on books and feels

[jazzfish]

I recently reread Susan Palwick's Shelter, a book that knocked me over so hard on first reading that I couldn't find anything at all to say about it. It's an amazing story about people who are doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons, and it's about forgiveness and identity and love and being human. It is also, almost incidentally, a well-constructed near-future SF novel: having come out in 2007 means that its lack of smartphones etc makes it feel a bit dated, but other than that it's eminently plausible.

This time it left me neither speechless nor in tears. (I got a little sniffly at the end but other than that.) It just had much less of an emotional gut-punch. I suspect that I'm better-adjusted and more in tune with my own emotions, so it's not poking so directly at some raw spots.

(I have Palwick's latest, Mending the Moon, but haven't gotten to it yet.)

On the other hand, I also reread Le Guin's Very Far Away From Anywhere Else. That one still gets me curled up in a ball on the couch at about the two-thirds point, and again at the almost-end. ("See, I'm supposed to go on living all those years, and I don't know how.") So, maybe not as well-adjusted as I'd like to think.

... in fact, definitely not, because I seem to have a very strong internal prohibition against talking about Very Far, about the things in it that spoke to me. Huh.

Comments

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

On Very far... Yeah. I re-read it every couple years.

[jazzfish]

Likewise. It's easily worth the reread.

I found it late (towards the end of an extended undergrad college career). I sometimes regret not having read it when I was in, say, high school... but I think it hit me harder reading it for the first time when I did.

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

I first read it right after high school. I remember being frightened by how much sense that book made to me--on levels I couldn't even articulate, let alone identify, at seventeen.