pedanther

there may be whole unexplored areas of fiction that have drifted by me because they seemed on the surface to be not my kind of thing. If so, I'm not sure I want to know; it's not as if I don't have a large enough pile of things to read and watch as it is.

This is how I feel about Japanese cinema - cinephiles keep on raving about it, but I really don't want to find myself with another large chunk of screen materail to learn about/catch up on... (On the other hand, I have seen a couple of Japanese silent films and haven't thought much of them, so possibly I'm safe!)

I learned about some new varieties of fiction as a result of attempting to read my way through a "Hundred Best Books" list published by the Times almost twenty years ago: I'd already read about half the works on the list and managed to get hold of about twenty of the remainder from the local libraries, as a result of which I read some fiction that I would never normally have looked at. "A Clockwork Orange" and "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", for example.
(The former I would recommend, the latter not!)

The memorable discovery that I did make as a result of this project was that I like Stephen King (and, to a degree, horror novels generally). I wouldn't even have considered picking up one of King's airport-sized tomes otherwise, with their lurid pictures and glossy embossed titles: but the List included "Carrie", "The Stand" and "It", and by the time I'd read through those I was a convert.