omorka | A Post That's Not About My Current Fannish Obsessions (Much) For Once This Week

bassfingers challenged me to write about reading.

I haven't mentioned much about that, because honestly, most of the people on my friendslist read fiction and read and write reviews of fiction, and I . . . don't much these days. I have a stack of novels that I've been given that I just can't face down. It's not that I don't want to read them, exactly - more that I have enough worlds crowding my head right now, and I can only really appreciate so many at once. In a lot of ways, it's been easier to go the television route for fiction - instead of building worlds and all the visual stuff that's hard to do for me, I can let the medium do that and fill in character motivation and backstory, instead, all the easy stuff. *sigh* It's lazy, I know. But as long as I'm generating my own fiction, and exploring other people's expansions on the canon, I don't really feel like picking up a brand new canon.

The last two print novels I read - both within the last three weeks - were a reread of the Ghostbusters movie novelization (it's thinner than I'd remembered), about which I will not babble since I said I wasn't going to talk about the Busterverse, and Diane Duane's Doctor's Orders, a nice bit of licensed Star Trek fanfiction. Yes, I consider the Trek novels fanfiction. They're certainly not canon. They often have Mary Sues in them. But in both cases, I have the advantage that I already know the universe and main characters, so we can get right down to plot and interaction. Other than that, I've not touched any print fiction.

Now, that doesn't mean I haven't been reading. Far from it. But most of my print reading has, as so often is the case these days, been nonfiction. I bought several cookbooks from King Arthur Flour and have been working my way through them (recipes are a lot like flashfiction, actually - all about presenting the necessary elements and getting to a preordained conclusion). I also just finished Ronald Grimes's Deeply Into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage. This was part of my "okay, so how do I learn to design rituals?" reading, and I think it was helpful, although honestly I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone who had a deep and abiding connection to one particular ritual style. Grimes is not at all shy of critiquing Western appropriations of other peoples' ritual technology, for instance. His writing style is also rather conversational, more so than I might wish in a book like this. I like scholarly prose.

My current book is Jonathan Kirsch's A History of the End of the World. Kirsch is the author of God Against the Gods, but he usually sticks pretty close to Judaica; these are both stabs away from his comfort zone, and it shows in what again I feel is a terribly conversational style. Having said that, this is a lovely book, more layman's religious history - this time about the Revelation of St. John and what has happened to it over the past two millennia.