Wednesday, March 09, 2005

I am sorry to say

that the Jenny Davidson rule of reading is that when there are novels in the house--and there are always novels in the house--they get read in order from most to least trashy. ("Trashy" is a compliment as far as novels go. There are some novels that I will not even dignify with the word--I have a personal moratorium, for instance, on the fiction of John Grisham...) I love trashy novels. And I stayed up till all hours last night reading two great ones by Mercedes Lackey: Magic's Promise and Magic's Price. I think this is the best of the Valdemar trilogies; the writing's most satisfactory, the characters most real. I am helpless to explain, though, the appeal of this kind of fantasy (the great trio of this sort are Lackey, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne McCaffrey), but I find this kind of book irresistible when it's done well. In that respect I have not much changed from my twelve-year-old self spending my babysitting money at the Waldenbooks...

I've got sort of a glut of novels right now; sometimes there's a dearth, sometimes you get a ton all at once from different sources. Very enjoyable. Though I've got a lot of work to do in the next few weeks, so it's just as well I've exhausted the fantasy ones now (though no doubt I will go poking around to see if I can find anything else before turning to slightly heartier fare).

This also seems an appropriate moment to say that one of my life's ambitions is to publish a novel that goes into a mass-market paperback edition. I love mass-market paperbacks.

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