She Who (Finally) Reads A Thing
In which the author finally figures out how to make keeping a public blog relevant to her life choices!
After decades of avoidance, I finally started reading the series that puts the “epic” in epic fantasy, The Wheel of Time. Why? Because my husband and I watched the first season of the new series, and he begged me to give it up in favor of the books. (He’s a longtime fan.)
Why had I avoided it for decades? Various partly spurious reasons. We’ll get into that later.
For today, the important thing is that after I’d read Book One, The Eye of the World, and decided to keep going, I also discovered that I’m not the only one to show up late to the game: I happened across Sylas K Barrett’s extensive walkthrough of his first read of the series. As I was wolfing that down for as far as I’d read so far, it occurred to me.
I could do this.
It won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s looked in on this site periodically to hear that I have historically been unsure what to do with this whole “social media” aspect of being a modern writer. Somehow it hadn’t hit me that anyone would want to read about me having thinky thoughts about other people’s books. Older books. Books I surely ought to have read already. (Maybe newer ones too, for that matter.)
But now, here we are. Could I read a few chapters of fantasy a week and then post some musings about it? I think so.
I’ll be starting with The Wheel of Time, and by the nature of the beast we’re going to be there for a good while. Then maybe I’ll move on to (finally) reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. (I know! A favorite of many friends for ages! Beloved modern depiction of Odin? Where am I? Getting stalled out in nonfiction gorging and side-projects, usually.) Or I’ll pick up one of the more recent books I’ve been itching to get to, like Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, which I bought the instant it went to paperback and which has been sitting on my unread bookshelf patiently ever since. We’ll see.