[A] Short answer to the former is no, the exceptions so few and far between as to be meaningless. I've always had a strong preference for non-fiction, which may be tied to a very literal mode of thinking, and very little tolerance for allegory and symbolism. This was already evident by middle school, where English was by far my worst subject -- excepting music and athletics, subjects I wound up writing quite a lot about -- which mostly served to turn me against virtually every acclaimed writer in the language (except Shakespeare). When I did belatedly make it to college, I never took another literature or writing course, so what little I've read has been pretty haphazard.

As regards literature, I can divide my life into three periods, roughly from 15-30, 30-50, and 50+, where the first period was one of intellectual curiosity and searching, the second an approximation of normal life, and the third my attempt to focus on my big book. The first could be subdivided into 5-year chunks, where only the first one involved much literature -- mostly plays and poetry, as they were short and I was a notoriously slow reader. In the early years, I actually bought a lot of cheap paperback novels, and read sample bits but rarely finished anything. I was especially into the beats, and Evergreen Review -- Burroughs and Genet are names that come to mind, although also Vonnegut and Coover.

The second five years focused heavily on philosophy and history, especially on Marxism. The third was post-Marxist, which includes my immersion in rock criticism. Novels were infrequent diversions, but Thomas Pynchon's V. left the biggest impression -- I started, but never finished, Gravity's Rainbow. Post-college, I recall several novels from John Gardner --The Sunlight Dialogues was the big one. But by 1980 I was reading very little fiction.

In 1980, I got married, moved to New Jersey, started working as a software engineer, stopped writing about music. I mostly read things relevant to my career (tech, but also business management), plus a lot of popular science -- my favorite subject before a really awful 9th grade teacher turned me off, so like English another subject I completely missed in college. About the only novels I recall from that period are science fiction books my wife read and questioned me about -- I wound up reading everything by Douglas Adams and quite a bit of Robert Anton Wilson.

Since 2001, I doubt I've read five novels. The most memorable one was Tom Carson's Gilligan's Wake, which seemed like it could have been written just for me. (We probably watched the TV show at the same impressionable age, and our lives crossed in New York when we both wrote for Robert Christgau at the Village Voice. Carson ended an article on 1945 by noting that winning WWII was the worst thing that ever happened to America, which is one of the smartest things anyone has ever said.) The most recent novel I've read was Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, which could just as well have been a political tract (and might have read better at that). The best written was Annie Proulx's Close Range: Wyoming Stories, which struck me as being as informative as the best non-fiction, as well as being some of the most dazzling prose I've ever read.

Nothing else really comes to mind, although I'm peripherally aware of much more: I've seen a lot of literary works rendered on film or video, and I know people, including my second wife, who really do read a lot (5-to-10 times as many books as I manage). I have at any rate overcome my intrinsic distrust of fiction -- partly I'm just hugely impressed by the erudition that writers like Pynchon and Proulx put into their work, and perhaps even more so by their ability to turn a phrase. I've contemplated coming to a point where I decide the book project is hopeless, and give up researching it, turning instead to fiction. After the 2024 election, I did pick up Gravity's Rainbow again, but put it down again after a few pages of Slothrop foundering in the dark Baltic Sea. While my bookmark was still in place, the spine of the paperback cracked on opening it, so it wasn't very welcoming.

Perhaps when I give up, I'll have more to say.