Random Thursday: Getting my reading mojo back

Several times over the last couple year, I've blogged about feeling like something was missing from my pleasure-reading. As if, after my long hiatus when working on my first couple of novels, either I'd forgotten how to immerse myself in a good book, or the SFF field had moved on and stopped producing things I enjoyed reading. The feeling was most apparent when it seemed as if all my friends--people whose taste generally seemed to march with mine--were raving over a book as the best thing since sliced bread and I found it merely...good. Merely pleasant. Merely well-written. What was wrong with me that I wasn't finding anything to be OMGWTFBBQ-excited about?

Well, maybe I just don't excite on the same level other people do. Maybe I'm mistaking the dialect in which people are discussing books for the meaningful content of the language. I dunno. Maybe I have simply gotten a lot pickier about what it takes to excite me. But some things have.

I got very excited about T. Kingfisher's The Raven and the Reindeer, after all. And Beth Bernobich's fiction has been consistently passing the treadmill test. I've recently started diving shallowly into the graphic novel pool and am discovering some woman-produced, woman-centered stories that are making me reconsider my disinterest in the medium. I just finished reading Kelly Gardiner's Goddess (a fictional account of Julie d'Aubigny's life) and will be saying very nice things in my review of it.

Maybe, if I'm not getting over the top excited about the hottest new SFF property...maybe that's ok. Maybe it doesn't mean that my reading organ is failing. Maybe it doesn't mean that my taste is broken. Maybe I simply like different things than my friends do. (Goodness knows, it wouldn't be the only path in life where I'm out of step with everyone else around me.)

As an author, I regularly feel a pressure to treat my reading habits as an essential part of community involvement. But that pressure pushes me in a lot of different directions: publishing community, genre, connections of publisher, of project, of convention community, of friendship. Even when I resist that pressure, there's this looming guilt that I should be reading Book X or Book Y because: reasons.  Currently I'm looking at my Worldcon panel schedule and thinking, "What if I have to admit to a fellow panelist that I've never read anything of theirs?" (Never mind that I wouldn't expect them to have even heard of my books, much less have read them.) That pressure and guilt isn't the only reason for my reading malaise, but it's one of them.

But I think...I think I might be starting to get my reading mojo back. Because on a few hot, sultry summer evenings lately I've found myself sitting out in the garden with an ebook and a cool drink until well after everything else went dark around me and the mosquitos began coming out. Some of it is because I'm in a break between major writing projects. Some of it is...well, hot summer night. Not feeling productive. But some of it is because I was enjoying that book so much that I didn't want to put it down and go to bed yet.

My primary blog has moved, but feel free to comment in either place.

StoryBundle: Magic in The Armor of Light - Melissa Scott

(I read Melissa Scott's The Armor of Light back when it was first published. A delightful book, rooted deeply in one of the most intriguing historic periods I know. It doesn't take much at all to introduce fantasy and magic into Renaissance Europe. This is one of the books you can get if you buy the bonus level of the Historic Fantasy StoryBundle.)

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The Armor of Light is part of the current HIstorical Fantasy Storybundle, so I thought I'd talk a bit about the history involved, and particularly the history of the magic. Years ago, Delia Sherman gave Lisa and me what is still my favorite blurb ever, for The Armor of Light. I’ve quoted it in full in the Storybundle page, but the relevant portions are “They played around with the history, saving Sidney from his Dutch wound and Marlowe from his tavern in Deptford, and punched up the magic a lot… Cecil would probably have had them silenced.”

While I’m delighted to think — from the safety of some 400 years later — that our book might have upset Sir Robert Cecil, one of Elizabeth’s spymasters, I do have to quibble just a little with the idea that we “punched up the magic a lot.” I’d say, rather, that we punched up the results of the magic; the rituals and beliefs are as accurate as we could make them. After all, at the end of the 16th century, we’re in that odd period when the modern division between “magic” and “science” hasn’t yet solidified. Things that we think of as obviously untrue, the result of superstition or category error, were repeated as well-known and obvious facts by scholars who were laying the foundations for the next century’s Scientific Revolution.

Some of this, of course, is the result of observation with imperfect tools. The Elizabethan commonplace, quoted in Hamlet, that “the sun breed(s) maggots in a dead dog” is accurate as far as it goes: dead things left in the sun will soon produce maggots. What’s missing is the stage that can’t be seen with the naked eye: the flies’ eggs that result in the maggots. Some is the result of beautiful, logical, and entirely unprovable theories, like the notion that the orbits of the planets form Pythagorean solids, and that the music of the spheres follows those rules. And some, of course, is flat-out magic, like the use of scrying glasses or the evocation of angels.  But for most Elizabethans, these pieces fit neatly together into a logical system that went very far toward explaining the world that they lived in, and there are enough texts remaining to make it possible to write “magic” that any Elizabethan scholar would recognize. (He or she might not have approved of all of it — the persistent legend that an extra devil appeared on stage during a performance of Dr. Faustus speaks to that unease — but that’s another matter.) We wanted our magic to feel like Prospero’s magic as well as the darker magic of Dr. Faustus.

Of course, our results were a bit more… immediate and visible… than most Elizabethans would have expected or approved of outside the theater. But at the same time, none of it would have been dismissed as impossible. And that was something we really wanted to do with the novel: come as close as possible to the Elizabethan worldview, and build on the magic already present there.