4 ms·

Fiction books have gotten sort of boring for me in the last few years. I used to read 20 or 30 fiction books a year, but lately, if I read 5 or 6, that's proba

Fiction books have gotten sort of boring for me in the last few years. I used to read 20 or 30 fiction books a year, but lately, if I read 5 or 6, that's probably a lot. On the other hand, I've been reading a lot more technical books. I think it's because there don't seem to be a whole lot of new ideas for me to find in fiction anymore. I suppose I could read non-fiction as well, but the Internet has made me sort of wary of any non-fiction that's not peer reviewed. With a technical manual at least, the worst that can happen is that something's out of date or poorly worded.

billswift 17y ago
That started for me about fifteen years ago; as I said at the time, "When Science Fiction starts getting boring, all that's left is the Real World." The only times now that I read more fiction than nonfiction is when I am stressed out and need to relax more than think.
jsm386 17y ago
When you say 'I think it's because there don't seem to be a whole lot of new ideas for me to find in fiction anymore' you're on to something. From http://hnlk.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/you-mean-its-all-been-written-before/ http://hnlk.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/you-mean-its-all-been-w... The last script writer/novelist on Earth committed suicide. Every conceivable plot had already been conceived, written and published. Every story remade twice over, rebooted, adapted, re-imagined, reinterpreted, stolen, sequeled or turned into trilogies, double trilogies or franchises that kept going where they had gone before. Every cartoon and comic book hero had his/her own movie trilogy. The chain of suicides, however, had not started until the advent of the Internet Plot Database. AJAX programmer and Star Trek fan Ziek Omeldoff in writing what appeared to him at the time as an innocuous little web application, did not know he was in fact heralding the end of literature, especially the genre of science fiction that he so loved. The IPDB rivaled the famed Wackypidea in its community driven model and Goggle in its search capability. Every conceivable plot was indexed, cross referenced and searchable by idea, time, setting and a myriad of other simultaneous parameters.

billswift 17y ago

That started for me about fifteen years ago; as I said at the time, "When Science Fiction starts getting boring, all that's left is the Real World." The only times now that I read more fiction than nonfiction is when I am stressed out and need to relax more than think.

jsm386 17y ago

When you say 'I think it's because there don't seem to be a whole lot of new ideas for me to find in fiction anymore' you're on to something. From http://hnlk.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/you-mean-its-all-been-written-before/ http://hnlk.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/you-mean-its-all-been-w... The last script writer/novelist on Earth committed suicide. Every conceivable plot had already been conceived, written and published. Every story remade twice over, rebooted, adapted, re-imagined, reinterpreted, stolen, sequeled or turned into trilogies, double trilogies or franchises that kept going where they had gone before. Every cartoon and comic book hero had his/her own movie trilogy. The chain of suicides, however, had not started until the advent of the Internet Plot Database. AJAX programmer and Star Trek fan Ziek Omeldoff in writing what appeared to him at the time as an innocuous little web application, did not know he was in fact heralding the end of literature, especially the genre of science fiction that he so loved. The IPDB rivaled the famed Wackypidea in its community driven model and Goggle in its search capability. Every conceivable plot was indexed, cross referenced and searchable by idea, time, setting and a myriad of other simultaneous parameters.