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art culture

I don’t read fiction… um… well…

For the longest time, I’ve been telling people that I’ve essentially given up on fiction. And it’s mostly true, the vast majority of movies do not interest me in the slightest, and the idea of picking up a novel rarely seems like a worthwhile thing. It has been nonfiction for me for quite a while. Econ, language, audio, computers, photography, optics, etc. have captured my attention for quite a while.

I do have favorite novels, and they are all of the highest pedigree of course. Orwell, Borges, Heller, Vonnegut, Dickens, Rand, Nabakov, Salanger, etc. all line my shelves. So why is it that my one weakness for fiction involves Dr. Who?

It’s true, I continue to devour all things in the Who universe. I’ve seen all of the TV shows save the second doctor. That spans from about 1965 (I think) to this past summer. That’s a lot of shows. A lot of them are pretty bad too, but I watched them. I have found the audio plays from Big Finish to actually be of a more consistent quality. There are a ton of those too. I have listened to 107 of those now.

Today, I learned that the BBC has some ebook versions of some Doctor Who novels on it’s site. I read one tonight. Sigh, it looks like I’ll be reading more of them in the future…

I plan on continuing to acquire more Big Finish Doctor Who plays (and related audio plays like the Bernice Summerfield stories, the companion Chronicles, and the Galifrey stories) and now it looks like I’ll be adding various books to the collection too. God help me.

So what is it that appeals to me so much? I wish I knew. It is fun, but I don’t know why I am able to throw myself into these and not be able to tolerate most other fiction. This is hardly great literature, but I can’t get enough. Luckily for me, the is a vast quantity of stuff out there, I’ll never run out.

I noticed how incongruous this is for me just tonight. I’ll be puzzling over this for a little while, probably while listening to “Assassin in the Limelight,” my newest audio drama….

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