Literary Fiction As Niche Hobby
While I was in kindergarten everybody had to play the recorder, when it came time for that.[^1] This is presumably because recorders are cheap to produce and easy to manufacture, they're relatively easy to learn, they're somewhat easy to make nice sounds with, your guess is as good as mine.
Personally I put down my recorder at around age 7 and haven't thought about it again for more than 2 minutes since. But there are people who hold on to their recorder-ing as adults: here's a blogpost on the life of a professional recorder-player, here's a recorder youtube video with 2.5 million views, here's an FAQ from the American Recorder Society.
Sometimes I imagine what it's like to be a passionate recorder-enthusiast. My hope and dream is that when you meet new people, and they ask what you're up to, and you say you're recording your new recorder-album, they say "oh isn't that fun" or "ah how lovely" and then let you talk for a bit about why you're still into this thing that (as other people tell you, endlessly) everyone else gave up at age 7.
That is to say: playing the recorder is a pretty niche hobby, but everyone knows it's a niche hobby, including everyone who's into it and everyone who isn't. Having a niche hobby is swell, the world is richer for having so many niches. But there's a fundamental congruence between the place of recorders in adult society and the perceived place of recorders in adult society: nobody feels badly that they're not into recorders, and nobody thinks you're judging them for not being a recorderer, because there's no cultural baggage attached to any relationship one might have (or not-have) with this instrument. Under heaven, more than is dreamed of in anyone's philosophy, there are a great many things, and recorders are one of those things, and that's great. There is a deep and satisfying harmony. The world is at peace.
When I was in high school I was into literary fiction. Much like the recorder, literary fiction is foisted on children of a certain age, and most of them don't care for it, and give it up as soon as they're not-forced-to. A very few people actually genuinely love it, and stick with it even after they don't have to. But that's not how it feels.
You can speculate on why exactly literary fiction feels so different from recorders: whether it's an artifact of our university system, or path-dependency in our media ecosystem, or the fact that for a long time writing was the only mass-media and people who like writing about things are disproportionately biased towards writing about writing. (Whatever else you can say about it, history is written by the writers.)
But my friend was once featured on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review and said that sold exactly 0 additional copies of their book; I think this is meaningful because 1) "The New Times Book Review" exists, 2) you'd think it's something that many people read, 3) either people aren't reading it, or people aren't buying the stuff it reviews, and I suspect the answer is both.
There is an entirely uncited claim going round the internet that there are 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in the United States. I honestly, genuinely have no idea if this is true, and I don't want to go overboard relying on it given that it's a statistic and it's uncited, which is two black marks as far as I'm concerned. Still:
1) I suspect there are more than 20,000 adult recorder players in the United States.[^2]
2) Literary fiction has a kind of cultural footprint that is entirely disproportionate to the number of people who do it.
Here's a tweet I read:
the entire complex around "writing culture" — literary novels, narrative or essayistic nonfiction, writing about said novels and books — is, at best, going the way of jazz, something supported by elderly philanthropists in new york city, universities and a few urban enthusiasts
— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) May 4, 2025
I keep saying "literary fiction" but maybe what I mean is closer to "writing culture" in the tweet above. And sure we can argue about what exactly Literary Fiction means, and partly this is an artifact of the fact that if something sells enough copies we no longer consider it Literary: Colson Whitehead / Zadie Smith / Jonathan Franzen / the other David Mitchell would probably all be seen as Literary Fiction Authors if they weren't also multi-million sellers.[^3] But honestly, I think we can pull a Potter Stewart here: I know literary fiction when I see it, and almost nobody is seeing it.
I suspect that much unhappiness within people is caused by things that are not themselves bad, but by the gap between what is true and what is perceived to be true. It's fine to be bad at cooking, but if you think you're good at cooking when you're not then you might cause some issues. It's fine to be extroverted, but if everyone else thinks you're introverted you're all going to end up having trouble.
Of course, this is what I think is happening with literary fiction: it's a niche hobby whose troubles are caused by a perception (both among its adherents and its apostates) that it's much bigger than it is. There are so many fine hobbies out there in the universe: knitting, fishing, jumping rope (another thing I learned in elementary school). I don't have numbers, but I think each one of these is ~100 or ~1000 times more popular than literary fiction.[^4] But none of them have a New York Times supplement.
If you're into literary fiction, people do think you're judging them for not being into it, projecting-ly or otherwise, because people (for a certain segment of people, at least) think everyone else is reading lit-fic, and they alone are failing to. And again, I don't know-know what anyone else is doing in the privacy of their own homes, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly not-reading literature, and I think we'd be better off if we could all acknowledge that.
Again, there's nothing wrong with loving literature if that's what floats your boat: truly, poetry is as good as push-pin. I do think reading lit-fic specifically can show you interesting things about the human condition that I personally value deeply. But I suspect that so can fishing, and so can knitting, and so can playing the recorder. (So can sitting there silently and trying to perceive the true nature of sensory reality, but who has time for that?)
More than anything, I wish that you could go to a party as a literature-lover and enthuse about what literature means to you in a way that felt less like apologizing for the hegemon and more like stanning the recorder: "here is a thing I adore, among the many things in existence, and maybe you would like it too." The strange position of literature comes from the total disconnect between its seeming cultural hegemony and its actual place in the culture. (If I were better read I would here insert a reference to a novel that perfectly illustrates this tragedy, but I can't).
my biggest fear in writing this piece is that it might annoy my dear friend Henry, who I think will disagree with it; if you also disagree with it, please check out his blog.
[^1]: ok fine it was probably grade 1 or 2. But here's a poem I love:
While he was in kindergarten, everybody wanted to play
the tomtoms when it came time for that. You had to
run in order to get there first, and he would not.
So he always had a triangle.
[^2]: I emailed the American Recorder Society, who very kindly notified me that they don't know how many Americans play recorder, but that they have 2,500 members. I suspect that there are 10x more people doing any given thing than joining the membership association for that thing, but of course that's totally speculative.
[^3]: with apologies to Tom Lehrer: "to be lit / it must be it/terly without redeeming publishing fortunes."
[^4]: look, let me level with you: a problem I often have when writing blogposts is that I don't know if 100 people will read them or 100,000. My motivation to go out and get exact figures for every claim is small in the first case and large in the latter. If you (collectively) are interested enough in this piece, I will go back and put in some better facts and figures.