And learn from the works of other writers, famous or not…

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Can you find the words to describe what you think fiction means to you? Or even what it is for a particular novel?

One opinion, Russian, is that it’s aesthetic bliss. To me, most works by Russian writers tend to go on and on and on. Fyodor Dostoevsky is a case in point. I grant you that if you can sit through the novel, which is very good, your opinion might be a little different. Not so much Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and some of his works.

In my younger days of reading when a large book never fazed me, a thousand plus pages (And Quietly Flows The Don – War and Peace) to a few hundred (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) to mid-range five hundred pages (Doctor Zhivago) they all could tend to be tedious, though I have to say Doctor Zhivago as a book was fascinating, the film by David Lean, captivating, and the stage play, boring beyond words.

That is to say, once you get past the Russians, there were British authors like Charles Dickens who could get up to that magic number of pages, and whose works could reach that lofty thousand. They were, however, perhaps more interesting, and most having been made into mini series for television, far more interesting as a spectacle than in reading the book.

And, of course, there is Jane Austen. Need I say more?

But there are times when you pick up a book and start reading the first page, and then stop. It tells a budding author that, on the one hand, it’s not going to be your genre, and on the other, that the opinion of the book is in the eye of the beholder.