Tellers and tales
Am currently reading a book by somebody, and I like their fiction, but they have shown themself to be a bit of a prat on Teh Intawebz - I don't know whether it's vanity googling or what, but people will be discussing their works and possibly making some minor criticisms and cavils about certain inaccuracies (as it might be: no, archives just do not work like that) and they will turn up and barrel into the conversation in an aggressively defensive way.
Nonetheless, this has not been enough to discourage me from purchasing their latest oeuvre.
There is another writer, whose work I like (though feel it has possibly gone slightly downhill of late), who at one point, back in the day when LJ was more happening, set up their journal there and a) it was massively irritating anyway (even without their commitment to one of the woowooier forms of complementary medicine) and b) they so did not get what LJ was about and how it functioned to a positively embarrassing extent. I therefore removed them from my default reading list but continued to buy the books.
On the other hand, there are people out there who blog or whom I know in various contexts and who appear to be entirely Good Eggs and yet somehow either I am just not tempted to read their actual books or if I do I find what they write is Not Quite My Sort Dearie.
There was that whole hoohah a few months ago relating to the dreadful revelations about a (now deceased) but previously much beloved, even adulated, writer, and people making a thing about never going to read the books again, getting them out of the house, etc etc. I don't know - maybe one couldn't read them again without this shadow, or maybe it would be too awful to find oneself still moved and identifying with the characters - I'm just not sure on this one. (It wasn't an issue of not buying them anymore, it was the existing copies that people owned that were tainted by association.)
There are quite a few of the writers I like who would have been a bit problematic to encounter in real life - Simon Raven is an obvious example but it's very clear that my darling Dame Rebecca could be a pretty difficult woman.
So I'm wondering, when and where does one draw the line and say that for reasons extraneous to the actual works*, one is not going to read a certain writer? I can see not buying their books, but there are libraries, there are secondhand bookshops, etc etc, that mean that they will not see any profit from the reading.
*For the purposes of argument, I'm assuming having actually read at least some of the works, and thus not making the sort of vulgar and inaccurate generalisation of what those are like and about that one encounters so often with e.g. journalistic references to Kipling. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2185033.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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