Books...

Okay, the people who REALLY know me are laughing at the posts about clothes and fashion because they know, no matter how much I love to shop and look at clothes, that books were and always will be my first love. It's just the way it is. I don't remember when I learned to read-I do remember the first book I loved. It was One Fish Two Fish by Dr Seuss and I made my sister read it to me incessantly. This practice has continued today-if I read a book I love, I have to re-read it again and again. Some books cheer me up (Wise Children by Angela Carter), some reassure me with their wonderful writing (Possession by A.S. Byatt) , some have me on the edge of my seat yelling "come on, come on!!" (A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge) and some for not-great writing but for great storytelling (anything by Jack McDevitt or F.Paul Wilson). I don't know how many times I read Gone With the Wind-I do know it was the only thing I read for three months and I sobbed at the end. My only defense is that I was 12 and it was the saddest thing I'd ever read. No, it did NOT take me three months to read it, I read it in two days and did nothing else. I stayed up all night to finish it.
I'll read just about anything if I think it's well written, but have to admit that I don't like long sagas where not many bad things happen to the characters and they don't really learn anything and life pretty much goes on in a long and somewhat involved story-so that pretty much rules out any of today's modern fiction, most of which bores me to tears.
I've said that I love science fiction and I really believe that if you like good writing, there is a science fiction book out there for everyone. I read my first science fiction book when I was probaly 11 or 12-my older brother, being a typical teenage guy had all sorts of science fiction hanging around. They all had odd titles-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? What was THAT? Imagine my surprise when it got turned into Bladerunner-after we had spent years making fun of him. But I had read all the Agatha Christie and other stuff lying around the house-so I picked up a book by Ursula K. LeGuin. No, I didn't get all the nuance in it. No, I didn't understand some of it. What I did understand was that this story took place on different world than my own (Rocannon's World was the title) and even though it was a strange place with odd customs and fantastic happenings, there were recognizable characters in it with their own storyit may have been differnt from what I knew but it was real. And to me, that it what still makes the best science fiction. The characters may be from a world a billion miles away and two million years in the future but if you can relate to them on some level, or care about what happens to them, the writer has done his or her job-witness a Deepness in the Sky, where some of the lead characters are spider-like creatures, but they have intelligence and humor and while they are not human, you can understand them and the changes happening in their culture. If you can't get past the trapping of science fiction-the future, non-human cultures, etc..well, you're missing a great story about how people can treat each other badly and mistreat other cultures. There's revenge and redemption and a fair bit of action-it's great.
But some people can't get past that. I've had people tell me that they think I have awful taste in books but I don't really care-I like what I like and I usually don't like historical fiction which puts the author's thoughts into the mind of a real person and I don't have any real fondness for chick lit-unless it has supernatural stuff going on-Undead and Unwed is hilarious and Dead as a Doornail (both of which deal with vampires are both very entertaining.
So, this has turned into Why I Love Science Fictioninstead Why I like to Read but that's okay. There will be more later on my love of mysteries and memoirs and the guilty pleasure called supernatural horror.