5/25/08 09:59 pm - hai, u can has crosspost
Happy Towel Day, barely, everyone!
(The below also on my IJ)
It's funny -- I used to be a great reader. The dining room table would be stacked with books I had been reading and hadn't gotten around to putting away because I wasn't tired yet of picking them up and rereading my favorite scenes. I would read during meals, as a result of which multiple Redwall books and some Tamora Pierce ones were significantly stained as well as being worn out. I devoured the books without, metaphorically speaking, chewing, then went over them again and again to absorb the details I had missed in my first greedy skimming.
I think the internet, combined perhaps with adolescence (does it seem to anyone else that time starts going faster sometime during puberty?) changed reading for me. I look at a book as a commitment now, more time than I am now accustomed to reading any one thing, and as I read in a way that is not conducive to putting the book down and picking it up again later, I can't break them into manageable chunks. I hardly read new books now. I feel guilty about it, but it's hard to get back into just picking them up and letting myself go when I'm so out of the habit.
Today I read Frederik Pohl's Gateway. It was interesting to my eyes, now attuned to pick out diversity and lack thereof in a way they never used to be: the universe Pohl created is a future in which the major powers are the US, Russia, China, Venus (?), and Brazil. I liked that, especially since the Brazilians actually did appear in prominent roles. Then there were a bunch of gay/bi guys (and a brief mention of polygamous gay women) in it, which I wasn't expecting, and it took a pretty sex-positive view with both gay and straight relations, not just for men either, though the male main character has most of the sex in the story. It was also well-written, with a cool premise/setting I won't give the details on, so overall I liked it. Major cons were that it was a downer, that it was a bit dull at points (the formula "Bob sees woman, description of the particular ways she's attractive, then they probably have sex offstage at least once" gets old by the end,) and that one of the guys-who-liked-guys was "explained" by some Freud-based thing about his relationship with his mother -- though I think that was the official view in 1977, when the book was written, and to Pohl's credit there was no indication that being gay/bi was a problem despite the alleged cause.
Overall: good book; not as cool as the computer game; I fully intend to read the sequels.
This icon has nothing to do with anything; I just didn't want to wait for an excuse to use it.