I rarely read or never read romance and its related genres of erotica. I can’t explain exactly why. My religion discourages consumption of books that contain topics with the seven sins like lust, pride, greed, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. I don’t believe in fairy tale romance and experience difficulty focusing on fancy, far-fetched plots which I don’t believe in.
Instead of talking about the negative, I’ll discuss about the positive aspect of your question, which is, what genre of books I always consume.
This year, 2026, is a different type of reading year for me. I started this year by reading many new books named on popular award lists. I discovered that the authors wrote on controversial issues, content and language, in order to get nominated on literary award lists. I didn’t like the content. I couldn’t complete reading the books. Then I made my personal resolution to never read those kind of books.
I changed my reading genres to non-fiction, specifically personal essays, autobiography, and memoir. I’ve read Joan Didion, Helen Garner, Margaret Atwood, and some writing instructors.
I practiced creative journaling by writing to prompts. This is why I have been writing to Helen’s prompts.
After a few months, I became literary inventive enough to write some stories, which I classify as my Scary Story Collection , There is a wide selection of topics for this whole series of stories. When you visit that webpage, you’ll see the list of story titles in the links. You can choose which web link to visit.
Why did I choose to write horror? I think this genre is interesting and intriguing as I can’t predict what is going to happen next, unless I have cheated and read reviews or summaries of the plot.
Furthermore, I have seen many phenomena which could not be explained by science or logical reasoning. This is one of the reasons why I’m attracted to the non-fiction and horror genres. This basically sums up my response to Helen’s question of what genre of books I rarely read, what genre of books I read, and how my reading choices have developed my writing.
Related:
Helen’s writing prompt for Sep 29 2024 is “What genre of books/movies do you rarely consume?” As Helen has stopped writing new prompts after 2025, she has asked her fans to re-use her prompts from 2024 to 2025.
