The past couple of weeks have been strange as far as reading goes. If you've followed me over here from TikTok, you may have seen last week's Weekly Reading Update, in which I talk about finishing a single book--Mosters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer--but also about the fact that I started Sixteen other books!

Even though I was reading a lot, I called it a reading slump in that video, because it seemed no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't settle into any given book.

This past week has been much the same, though I did finish 4 books. Let's talk about em:

I finished Reality Hunger by David Shields, finally. I have been working on this book for about three weeks, reading a few pages at the very end of my night before falling asleep. If I'm honest, I think this is the book that's put me in the slump.

I've read it 4 times, now, maybe 5. And every single time it sparks something in my mind that will not slow down. The book is hard to explain. It's about so many different things: What is art? Who can create art? Is art worth creating? What is good art? Can we actually, factually say what is good or what isnt? Is good art different than good literature? What is good literature? It's just thinking about so many different things.

This last question, though--What is good literature?--seems to be it's guiding question. Shields seems to have grown weary of what he calls "the great American novel." Of course, this isn't his term, but he uses is to gather all of the 'typical' novels published in the west into one term, as if it's all a monolith.

He then dives into that monolith to mine for what he believes are novels that are actually interesting. To him, interesting means some kind of blurring between fiction and non-fiction. Some passages claim the personal or lyric essay to be the 21st century's most important, most real, form of literature one can work in. Sitting in one's room, "inventing stories" and writing down a wholly imagined world (even a wholly realistic one) is not able to speak to our lived experience today, according to Shields. Essays (or poems, or self-aware memoirs, or non-fiction disguised as fiction), though, with their seemingly endless questions that most often go unanswered, are able to speak to our lives today, in which most of us are heavily curating our "selves" for others to see on social media and elsewhere.

I hated the book the first time I read it. I was forced to read it for a lit class in uni, and I chose the book to write my main term-paper for, because I wanted to rip it part. I believed--and still believe--that a great novel, great stories, can shape the world in profound and meaningful ways, that a world without fiction would be a sad world, indeed. I wanted to shout that from the looseleaf.

Thing is: the more I dug into it, the more I read from the suggested reading list--which isn't a list at all, but a compilation of the titles mentioned throughout the book--the more I found titles that seemed to be doing what Shields is talking about--dancing around the edges of fiction and non--the more I found that I seemed to agree with him. I have easily read a dozen or more of the titles he mentions in the book, and many of them have become some of my favourite reads ever.

It's to the point where I'm reminded of these books every time I read _Reality Hunger. _I'm just walking through the world talking about _The Blazing World _being a fave, or Human Smoke, or Jesus's Son, Lydia Davis's work, and then I'll read Reality Hunger again, and I'll remember: Oh yeah, I found these books in here. In a very real way, the book has changed my life.

At the very least, it has shaped my reading life since I read it in 2014.

It's also shaped my writing. In the book, he tells a story about reading his girlfriend's diary when he was young. He said her version of events felt much more real, more fulfilling, more truthful, than he felt when he was actually living through it. He felt more alive in the diary than he did in real life.

I stole this story and made it my own. In Grandview Drive, my own book, one of the stories has this same premise. A man begins to see the world with new vigour after he accidently sees his own name in his girlfriend's diary, and then he keeps reading it, to the point he feels reliant upon the text to tell him how he should act in real life, how he should be.

But besides stealing his story, I've also learned that the kind of books I like to read, and the kinds of stories that I like to write are indeed those stories that ride so close to the boundary between fiction and non that you eventually can't decide if it's real or not.

The joke (or maybe the point) for Sheilds being that there is no such thing as non-fiction. One of the central tenets of his "Manifesto" (as the subtitle calls it) is that even the most diligent memoirist, the most fact-checky journalist, the rigid biogropher, the zealous documentarian, they all must create some sort of artiface, some kind of fiction to offer any sort of narrative humans are willing to read/watch/listen to.

Which is to say: as a writer, it's been very freeing for me to realize: 1) Every story we write is fiction, but 2) Anything meaningful is found in the Truth of the stories, rather than the facts. I can tell stories about my self that are not 'factual,' as much as they're telling a truth. I've been giving myself permission to write stories that skew more closely to the hew of my own life.

And I feel proud of the work I'm doing now in a way I haven't been proud of other work, even if I am extremely proud of much of it.

Anyway, reading Reality Hunger again has made me--as it usually does--unsatisfied with the novels I've been reading, or the memoirs that try to tell me they are 100% true. So I'm on the prowl for more of the same: books that blur the line so badly that it makes me feel alive.

Which means it's harder for me to settle into books. Thus: the dreaded slump.

5 stars for Reality Hunger.

* * *

I also finished:

We Are too Many by Hanna Pittard, which so perfectly fit this mold I've been blabbing about that it felt like a miracle. Non-fiction, about the author's experience of having her husband cheat on her with her best friend, told in a series of remembered (and sometimes invented!) conversations she's had over the years.

5 stars.

_Yellowface _by R.F. Kuang. I very much enjoyed this book. I doubt I can say anything new about it. If you're interested, I made a longer video on TikTok. I felt called out as a white man, as a writer, and even as a reader. I loved the book and hated the main character. It would be 5 stars, but the end fell a little flat for me.

4 Stars

_The Truth According to Ember _by Danica Nava. This is the first romance novel published by a "Big 5" publisher, by an Indigenous author. The book has two Indigenous main characters. It was beautiful. Funny in the way Emily Henry (who blurbbed the cover) is funny, but also willing to tackle some pretty big issues (eg. racist hiring practices; subtle racism in work spaces; women's treatment within the workplace; even intergenerational trauma, to an extent). I'm glad to have read it.

5 Stars