Reading, for pleasure, no less.

I read A LOT when I was younger. I started reading SF/Fantasy with Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness Quartet, and then proceeded to read anything with a sword and a dragon in it. By high school, I was mowing through David Eddings, Raymond E. Feist, Mercedes Lackey and basically any DAW book with a Jody A. Lee cover on it. I read the Pern novels that were fantasy-ish, but not SF-ish. Come to think of it, I didn't read a lot of SF during this time. I also disliked Andre Norton, Piers Anthony, I never made it past the middle of "Two Towers," and Roger Zelazny. I refuse to read Robert Jordan on principle. I shyed away from Terry Brooks, for some reason.

In college, I stopped reading for pleasure. Part of it was the demands of scholastic reading, part of it was the internet, part of it was getting bored of reading the same story again and again (i.e., farmboy/girl gets plucked out of obscurity and rises to save the world in peril! Falls in love, too!). I started Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth and by the 4th or 5th book, I said, "I can't take this anymore!" and abandoned it.

Post-college, I read a bit more non-fiction, which I can only assume was a legacy of the scholarly reading. I read some young adult SF/fantasy because I felt that the more imaginative stories were there. (I'm thinking of Garth Nix, Jane Yolen, and now mega-star Philip Pullman.) I was still not reading a lot of fiction, though, until now, though.

And what am I reading? Serious stuff like Guy Gavriel Kay and China Mievelle. Steampunk-y stuff is fun. I'm drawn to fantasy books not set in a medieval setting. I got some Margaret Atwood and Samuel Delaney on the TBR shelf.

And, on the other side, girly, unapologetically romantic fantasy. I LOVED Anne Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy. I like Jacqueline Carey a lot, too. Melanie Rawn's OK, too. Why didn't I read these when I was actually a girly teenager? I keep thinking back to things I read in college about women reading romance literature and how its the outcome of the patriarchy's repression. (If, my God, you're actually interested in this idea, there's a good chapter on this here on Google Books.) I also keep thinking it's just fun escapism, like video games, but, you know, feminist scholars got a job to do.

Also, and this is going to sound nuts, but I wonder if I'm reading more fiction now because I'm doing more math now. The end of high school was also the end of serious mathin' (I went to a liberal arts college with no serious math/science requirements). I'm doing more math now because of the accounting degree, and all the sudden I want to read fiction again. Maybe something's happening up in the old brain chemistry.