When literary blogger Maud Newton wrote last Friday about being disabused of a literary prejudice by reading Keith Lee Morris‘s latest, The Dart League King, which proved to her that novels written in a close-third person voice with multiple, alternating perspectives don’t have to be “emotionally empty, utterly plotless stories that drift from one unsympathetic character to another and culminate in wishy-washy epiphanies,” it reminded us that we’d gotten a copy of that novel ourselves recently, which was sitting near the top of one of our own to-read stacks. So we had a look at the opening chapters over the weekend, and, doggone it, she was right: It is awfully engrossing. (Read an excerpt for yourself, and see if you agree.)
And that, coupled with another conversation about Maud’s post, got us to thinking: What “least rational contemporary fiction prejudices” were we still holding in our hearts? This proved more difficult a question that we’d anticipated at first—particularly since we were in a hurry, which rather hampered our ability to fully interrogate our assumptions—but we did finally allow as how we generally have to be dragged kicking and screaming into reading any epic fantasy that isn’t written by George R.R. Martin, and that we should stop acting “pleasantly surprised” when anybody else’s work in the genre turns out to be good.
How about you? What biases in your reading habits could use a good challenge this week? Email us or share your thoughts in the comments section.