The Fear Literacy Brings

The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters is this year's entry into a yet-unnamed genre of literature. Like Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrel and Evil Librarian, this book has been written by a first time author in a faux-antique style. It has enough fun ideas to lure me into reading it, but not so many that I can feel that they justified enduring the bland main plot. (For examples of a book that does, see Perdido Street Station.) There's an element of fantasy, but it's couched in ways to reassure readers that they're not really reading a real fantasy book. And of course, The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters is large enough to convince critics that a book of such size has never existed.

The first-time author part feels important to classifying this kind of book, which is a shame. Otherwise, we could include Neil Stephenson's Monsters Of Finance trilogy, and call it (blank)punk. As it is, I'm afraid if this genre gets named at all, it will get tagged with something even lamer, like "Literary Pulp." (This is assuming that my ten minutes of research is definitive proof that no one has coined a term for this yet.)

I haven't found out yet if The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters is actually written in "the Victorian style," but this seems a good bet. At one point, I thought that the return of the Victorian Style books was a great idea. This is because despite taking years of English classes that sampled every writing movement to sweep Europe, I always assumed I loved or hated books solely on the quality of the author, not the format they used. Now, I realize that the Victorian style usually just gets in my way.

Narraptor took the hit for me in reading The Historian, so I suppose it's my turn to venture forth, this time into the always disappointing world of steampunk.

On that note, I should add that steampunk is a setting, and not a genre, no matter how badly people want it to be one. This is in the same way that "fantasy" can mean a whole host of things, but only when you add a protagonist about to have their life shattered, a character with an mysterious power, and a poem of prophecy does it become "contemporary fantasy."