2005-06-14 - 8:26 a.m.
Heinlein just wanted to get laid by pretty young women...
Well, thank you for all the book suggestions. I can't promise I'll read them (my tastes run to philosophers, humourous essays, scary old diet books, and re-reading old favourites, as my time is more limited than it used to be), but it was very sweet of y'all to weigh in with your favourites. Believe me, it's quite a leap for me to re-read the Moorcock set; I don't have the patience for much fiction these days (I am proud to say that I have never read a book with an "Oprah's Book Club" sticker on it). Well, I *did* say I was a curmudgeon. In answer to a query, yes, I have read pretty much all of Heinlein's books, and the later ones are extremely polyamorous - I think in part because of the progressive brain degeneration he suffered in his later years. One of the symptoms of brain injury (through disease or accident) can be a lowered sense of inhibition; behaviour and thinking becomes less governed by societal norms. This does rather describe the situations in his later plots, especially "To Sail Beyond the Sunset", which is one of the few books I've ever read with a positive spin on incest. (Hey, if you're all adults...) (...and anyway, who's it hurting? Here, kitty, kitty, kitty...) Okay, I'm back. The first Heinlein book I ever read was "I Will Fear No Evil", which I read at age... 7? 8? - I had a habit of picking up books and just reading them; some made sense, some didn't. Uh, I probably got a bit more of an education from that book than I intended. At the very least, it taught me to keep the guest bathroom stocked with travel toiletries for anyone who needed them. (Yes, I know that's a thoroughly obscure thing to pick up from that book.) In my teenage years, I bought and read the rest of the Heinlein ouevre - I still have a pre-publication editor's proof of "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls". It is perhaps my gluttonous consumption of SF novels during my teenage years that made me sour on the whole genre - like the time I had to live on lemon curd for a week during my college years, and now I can't stand to look at the stuff. I go through stages of interest when it comes to reading. When I was 6-7, I was obsessed with the Sherlock Holmes stories - now they just come across as really, really gay (hey, *you* read "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and tell me Watson didn't have a total hard-on for Holmes). As I got older, I moved into horror novels (some of which I still like, but the majority I read were just awful, awful crap). Then I found SF, then fantasy, and I read obsessively - everything in the current genre of choice that I could get my hands on. I hated most of them - hated the plots, hated the people, hated the crappy writing. Too much of it is still stuck in sticky little clumps in my brain. I remember random scenes from stories I read twenty years ago as well as I remember the book I read last week. I can't remember people's names, birthdays, where I put the double-sided tape, or the time of my next doctor's appointment, but I remember the entire plot of a book I read as a teenager and loathed. This is absolutely *not* a useful skill, unless I feel like starting a website devoted to obscure fantasy novels of the 1980s, and I feel that my time would not be optimally spent in such an endeavour. So I'm skittish about going back to reading something I'm not sure I won't hate. Bob knows me pretty well, and if he suggest reading something, I will, but he has to be prepared for me to rip the book to shreds (metaphorically) when I'm done. I am *not* a SF/fantasy fan, not really (yes, I know that makes me an anomaly within the SCA), but I'm not a snob about it (I have all the "Sherman's Lagoon" comic books, for heaven's sake). Within a limited scope, I'll read sf/fantasy books, but it's rather like my taste in music; no matter the genre, a good song is a good song, but I'm picky about what I consider a good song. But I do appreciate the suggestions.
Dorsal - Ventral
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