genre bending

There's something that's been bothering me for a while, and I think it's probably time to give it an airing here. There's no point tiptoeing round the subject, so I'm just going to come straight out and make a statement here: I identify as transgenre.

Well, that's fine, you'll be saying, and we're obviously all keen to be as supportive as we can to you on your life journey, but can you be clear what you mean? Well, OK. I read quite a lot of fiction, as documented on this blog, and I like to think my novel-reading habits span quite a bit of a range in terms of subject matter, from Proper Literary Classics to science fiction, fantasy, utter filth both ancient and modern, historical fiction, murder mysteries both home-grown and foreign, big books, small books and all points in between. But all fiction, right? Now I'm not (clearly) one of those people who will feign some sort of incomprehension at wanting to read something someone just made up, nor do I make the claim that you can't learn useful things about the real world from reading fiction, as that would be nonsense - and I mean actual concrete stuff like history, not the more nebulous stuff like insight into the human condition and interpersonal relationships, which I take as read, if you'll pardon the pun. 

But nonetheless it is all squarely within the fiction genre, although occasionally straining against the fuzzy boundaries, and I wouldn't want you to think that that's all I read, nor that I am closeted in my little novel-reading garret oblivious to the goings-on out in the real world. My concern - and a bit of self-knowledge is key here, as it is in all parts of life - is that my slightly nerdish interest in the statistical minutiae of my reading habits might induce me to reduce the frequency of reading stuff that I don't document here, out of a (perhaps subconscious) desire not to skew the stats.

So I have come to the momentous decision to live as my true self in all its glorious messy rainbow diversity and include some non-fiction books in the list of stuff that gets documented here. I am absolutely not going to make any sort of commitment to quantity or frequency, and it will very likely be a lowish percentage of the overall numbers, but what I want is the freedom to widen the list of available choices for my next book and basically just do what the hell I want when I want; again, a reasonable aspiration for life as long as what you want isn't hollowing out people's heads and putting them in your fridge. 

Just for the record, this absolutely isn't a choice I've made because I'm running out of fiction choices in my unread pile; that remains, and always will given my book-acquisition habits, a healthy size giving me more than enough choice. I am very uncomfortable with the fashionable concept of tsundoku, because as used by a lot of people the term seems to imply the practice of buying lots of books and never reading them, rather than having a healthy and varied to-be-read collection that you haven't read yet offering a mouth-watering diversity of choice. Personally I find the selection of the next book to read from the available list to be one of the most delicious aspects of the whole process, something I might not find if I instituted a strict regime of only having, say, a maximum of five unread books on the shelves at any time. It's highly variable, but my current practice of having somewhere between 50 and 70 unread books at any one time means I never feel restricted or constrained by the range of choice on offer. 

Aaaaaanyhoo, there it is; my current book is still a regular old novel but once that's finished (and documented here, obvs) the one single commitment I will make is that the book after that will be a work of non-fiction. This is just to test-drive the process, and if I find the whole experience brings me out in hives or is otherwise unsatisfactory in some way then I'll knock it on the head.