Generalizing About Specialist Readers

What’s with people that only read one kind of thing? Ever roll your eyes when you get to talking about reading with one of them and they tell you how many times they’ve reread Harry Potter or Jane Austen, but they’ve never tried a mystery, or a historical adventure, or something by a non-English-speaking writer? They’ll rave about Stephen King, but they’ve never read Poe. Or maybe they are experts on Napoleonic history with a non-fiction bias that prevents them even considering a novel by Cornwell or O’Brian. They are the specialists, and I don’t understand them — I’m not even sure, really, if they are ‘readers’ by my definition:

To me, a real reader is a voracious omnivore; metaphorically a gaunt, hollow-eyed ghoul with ink-stained fingers and sharpened teeth who knows an insatiable hunger so keenly painful it has in fact become a pleasure of sublime proportions. Our ghoul/reader will eat and eat and eat to the point of dieing, and ask for more with his last breath. Real readers are all a little bit insane — and they hope that no one ever finds the cure for their condition.

But, lest you think mine is an argument founded on some sort of smug exclusivity, mosey over to Black Gate to read my full article on Specialist and Generalist Readers and notice that I’m legitimately perplexed. Are the two broad camps of reading styles the result of childhood experiences, or marketing? Are some people wired to be generalists or specialists? Are there even really two primary categories of reading types, or more of a continuous scale? You’ll find more questions than answers in my essay — but, generally speaking, that is what we generalists are generally known for.