This year ain't working... And the Remedy.

The year's first defeat has happened.  I'm pretty sure it happened in February last year too.  This particular defeat is worth explaining as opposed to mentioning and then moving on.  Laird Barron is a really, really good writer.  He's also kinda creepy, but then again he's branded as 'horror fiction.'  I read a little more than half of The Imago Sequence, five of the nine short stories in the collection.  Barron reminds me of the subscription to The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy that I had a few years ago: solid writing and standout stories that are of no particular interest to me.  


I'm a firm believer in reading the wrong book at the wrong time, it's happened to me before, most recently with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The General in his Labyrinth.  It's possible that I'm not mentally in a place that I need to be into enjoy a given book.  With that in mind, The Imago Sequence is not going to used book store to be traded in, but neither am I in a hurry to further explore it at the present.  


I'm not having a lot of fun reading lately.  Breakable You, kinda started it, much as I loved BADASS it's not a book that encourages extended reading, The Windup Girl (as I've said before) may end up being the best thing I read this year--if I can get through it--and now Barron.  I like challenging stuff, and I also like trying new to me stuff (like horror) and new to me authors (like Barron) but for whatever reasons, with the exception of BADASS, I haven't been picking up books that are very 'fun.' this year.  Leave it to the lovely Terri Wenna to straighten me out.  "I don't know too many people who can read a steady diet of Moby-Dick and Middlemarch, or even, for that matter, Mieville, Crowley and Egan."     I was never that ambitious  and if you ever catch me reading Middlemarch call a doctor, but for me, her points make a lot of sense.  


I have found the fun.  Looking back, it was actually very obvious and easy to do; I've said I was going to do it for a while.  James Barclay's Dawnthief.  It's not just that the pages are flying by--which certainly is welcome considering my reading of late--but I'm enjoying everything going on.  It's fun.  I wish I could say my 'comfort food' weren't so firmly rooted in Western European styled fantasy with all of it's cliches and single colored ethnic palette's but David Gemmell's got the cover blurb and how could I resist that from the guy who first sparked my interest in reading?  


The Imago Sequence is probably amazing, sadly I won't be reading it.  I will conquer The Windup Girl, not because I'm stubborn--I've never thought of putting it down--but because no matter how hard it is for me to read, I am enjoying it.  Dawnthief and Barclay's other stories of The Raven are currently occupying my reading time because they have made me remember why I enjoyed reading in the first place.  It's fun.