unChallenged

I don’t do book challenges, never have. When I was a kid, they were mostly abot getting you to read more and that would have been just silly. Now, I don’t have the patience; the adult ones seem to be mostly about reading books for some other reason than you think you might love them, and I don’t have the time or brain cells to do that. Lots of people do, and I’m not knocking their reasons: people read books to learn, to broaden their experiences, to please someone else, out of a feeling of obligation, and a host of other reasons. I don’t. I read for me only, and only for enjoyment. Mind you, I do learn and broaden my experiences through reading; I read fiction and nonfiction, classics and modern books, general and genre. Since I’m much more likely to enjoy something that is well-written and convincing, I am more likely to enjoy books where the facts are right, the world-building and characters feel real to me, there isn’t too much reliance on telling rather than showing (a particular problem with mysteries, for some odd reason), and the logic is sound. If you’re going to fail on one of those counts, something else has to be good enough to make up for it. (But my definition of “well-written” may not agree with many people’s, and I can be pretty forgiving if the story / characters carry me along; I’m fond of Harry Potter, after all. Speaking of books with logic problems!)

Of course, sticking to books I like can lead to a certain sameness. But that doesn’t have to be in a limiting way, because of the unlimited inventiveness of authors: if I like a particular trope I may read a lot of it, but that trope can be taken in a wide variety of directions, too.

What I’m getting at here is that I will probably never do something like the challenge to read 50 books by / about people of color, or to look specifically for books centering on gay characters, or small-press books, or any other category that spawns book challenges. I will instead spend the time looking for and reading books I think I’m likely to love. But because they’re likely to fit within certain categories in one way (fortunately, a fairly wide group of categories in my case) that doesn’t mean they can’t be broader in other ways. If anyone wants this particular reader to read books with an expanded range of characters, then, the best thing you can do is to suggest ones you think I might love, or talk about the ones you’ve loved.

And so I have recently bought Silver Kiss, by Naomi Clark, with a lesbian character, recently recommended by Sherwood Smith. It’s urban fantasy, which I’ve been enjoying to some extent (not enough to read all of it out there, though!) And I will be buying Karen Healey’s Guardian of the Dead, which gets into Maori myth, because Shweta Narayan talked about it and the book intrigued me because I like YA fantasies that mix magic into our world. (Justine Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness trilogy is another example in this subgenre that centers on a mixed-race character.) Also in the class of “characters unlike me”, not to mention small-press books, on the plane here I read The Year of Plenty, by Rebecca Brammer (an online acquaintance), which would probably be classified as a Christian book, because several people I know read and liked it, and I’ve enjoyed other historical growing-up books from the Little House books through the recent The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. (Not bad: it managed to show the characters’ Christianity as very obviously the center of their lives without preaching at the reader).