Thursday, May 28, 2009

"Why We Read Fiction" by Liza Zunshine

I've always thought people who say "I don't like to read" simply haven't found what they like to read. This book looks at several types of fiction--literary, epistolary, stories with unreliable narrators, detective--and theorizes the different types of cognitive processes that go on inside people who read and enjoy them.

Although only 150 pages, I thought that with all the term-defining and explanation, the eventual five-page payoff of why people read fiction just wasn't enough for me.

2 comments:

John said...

I'm still interested...but only because her name rang a bell. We were in the same program at UCSB. When we were there, theory (literary and otherwise) and cognitive psych were huge, so I'm not surprised that she spends a lot of time on specialized terms and jargon.

Michelle Panik said...

That's right! You did your grad work at UCSD. You should definitely check out her book. I did find some of the cognitive analysis really interesting. It just got bogged down at a few points. And six pages to solve the title's question? I was left wanting.