Not intending for this to go in any direction in particular, just sharing an experience and wondered how many others have had similar experiences with the ‘youngen’s’.
So, in the office one day we somehow got onto the topic of books and what our favorite category was… dah, dah, dah, Blah, blah, blah and I eventually got to saying that my favorite category would be “non fiction”.
This 25 year old kid looks at me flabbergasted like I was on crack or something and he’s like “non fiction, what the fuck kind of category is that” like as if he had never been to a library in his life… Actually I could almost believe that as he was still playing video games at his parents house until a couple of years after this came up.
What are y’all’s experiences with this type of thing?
I’ve been extremely self-absorbed my entire life. “What clothes am I going to wear?” “What am I going to eat?” “Where am I going to go for a walk?” “When will I die?” “Will anyone ever laugh at my lame-ass bullshit I have the temerity to label (to myself, of course) as ‘jokes’?” “Will it ever matter in the slightest fucking way that I ever existed?”
I’ve been wrong my entire life. I am still self-absorbed and still wrong.
I hope this was helpful.
(Look at that pathetic crap! I, I, I. Loathsome, innit?)
That’s not an example of being self-absorbed. Ignorant or disparaging perhaps, depending on how he said it, but not self-absorption. Self-absorbed would be if he didn’t bother listening to your opinion and just went on about his favourite category.
Hell yes, people are self absorbed, though I don’t think the OP or jimbuff314’s
thoughtful post are examples. An excellent illustration of it would be most forms of social media;a platform that exists for the very purpose of sharing every bit of minutiae about one’s life.
Any time a thread comes up around here where someone is looking for encouragement to join a gym or otherwise get out of their comfort zone, my first response (at least in my head) is “honey, don’t worry; everyones’ head is stuck so far up their own arse, no one will even be looking at you.”
Yeah, exactly what I might have said, What the fuck kind of category is non-fiction? A category that encompasses The Autobiography of Mark Twain, The Egg Cookbook and The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics is meaningless. You’re right though, there was someone excessively self absorbed in that conversation.
Not to send this thread even further off track, but are some of you saying you wouldn’t get it if someone told you they prefer nonfiction? Really? I mean, yes, that encompasses a lot of sub categories, and if the young man in this situation wasn’t such a self absorbed twat and / or was actually interested, he might have asked about specific subjects, but I’m really surprised anyone can relate to his train of thought (not that I’m calling anyone here a self absorbed twat )
I wouldn’t call them self absorbed. I consider them to be ignorant (and I mean that in the nicest possible way). Narcissiopath also applies. If they don’t know it, if they’ve never heard of it, then it can not possibly be important, or actually exist.
IMHO, I hold the “everyone gets a trophy” child-rearing responsible for this socially awkward public behavior. Little Johnny’s team won a championship. Little Johnny spent the season sitting on the bench wondering why he can’t play his video games. Little Johnny doesn’t want to learn the skills, or the rules, because he’s going to get a trophy, regardless. Yawn. Later in life, Little Johnny gets a job, and annoys the more knowledgeable folks with his outspoken ignorance.
Well, I’d be incredulous in the sense that I think it’s ridiculous you (general you) don’t like stories (this wouild be an assumption on my part but so far has proven to be true; the person who says “I like documentaries best” doesn’t watch any normal movies, etc). The essence of it is, I suppose, that human civilization is built upon fiction. Mythology, religion, legends, folklore. Oral lore have been around since the beginning. It’s what has given birth to our modern entertainment. We’ve been repackaging the same stories for ages, and understanding that is just as culturally important as knowing who won WWII and how. So someone saying they prefer nonfiction to me would be like rejecting part of human culture.
That and the whole, “so uh what, robotics, civil war history, cooking, politics, biographies…uh, what? That’s a lot.” thing. Yeah, I’d be flabbergasted too. I might not spurt it out the way they did though. That and the whole video game jab by OP - hell, video games are just as culturally impacted by the stories we’ve always been telling. Some of them have scripts as long as multiple books. You can’t be mad a guy for pooh-poohing your entertainment choices and then turn around and do the same pooh-poohing yourself without being a hypocrite.
Human civilization was built on facts at least as much as made up stories, and documentaries ARE “normal movies.”
While I do like fiction, over time I have tired of the same repackaged stories. What’s ridiculous about preferring to learn about something that actually happened or how to do something instead of simply being “entertained”?
Not to say you cannot learn anything from fiction, but it’s less direct and more subjective.
Meh, I have found that people who say things like “I only read nonfiction” are the same sort of people as the people who say things like “I don’t own a television” and “I’m an introvert so just let me boss you around”. One doesn’t have to be a self-absorbed twat to decide “I only read nonfiction” is as far as they’re interested in pursuing that conversation.
The self absorbed twat comment was just me trying to be funny- he really just sounds garden variety rude.
In any event, by “get” in my first post I meant that the young dude sounded like he didn’t grasp the concept of what nonfiction is and when people sort of defended him I was confused. The OP didn’t say to him “I only read nonfiction”, he said it was his favorite genre. I’ve certainly heard people say the same thing and I either formulated an idea of what that might entail or they expounded or we all just moved on and lived our lives. But it definitely wasn’t unfamiliar, a la “what the fuck kind of category is that?”. To me it sounds like he indeed may have not been do a library any time in recent memory.
I go to a library everyday (I work in one) and I can tell you that there is a huge contingent of librarians who hate the term “non-fiction” It is such a generic descriptor that it’s basically useless. The only reason it hasn’t been retired is that nothing better has come along yet.
Also, I know you know this, but books about video games are stored in… wait for it… the non-fiction section.
The “Participation Trophy” was first popularized in the late 70s/early 80s. That first batch of “kids” are nearing their 50s now.
I read it differently. Much differently. "What the fuck kind of category is that? " doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what non-fiction is. It means he considers it to be a bad way to categorize books, as if we were talking about our favorite type of movie and I said “Color”.
But there is better. You mostly file by Dewey? So hang signs on the end of every shelf listing the Dewey divisions within (or just the class, depending what makes sense for the relative quantities of each). No need to just call it all “nonfiction.” There is no need for “nonfiction” to appear anywhere in library signage, really.
Or break out of Dewey! Keep the spine numbers for sorting and indexing, but arrange the stacks by whatever recognizable categories make sense for your library and community.
Indeed, separating out fiction, in the first place, means labeling and shelving outside Dewey. Almost everybody does so, because fiction is popular and filing by author is easy–but strict Dewey puts fiction within the 800s. Same principle for biography (920s), in many cases.
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