Storystorm

I've always had a sensitive stomach, one that ached after too much of anything: cookies, cake, soda, anxiety, love. Without fail I have ended up in the bathroom after most social and festive occasions where food is involved, Christmas dinner and Valentine's parties and birthdays, seeing it all for the second time.I am telling you this about myself not because it has anything to do with the story for this week, but because it led me to the story for this week.The other night, after too much of something delicious, I lay in bed sweating, curled in on myself, willing the waves of nausea to go away. That is when my boyfriend came in, yellowed paperback in hand.“Do you want me to read you a story?”It's not often that my boyfriend and I read to each other. More often than not it's me reading to him, begging him to pick up when my throat goes dry—picture books from when we were kids, or short stories that I read to him by flashlight while camping in Vermont (see my previous post on “Incoming Tide,” that one I read to him on the shore of Lake Champlain before falling asleep with the rain fly open, the moths stunning themselves against the sides of our tent). Never before had he offered to read to me without me asking him to first, so, in spite of my usual preference while infirm to exist in silence and without being touched, I said okay.That night he read a few of the shorter stories from Isaac Asimov's Nightfall, and without fail, as I clenched my teeth and tried to still my stomach, I kept getting distracted by what good stories they were.There seems to be two different camps when it comes to writing fiction: those that prioritize plot and those that prioritize language. Certainly the best fiction prioritizes both, but oftentimes we sacrifice plot for lyrical language, or we sacrifice lyricism in order to focus on narrative structure.There's no besting here. One is not necessarily better than the other. But when you are curled into a fetal position and battling your own body, chances are a good that pages of compelling plot are going to be more helpful to your plight than pages of beautiful language.So my boyfriend read to me. And his reading worked. Those stories took me out of my body and into another world. A world far from our bed and the extra helping I had for dinner. A world far away from the one in which we live, where robots exist to serve humans, where books are read on screens, and where teachers are computers.I found another collection of Asimov's stories on his shelf a few weeks later—a 1957 copy of Earth is Room Enough—and asked him which story was his favorite. “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” he said, and I read it without stopping. It is the story of a weak-willed, insecure woman who falls in love with the man sent by her husband to serve her. Sure, that man happens to be a machine, but her sensitivity and fallibility create in her a deep and empathetic humanity that writers of literary fiction are lucky to achieve in their protagonists. If this is how good science fiction could be, why had I been resisting it for so long?I don't know why we don't appreciate genre fiction as much as we do literary fiction. Is it because it's “easy” and “accessible”? If so, what is so wrong with literature being those things? Since when did reading become a masochistic endeavor? It's like how I spent my entire life rolling my eyes at Stephen King, silently judging people who named him as their favorite author, having never read a single word he had written. Then, last summer, I took a horror class and read The Shining, during which I said out loud, multiple times and to anyone who would listen, “WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME THIS GUY WAS SO GOOD?”So I encourage you to try something different. Read something that feels like fun, not something that is hard and you feel like you should.Trust me; you'll like it.