S. Worthen | Weblog

Last summer, while I was in Massachusetts, my Smith friend TC and I passed a pleasant hour in a bookstore. She recommended various books to me with with enthusiasm and, since I respect her taste in books, I bought one of them to tide me through some of my then-forthcoming travels.

I started reading the book on a bus. Before long, I was bored. I didn't care about the character, the plot was full of clichéd reversals, and nothing much had grabbed me about it. I stared out the window of the bus, or napped instead.

But, as is the way of book-readers, someone else whose taste in books I respect (cliosfolly) also recommended the same book. And then, eventually, through friends-of-friends LJ lists, I wandered across the author's own LiveJournal. Intrigued by these factors - and by how rarely I don't finish books, once begun - I brought the book along again as reading for a trip, this time on an airplane.

I still wasn't very excited after the first fifteen pages, or however far I'd made it last time, but then, finally, I settled into the storytelling, interesting things began to happen, I started to care about the characters, the frequency of clichéd reversals died down, and before the flight was over, I found I'd quite enjoyed reading Sherwood Smith's Crown Duel.