Blog Post # 7

Faryaal Zindani

Blog Post #7

May 24th

                     

How true does a book have to be in your mind to be considered non-fiction?   Why?

A non-fiction book in my mind has to be mostly true at least 90% because if the other doesn’t exaggerate a little bit on some parts then people wouldn’t want to read it as much or just loose interest. I think the author shouldn’t lie about big events that happen in their book that will affect the entire book like James Fray did in A Million Little Pieces; he took the main events in his life and made it into something that wasn’t exactly true, which impacted the book greatly. There should be a certain extent/amount of what authors can write about of their life to become a memoir.

Are half-truths okay if it’s still a good story? Does it matter if Frey or Mortenson bent the truth to tell their stories?

I don’t think half-truths are okay even if it’s still a great story because those types of authors like Frey or Mortenson make the readers believe that their whole book is true until people actually go and research and see that it’s not which becomes disappointing to some of the readers. Frey and Mortenson had great books until we found some of it wasn’t true. If authors write books that are overly exaggerated from the truth like in Frey’s book, then they should write on the book that it was based off a true story. That way Frey wouldn’t get blamed about not having the book entirely non-fiction.

Is David Shields right?  Do we need lines between genres—do we need to label something fiction or non-fiction?  Why does it matter?

 I think David Shields is wrong. It’s important to have lines between genres because people should know when a book is true and when it is not. Lines between genres is important because some people just want to read non-fiction because they might think that it is more interesting and some people just enjoy fiction. If there was no way to tell whether a book was true in the past about let’s say the holocaust, then how would the people of today know what it was like?

Blog Post # 6

Faryaal Zindani

Is there a difference between literary and popular commercial/genre fiction in your mind?

In my mind when I think of a literary book I end up thinking about something boring or uninteresting. When I think about popular genre fiction books then the books like Twilight or Harry Potter, basically any popular trending book comes up in my mind. The teachers/schools put a negative image in our mind about what literary books really are, by making us annotate every page and read a certain amount of pages by a certain time period makes us not wanting to enjoy the book and makes us more uninterested.  When I read a popular genre book outside of school I don’t have to keep stopping to write things down which makes me go more into the book. Jodi Picoult, states how she doesn’t think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction, I would agree with that statement because if a person likes to read literary fiction more than they should be able to, same goes with people who like popular genre fictions.

If Gallagher’s argument is true in Readicide, should we continue to teach literary fiction so exclusively?

We should not teach literary fiction so exclusively because that’s going to make the future generations not want to read much, or for those matters just stop reading. People are already starting to hate reading because of the schools book choices so why keep teaching literary fiction so exclusively. I agree with Gallagher’s argument that schools should teach half literary fiction books and half popular genre books because if students start reading books they like it will keep them more enthralled in reading a book and possibly make more people want to start reading again because they forgot the feel of what books were like.