Shiverfinger

I finished Luck in the Shadows. Actually, I finished it a week or so ago. I didn’t felt like doing anything else, but the book did help with my vocabularly expansion goal. It had a few odd words, like swain. It was pretty much just an ordinary fantasy book with gay characters. Not that that’s a bad thing. Lynn has sort of a preoccupation with describing her architecture, though. I want to hear about your characters, lady, not the angles of your buildings.

I’ve poked through some of my other books. I started on the second book in the series a few days ago, Stalking Darkness. I’ve been reading Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind also. Wild Mind is a book about writing.

I think I want to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead sometime.

1. Snapdragon.
2. Honeysuckle.
3. Fern.
4. Palmetto.
5. Daisies.
6. Magnolia.
7. Lemon Grass.
8. Mint.
9. Azaleia .
10. Lady’s Slipper.

I used to read tons. Especially back before I was in high school. In elementary and middle school, I always had several books with me. I still read during high school but certainly not as much. Sleeping took up the majority of my free time, although I did manage to sneak time in for a book or two every month.

But somewhere along the line I just stopped reading. I’m out of school now and I definitely have the free time. I’m not interested in reading a big list of “the classics” or some big ponderous book dissecting. . . I don’t know. . . some big ponderous issue. For some reason I feel that the literary types feel if you haven’t read 50 books written in the 1800s then you don’t really like to read.

So.

I recently picked up a copy of Lynn Flewelling’s Luck in the Shadows. It’s of the genre I’m most interested in right now: Fantasy with alternative sexualities. In other words, gay Fantasy.

I remember reading Mercedes Lackey’s The Last Herald Mage series. The main character’s name is Vanyel. So sad. I honestly couldn’t (and still haven’t been able to) finish the last book through. Not out of boredom or lack of commitment, but because I just really didn’t want to see something bad happen to the character. He was very happy where I stopped. That’s probably a little quirky.

The point is that Vanyel was the first gay character I had encountered in my favourite genre. It was kind of empowering to read about someone like me. Before I would read books with female heroines and put myself in her place, which wasn’t quite the same. With Vanyel the entire experience just felt very. . . complete and identifiable, even if in a fantasy setting. That’s why I’m looking for this sort of book. It combines my favourite settings and themes with characters I can more easily identify with.