I’m craving a particular type of reading experience right now, something that’s not really searchable in a few keywords, but I figure that the Dope’s collective wisdom and hundreds of years of fiction reading could help me out.
I have always loved the kinds of fiction that tends to make people impatient. For example, I adore Neal Stephenson’s longer works, which, according to others, should be edited down to half their size. I get a huge kick out of his digressions about Cap’n Crunch, elves and dwarves, heirloom furniture and stockings, pizza delivery, toilet paper, &c., and I almost don’t care whether the story goes anywhere, as long as the world stays fascinatingly textured and I get to read lots of interesting snippets about it.
Similarly, I love Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, not least for its hundreds of juicy footnotes, I love Vonnegut’s wanderings and rantings and commentaries, and my favorite parts of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are the silly little asides and vignettes that can’t possibly be relevant to the rest of the story–until they suddenly, bizarrely, are.
Basically, I want to read something written by an extremely interesting person who loves to expound upon anything and everything, and can barely control him- or herself. I want to be dumped into the odds-and-ends drawer of some fascinating story, world, or situation. Genre isn’t terribly important, but I tend to like (post-)cyberpunkish science fiction, magic realism, surrealism, and crazy postmodern stuff. Plot (or lack thereof) is no object. I swear. I just need something cluttered, textured, meandering, and fascinating.