Book genres: what I love

This week’s blog hop from Crazy-for-Books asks why you read the genre that you do?  What draws you to it?  You can participate in the blog hop by clicking on the link above or the button at the top of this blog.

So, I love literary fiction and nonfiction and mysteries.  I like both literary fiction and nonfiction because I feel that these genres often provide opportunities to learn and grow and generally push your boundaries a bit.  I especially love books that open new worlds or new ways of thinking about your own world.  Reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance made me want to go to India, and gave me the curiosity to do that.  Reading We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Familes by Phillip Gurevitch made the tragic genocide in Rwanda a real, tangible event for me, when I’d known almost nothing about it before.  And then books that are much closer to home, like Gap Creek or How to Be Good make me think about what it means to be married and striving to be better and generally human.  And I guess that’s it, really.  I like literary fiction and nonfiction because they help me to see what it means to be human.  You can spend your life at that.

Mysteries I like mostly because they’re just fun.  I love the sense of place that often comes across in mysteries; no one talks much about it, but mysteries often seem to be the last stand for fiction that is firmly grounded in a place.  Try to imagine noir without L.A. as a backdrop.  Agatha Christie made me want to go to England, and really is why I fell in love with mysteries in the first place.  And I love mysteries that have great characters whom you can follow over time and books, like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and Lisbeth Salander and Inspector Rebus and Thomas and Charlotte Pitt and most recently, Amelia Peabody.

What draws you to your particular genre?