Queen of Swords

I'm in need of an engaging, at least slightly escapist, satisfying novel to read. In moods like this I'm mostly drawn to fantasy, space opera and historical fiction.

Something along the lines of Guy Gavriel Kay, Lois McMaster Bujold, Jacqueline Carey, Anne Bishop, Sara Donati, Parke Godwin, Sean Stewart. . .

I just finished re-reading Kushiel's Mercy, and it's making me impatient with everything else I try to pick up.

It's been a very long time since I've read romance novels, and to be honest: I haven't really been in the mood to read about other peoples' happy endings for a while. But on an impulse I ordered a romantic fantasy anthology called Lace and Blade from Amazon after it came up in my recommended list.

So far it's delightful. I just finished reading "The Topaz Desert", by Catharine Asaro, whose name I've seen frequently but whose novels I've never read. It was well-writen, romantic, erotic. . . delightful to read.

The other story, "The Beheaded Queen", is about a queen who was beheaded for cuckolding her king-husband and kept alive by magic for ten years, many of those kept in a cupboard. The story of why she is finally brought out, and what she does with her freedom, is also enjoyable.

The book claims to have a swashbuckling theme, but both the stories I've read so far are not swashbucklers at all, just straightforward fantasy. I cherish some hope, however. . .

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the stories.

. . . is definitely better than life with it.

I have significantly more energy than I've had in I-don't-know-how-long. I get hungry less often, and less intensely. My mind is more clear. I've lost two pounds in the past week, partially due to eating less, but partially due to having the energy to actually take care of myself and cook decently healthy food and do yoga. I even got on the Wii and played fitness games for half an hour last night.

The other aspect of my relationship with my hunger has been a side effect of the book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, by Stephen Cope, which I strongly recommend to anyone with the least bit of interest in the intersection of the body and spirituality. I don't tend to connect with the Eastern traditions very much, but most of the spiritual aspects Cope discusses in the book strongly resonate with what I've been learning in my Qabalah studies.

Cope's discussion of non-attachment hit home in a particularly powerful way. He wrote about observing physical sensations that come up and not judging them as "good" or "bad" or something to be embraced or avoided, but just experienced. This finally connected to my deeply irrational fear of being hungry. For years I've realized that when I'm hungry it's not just a physical sensation, some part of me is afraid of the consequences of hunger: of physical weakness, loss of concentration and mental acuity, of pain, of all kinds of non-specific but potent Bad Things.

Last week when I was driving to the grocery store after work I felt familiar after-work hunger pangs. Usually this means that I'll go to the drive-through and get at least a small hamburger (I've cut *way* down on my drive-through consumption). This time I simply observed that I was hungry, and didn't judge or experience it as something bad to be avoided or eliminated as soon as possible. I was hungry, that was all. I didn't grab a snack; I simply went to the grocery store then came home and cooked a healthy dinner.

It was a quietly powerful paradigm shifting experience.

Tuesday night, Hob and Wolfling and I went to see Guy Gavriel Kay, who was being interviewed by super-librarian Nancy Pearl at a local library. Kay has been one of my favorite authors for years, and remains one of the very few whose books I pre-order and buy in hardback. The Lions of Al-Rassan is one of my top two or three favorite books, and his Fionavar Trilogy, the "Sarantium Mosaic" duology, and Song for Arbonne are second-tier favorites.

I was eager to see Kay in person, but also a bit cautious, afraid of being disappointed. As it turned out, however, he was charming and interesting, and Pearl was a very good interviewer. One of my favorite bits of information was finding out that he had a law degree, because it puts a fun spin on the fact that two of the leading characters in the Fionavar books are law students.

When it came time for the signing, I was shameless in rushing ahead of Hob and Wolfling to get in line. Although I had already purchased and read Kay's newest book, I had brought with me my hardback copy of The Lions of Al-Rassan (which Hob himself had given me for my birthday a year or two ago to replace my battered paperbacks).

As I stood in line I fretted a bit about what I would say when it was my turn. What could I possibly say to GGK that he hadn't heard hundreds of times before?

Unlike many other authors, whose book-signings are machine-like with only the briefest interaction between author and reader, Kay took his time with each person, really focusing on what they said and interacting with them. When it was my turn, I told him that I had already read and liked "Under Heaven" but Lions was one of my all-time favorite books, that of all the thousands I have read it was my "desert island book."

It's a fairly common phrase, but he latched onto it with surprising energy, telling me that no one had ever said that before, and that he was especially taken with it in this case because of the novel's first line: Always remember that they come from the desert.* I said it with him as he spoke it.

After that I thanked him for all his books and for how much they meant to me. He put his hand over his heart and thanked me by name.

It was only later, after Hob had gotten his own autograph and we were out in the parking lot that I realized I was zinging with energy, and a while after that to fully absorb that I had said something unique and meaningful to Kay, and that I had been able to look into his eyes and thank him for the great gift of his stories, which in itself was a privilege I never thought to have.

( For those who want to know more about Kay and his books )




* For the purists, that's the first sentence of Part 1, not the Prologue. But if the author says it's the first line, I'm not going to argue!

Okay, I know that the urban fantasy genre has become increasingly popular (right along with supernatural romance). And I understand that not every author can be a Charles de Lint or Neil Gaiman. But I can't seem to find words to describe just how mind-bogglingly outlandish this plot description is:

When a serial killer targets fairy prostitutes in a Boston neighborhood known as the Weird, Connor Grey, a crippled druid and former Guild detective, discovers that the killings are part of an ancient magical ritual that could bring about the apocalypse.

I mean, if I were an editor and this was the lead-in for a book proposal, I'd think one of my colleagues was playing a joke on me and hit the delete key.


Please understand, I like Harry Dresden and the Nightside, and those can get pretty over-the-top, but I don't think that they've ever managed a combination like this. Not in such a brief synopsis, anyway.

Which "classics" have you read that actually made a strong impression on you, and/or had a significant influence on you? Which do you keep in your library because you truly want to have them at your fingertips to read -- or at least dip into -- again and again?


ETA: Lists are great, folks -- but what I'm really interested in is why and/or how these books touched you in such an important way.

I didn't try to organize my books when I first moved into this apartment. I just threw them up on the shelves as fast as I could so I could break down the boxes and get them out. Since then, I've been frustrated by not being able to find anything. This evening I started sorting it out -- which is a real challenge given the size of my library.

My first thought was that I would take all the books down and stack them into piles by topic, and then figure out how the whole system would be organized -- but I don't have that much floor space. Once there were a few hundred volumes scattered about, with hundreds more still sitting on shelves I decided a new strategy was in order. Instead, I decided to focus on what was most important to me and just let things develop from there.

( The shelves so far. . .  )

Wolfling tends to be rather nonchalant and somewhat hard to impress. She's not sullen or dismissive, she just doesn't get excited about a lot of things. She's never been one to squeal or jump up and down a lot.

I've heard her **squee** twice this week. And I mean a serious squee: loud voice, full body involvement, goes on and on. What prompted this uncha

1. Spike's first appearance on Buffy

2. My showing her the just-arrived copy of Turn Coat the new Harry Dresden novel


I'm definitely raising a geek. :-)

mamadar posted a link to a review of the Twilight series in The Atlantic Online. Neither she nor I have read the series, but the review is very interesting in its perspective on why the story is so powerful for teenage girls. The author of the review certainly captured my experience, as I remember it, especially in this passage:


The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

I too spent many, many hours behind the closed door of my bedroom reading in order to work out the big questions of my life -- and when I wasn't reading, I was writing my own stories in my secret code, trying to figure out What I Thought About Things and working out Who I Wanted To Be.

Wolfling just sent me a URL to a website with Twilight-themed t-shirts as part of her Christmas wish-list. It's fun to see her so passionately engaged with a story and with characters like this. It makes me feel even closer to her.

Wolfling came to me this evening looking for a book to read. I took her into my library and introduced her to some of my favorites.

She's about to start The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay, the first book of The Fionavar Tapestry.

I am gleeful.

My Wolfling is about to start reading one of my favorite series by one of my all-time, buy-his-books-in-hardback, favorite authors.