– Walter Benjamin
This humble cul-de-sac exists to help those who want to do their own reading beyond what is provided elsewhere on the site. As implied by the title, it is something of a library or archive: essays, books, videos, images, et cetera, et cetera.
Due to the limitations of my own capacity, as well as copyright laws, I cannot ever hope to provide everything that one could conceivably want from such a service. But, I will at least provide those must-see resources that will communicate the spirit of my viewpoint better than I myself ever could.
Please use the below sections to navigate to various collections, which have each been tailored to their own concrete purposes.
This collection serves as an introduction to reading non-fiction about fiction. Video essays and streamer-critics are currently in vogue, but translating such trends into the long and exciting history of literary non-fiction has been less successful. This is a shame: it was once recognised that good writers would produce both fiction and non-fiction, and that enjoyers of the former would include some of the latter in any balanced diet.
The assumption is often that such reading is impossible in our fast-paced modern society. After all, reading non-fiction is work. Maybe some turbonerds and professors can waste their time with such luxuries, but nothing like that could belong in the world of recreational reading embraced by the contemporary market.
Not so! Back before the hellsites that we call social media, non-fiction reading was the starting point for the human needs of community and discussion around books. Many of the world's most famous culture magazines were originally focused around exactly this kind of service. Reading fiction is not just the immediate process of reading a novel: Afterwards comes the far longer process of integrating the novel into your brain more deeply. You reminisce on its content, meditate on its themes, re-live the experiences of its characters, and consider what the whole experience meant to you.
The worst way to fulfill this impulse is to shovel your raw—tender, virginal—first impressions out into the dark abyss of social media, only to receive a total feeling of emptiness in return. But non-fiction is a place where you can go through a more total version of this process and walk away satisfied. It allows you to read the detailed thoughts of other readers, consider your own experiences, and synthesise a more concrete viewpoint on the nature of literature and what it has meant to you. It also allows you to encounter ideas you have never considered before, and place your reading into interesting contexts such as politics, history, and methodologies from other artforms.
This collection will allow you to do exactly this. You will encounter various excerpts from some of the most interesting critical and analytical readers of literature. I cannot promise that every piece here will be about a story that you are already familiar with. After all, if you want such analysis of currently popular stuff such as weird Japanese pop culture, the main blog should hopefully scratch that itch. Instead, the stuff provided here will be about all sorts of stories, and will prompt you to think about your own favourite stories in a general sense, and also how the craft itself works.