Readers say that they find my fear of fantasy genre to be curious, so I will dedicate a separate post to it with the hope of analyzing why I dread the genre so much.

There is a number of genres that I can’t stand. Harlequin romance, for example. Or sci-fi. Still, I can read them if I have to. As for the fantasy literature, however, I’d rather read a phone book than a fantasy novel.

One reason is that, in my opinion, the founder of the genre (Tolkien) already did all that could be done with it. The guy was an obvious genius, so everything coming after him is likely to be inferior.

I also don’t really see the point of fantasy. The entire genre is a huge cop-out, in my opinion. If you have no idea how to resolve a plot line or explain something that is happening, just stick some Little People (this is a reference to Murakami’s 1Q84), and there is no need to resolve and explain. It’s the Little People, you know. They are magical and can do whatever they please.

You know these mysteries by Agatha Christie where supernatural or magical things seem to be happening? The best moment in these novels is when you realize that there is a perfectly rational, real explanation to what took place. It’s one thing to figure out who the murderer is within a small group of people locked in a library. It would be a complete let-down, though, if Poirot announced at the end, “The murder was committed by magical creatures who came through the chimney!”

I understand that fantasy novels have some sort of an internal logic at least some of the time. What is the payout to figuring this logic out, though? Even if it exists, it will be completely different for other novels by other writers.

This, of course, is not meant as a criticism of people who read this kind of books and enjoy them. I’m just sharing my feelings about fantasy in hopes of starting a discussion.

As Borges said, though, nobody knows what God’s literary preferences are.

The barista who always serves me coffee at our campus coffee-shop says:

“I’ve been meaning to tell you: you are always SO pleasant. Thank you for being that way.”

You see, people? I’m only a scary ogre online. In RL I’m actually pleasant.

This, by the way, is part of Canadian identity. It’s considered a horrible faux pas to be rude to people in the service industry. In my own culture, the way to go is to be super rude to everybody. Which makes me that much eager to shed my identity in favor of the Canadian.

I’m especially appalled at the disingeniousness of people who claim that since college profs used to ridicule Bush’s way of speaking and don’t ridicule Obama’s, this must mean they aim to indoctrinate students in their Liberal ideology.

People who make this silly claim pretend to forget that the reason why the entire world laughed at Bush was that he couldn’t string two sentences along without making some egregiously funny error of grammar or vocabulary. College profs dislike it when people can’t express themselves in their only language. This has nothing to do with anybody’s political agenda. If Obama made the same kind of mistakes in his speeches, everybody would ridicule him, too. He doesn’t, though.

Those who like to find some huge Liberal conspiracy behind every corner would be better served to remember that, sometimes, the simplest explanation is the correct one. It is possible that people made fun of Bush because the way he spoke was funny.

Just think about this logically, folks. It wasn’t Bush’s appearance, family, voice, hair, clothes, etc. that were ridiculed, right? It was very specifically his endless blunders that people made fun of. So maybe if he made no blunders when he spoke, nobody would ridicule him, eh? Does that compute at all? Remember Bush, Sr.? He was also very conservative, wasn’t he? But did he make anybody laugh? Were there calendars and books of his funny verbal gaffes sold on every marketplace in the world?

Maybe people simply laugh when something is funny and not when they need to advance some non-existent Liberal conspiracy.

When I read, I always see the characters in my mind as if on a screen. They become so vivid (if the work of literature is any good, of course) that I often decide that I must have seen a film version of the novel. I then keep looking for this film version, only to realize that it doesn’t exist and that all of the images of the characters and their surroundings come from my own imagination.

This is why I don’t like movies. They strive to tell me everything: how the characters looked, what they wore, what their every facial expression was like, etc. They even choose the angle of vision for me. Not only do they render me motionless and speechless, they also rob me of the need to imagine anything. It’s all right there, all spelled out for me in painstaking detail.

Spending just two hours at the movies terrifies me. What if the lights never go on and I will be stuck there, consuming one story after another in my role of a perennially passive observer? What if the surround sound noise never allows me to formulate a single thought of my own?

Lenin really knew what he was talking about when he denounced people who read books and declared that the main form of art for his regime would be cinema. And the circus.

. . . is not writing consistently. Once you lose the habit of writing on a daily basis, it is extremely hard to get back into it. I stopped writing while I was assembling my midpoint dossier and doing research for the new article. As a result, I now have to struggle with every sentence. The good habit of writing for two hours first thing in the morning is gone. I feel like an addict who has jumped off the wagon and now doesn’t even remember what the motivation was behind doing it.

A writer who isn’t writing every day – and I mean every day – is doing herself a huge disservice.