Novels

18-07-23 00 / episode: 183

Script

"Novels.

Do you like to read novels when I was young? I sure liked to read novels.

Not every novel, but there was a lot that I did read and I really enjoyed them.

What is a novel? Well, I don't know.

Exactly.

And I, like, I, like, I usually say I didn't do special research here but I did check a little bit about novels and I found out that number one, they are fiction.

They can be based on fact, they can be based on a true story, but they've been fictionalized.

They're not true.

Number two, there's a certain length that they have to have.

Although I couldn't find any place that said exactly what that length is.

If they're too short, it's not a novel, it's a novella and I don't know about it being too long.

Nobody wrote one that was too long.

As far as I know the first novel that was written.

When was that? There's a number of different, um, suggestions for the first novel.

The most common suggestion that I came across was The Tales Of Genji, which was written by a Japanese woman about 1000 years ago.

There were other books written a long time ago, there was one that came from Greece almost 2000 years ago.

I forgot the name of it.

It was kind of obscure.

Some people say that was a novel but other people disagreed with that.

There's several, shall we say candidates for the first novel.

But let's just go with Tales of Gei because it really was a story and it was written down in one sort of unit and it's fiction and on top of that, it was written by a woman.

So it was definitely the very first woman written novel.

Do you like to read novels? I love reading or I used to love reading pulp fiction.

There's a story about uh Jason Bourne, the Bourne Identity was the first story.

After that, there was a whole bunch of books in the series.

When I got to about book seven, I realized they were all minor variations of the same thing.

That's what pulp fiction is.

They changed the, the small details of the plot, but the general outline or structure of the story is the same.

And I actually got tired of pulp fiction, but a lot of people still love that stuff.

There's a lot of western novels and mystery novels that are all pulp fiction and then there's the true great literary novels.

But I'll leave that for another day."