Which literature?

Okay. You have every right to disagree with what I'm about to write. Sorry, my blog posts don't accept comments. If you'd like to meet and discuss this, check the contact section.

Now, to the point. Which literature?

Lately I keep hearing the same thing. "Bro, I want to read literature. What are these? A waste of paper, trash! I want to read something with depth. It should make me think, it should be hard work."

Well, my dear brother, what makes the book you're talking about not literature?

Let's say we're talking about novels, to narrow it down. The genres that come to mind first: horror, gothic, crime, thriller, science fiction, fantasy, dystopia, romance, erotica, historical novels, adventure, western, war literature, humor, children's and young adult, mythology, magical realism, dark comedy, noir, cyberpunk, steampunk, post-apocalyptic...

Then, of course, maybe we should split them by approach? Classicism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, existentialist literature, absurdist literature, postmodernism, stream of consciousness, the Beat generation, underground literature (I'm somewhere around here), dirty realism, transgressive literature, punk literature (have you read AYI?), social realism, prison literature, exile literature, women's literature, LGBTQ+ literature...

Oh! Of course, sorry, some people prefer to divide it by geography. Russian literature, French, English, American, German, ... Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Arabic, Persian, Balkan, Eastern European, African, Turkish literature (Divan or Folk? Or modern Turkish literature after the Tanzimat? Which one?)

And of course, I can't leave these out. In my opinion, these are absolutely worth reading: fanzines/independent publications, fan fiction, graphic novels.

Now, of course, what does punk literature give a person, right?

In punk literature, the question asked is how the system shapes you. No one looks for a beautiful sentence, a mature character, or a satisfying ending. It's written in a raw, broken, crude language. It teaches you to doubt authority, it's authentic, and you see the people left on the margins (the poor, the misfits, the addicted, the unemployed... it doesn't lecture, you read to understand). You understand anger. You live nihilism to the very bottom, yet the word "nihilism" never appears even once.

In erotic literature, the focus is desire. The relationship between body and emotion is grasped. You question taboos. You see what society calls "shameful," why it does so, and who those shames protect. You see power dynamics, human psychology, different preferences, and what shapes those preferences. It helps you understand differences. You see that what is shameful to you may not be to someone else, and that this is completely normal. On top of that, they build wonderful atmospheres, literarily speaking, because these desires take shape in the right atmosphere. Smells, tastes, light, everything serves it.

And there's one more thing! Is depth in the length of the sentence? Okay, is what you're looking for an ornate, long-winded language? Then why? Why do you expect a writer or a book to push language to its limit? The writer has no such mission. Language evolves over time, words change, sentence structures take shape. Language is the spirit of its era. It is current. In a novel, language and the writer have only one purpose: communication. Being understood correctly. Formal experiments and poetic expression are, at times, part of that need to be understood. For some people, a short, plain sentence is the way to put order into the crowd inside their head. It beats hiding behind ornate sentences and waiting to be understood. Simplicity of language is not a crime. On the contrary, being able to tell intense feelings, thoughts, and a person's struggle plainly, and making the reader say "this guy understood what I'm going through," takes its own kind of skill.

What I'm getting at is this: if you say "I want to read literature," people will ask you, which literature? If there's only one literature for you, maybe the shallow one could be you?