’ve read T.S. Eliot’s poetry, I have to admit that in my spare time after work, I’m far less likely to pick up Eliot than I am to grab one of my tattered copies of Harry Potter and loose myself in that complex world of plot twists and richly developed characters. If something is truly well-written, then I say the longer, the better.

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I want to take a moment to promote the Weekly Geeks Blog/Reading Challenge for this week, which is centered around the theme of “short and sweet” books. This challenge inspired me to share my thoughts on short stories and novellas, and it has also motivated me to try to review several shorter novels and novellas from my TBR pile this week. If you have a book blog, check out this Weekly Geeks Challenge and consider posting on one or more of the questions. Then come back and leave a link to your post here in the comments section. I’m interested to hear everyone's thoughts on short stories, literary preferences, etc.