When I was young, the only cheese (or rather, cheeselike substances) I would eat was Velveeta and American cheese. Now I never touch those, but love most kinds of real cheese, including the moldy ones and the ones with unusual herbs in them.
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| what I would have liked 30 years ago |
When my husband and I visited garage sales and junk shops years ago to furnish our first house, we were attracted to simple dark-stained, coarse-grained American oak furniture. When we later moved to New Orleans, our tastes shifted. The more French furniture made of finely grained fruitwood we saw, the more we loved it. We still have a few oak pieces, but they now look clunky and awkward to me. They sit in rooms out of view of guests.
Knowing how my tastes have changed so dramatically in some ways, I wonder why my reading tastes have barely changed since childhood. Then my preference was for fairy tales, fantasy, history, and biography. As I grew older I continued reading in those genres and added science fiction, mystery, and romance. My tastes broadened to include occasional dips into almost every genre of fiction and nonfiction, but even today a good fairy tale or fantasy is what I pull off the shelf first.
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| what I like now |
The more I ponder this discrepancy, the more surprising it seems. Shouldn't reading preferences reflect one's stage of life? One's growing body of experiences? One's ambitions? One's emotional and spiritual wounds? Sure, I read books about writing, and after my mother died I read about grieving, and because I'm the cook at my house, I've amassed a huge collection of cookbooks. But my first preferences are little changed from when my father first started taking me to the library every week to pick out books.
I'm curious about your experiences. How have your reading tastes changed since childhood? Or have they not changed? What factors do you think influence reading preferences?
I'll be blogging again at Novel Spaces on Saturday, March 5, when I hope we'll all be having much nicer weather.
—Shauna Roberts
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