Random Thursday: Getting my reading mojo back

[hrj]

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.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

It is far harder for a book to grab me like books used to; but it turns out that good books still can. I'm just no longer able and willing to settle heart-and-soul for mediocre ones. And that's ok with me.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

My problem is similar, and part of it is that I'm less happy about "making do" with books that don't cater to me.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I suppose it's less 'cater' than 'acknowledge existence' :-(

It wasn't until a few years ago that I realised how lucky I'd been that I'd read not only adventure stories/SFF but horsey books. Many of them either German or Swedish in origin, and they were chock-a-block full of girls doing stuff and having adventures; solving their own problems, tackling difficult situations. And many of them were clever, working hard at school (or at least some of the time), allowed to be intelligent and appreciated for it. (There were occasionally boyfriends, and I cannot recall girlfriends - I *really* would hope that has changed these days - but that was never a major part of the stories.)

But so often what makes books mediocre isn't the writing (I like a nice turn of phrase but prose needs to be really bad before it becomes a hindrance) or plot (I can take a fair amount of cliches if I get other payoffs) but the attitudes it shows towards large swathes of the population. If only straight, white, aggressive males 'count' then I definitely won't be reading.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Good prose is one of the things I find I can't do without. One of the most frustrating things about discussing writing quality in the LesFic community is that when you say "good writing" people assume you're talking about grammar, spelling, and punctuation. For me, that's like discussing cuisine only in terms of, "well, this isn't actively poisonous." If you try to discuss prose style and literary technique people start bristling. It's not that there aren't LesFic authors who can write damned good prose, but it's as if we're supposed to pretend that it doesn't matter.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I don't think it happens in isolation - if an author writes workmanlike prose, then maybe they have other strengths, but if an author struggles to even keep a basic rhythm; if their diction is all over the map, then they're rarely conveying character nuances (with what?) or weaving an intricate plot (again, you need *some* degree of wordcraft to to that.) (I think this is more like microwave cooking. Even if you're very, very good, you'll still be serving a meal that came out of a microwave.)

But I was reading Throne of a Crescent Moon the other day. It has some nice turns of phrase, but is rather pedestrian in other places. The plot is built to a fairly common pattern. What made it a book I inhaled were the unusual characters, and the building blocks that the plot was created from, which I didn't recognise and wasn't expecting.

I find over time that I appreciate good writing more, both in that it gives me more satisfaction (and I am more likely to wander away from mediocrity) and that I have more tools to articulate what does and doesn't work for me. Overall, I count that as a win.

I do not think a meaningful dialog is possible where positions are as far apart as you describe :-(