A while ago, I ran into a friend who told me he was on his way to have sex with a guy he'd just met. I asked him whether it was a nascent romance, or just meaningless sex. He looked at me quizzically and said, "Have you ever had meaningless sex?"

Of course I hadn't. There's no such thing, is there?

I'm tempted to respond similarly to a question regarding my most meaningful reading experience in the last ten years. Have you ever had a meaningless reading experience?

Still, it would be foolish to deny that there are various levels of intensity and resonance, in sex or in reading. One of my more meaningful recent reading experiences has arisen not out of a single book but a body of books, which had one thing in common: they were the kind of books I'd always assumed I would never read.

They were, specifically, genre books — books that were shelved in their own sections, under such headings as Mystery, Science Fiction, and Romance. I was preparing to write a novel that employed certain genre devices (I'm still working on it, and worry sometimes I'll still be working it in the year 2020). I had, until then, confined myself to the vague territory known as "serious fiction." For research purposes, I ventured across the line.

A lot of the genre books were, frankly, terrible. Some of them were revelatory.

In an airport I picked up a thriller called The Straw Men by Michael Marshall. It proved to be so smart and dense, so politically astute, as to bear comparison to Don DeLillo. I read a passel of mysteries by Ruth Rendell, who I've come to adore. I was properly unnerved by the novels of Dean Koontz, whose sentences are far from lovely (and are not meant to be), but who has a deep understanding of what frightens us, and why.

Maybe most remarkable, though, were some of the science fiction novels I read. Prominent among them: Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany, Idoru by William Gibson, The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. As it turns out, the novel of ideas is alive and well. It just tends to be kept in particular sections of bookstores and libraries.

This particular discovery of mine will naturally seem naïve to those who have been reading promiscuously across genre lines all their lives. Still, none of us has the time or energy to read all the books that matter. We all perform triage of a sort when choosing our next book. It was something — it was meaningful — for me to realize that the choices, for me, are more varied, more numerous, more daunting, than I'd ever imagined.

Michael Cunningham, 2004

About Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham is "one of our very best writers" (Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times). An excerpt from A Home at the End of the World was published in The New Yorker, chosen for Best American Short Stories 1989, and featured on NPR's Selected Shorts. He is the author of two other novels, Flesh and Blood and The Hours, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in New York.