My love of reading probably came from my parents and my oldest brother who read out loud to me from my infancy. However, my other brother doesn't read books for entertainment though he received the same encouragement. Same with my sons: one reads as avidly as I do in many genres, but the other only enjoys instruction manuals, such as How to Maintain Your Airplane and A to Z Home Wiring, which he reads very, very well. I attribute my profound distaste of dystopian literature to high school reading -- my teachers seem to have all been bitten by the same dystopian bug. In three years I was assigned Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Land Under England, and a couple I've mercifully forgotten. If I had read them in a more spread-out period and the teachers hadn't been such sheep, I might have enjoyed and got more out of them, but, as it was, I was soured forever. if you weren't an English Literature major, you probably weren't (or never would be) a serious reader of literature.Georgia, I ran across that sort of pickle-brained professor frequently.

I like fantasy for many of the same reasons I like science fiction. It provides a fresh lens for looking at our world and our problems. In a fantastical world our prejudices and preconceptions don't apply. We come with a fresh eye. Laura Marie makes a very important point - the world created by the author must follow the rules established by the writer, or it's throw against the wall time. I hate when a character discovers he has a new magic skill just in time to save the day. Unfortunately it isn't rare in fantasy, which is why I read so little of it any more. I was mildly disappointed by the Maisie Dobb's An Incomplete Revenge wherein we discover she has a hitherto unknown psychic skill perfect for solving her case. Mildly disappointed because otherwise I was thrilled that this book was so much more enjoyable that Winspear's earlier novels. I began reading the series because of unfamiliar setting and because they struck me as worthy. The last couple have been a pleasure to read. All I can guess is that Winspear's skills have grown with the writing of her novels. I saw E.T. with cousins on the Christmas it opened. I came home ranting and raving about how awful and derivative it was. Ha! What did I know?

Avedon, Purple Maze is a really good one here and I expect it to be at your house as well. Kate and Debra, I moved Roman Cohort to a much better spot last fall and I am hoping it will do as well as it did initially until the New Dawn rose shaded it out and I had to move it, but not the best place. Debra, WD always re-blooms here as well, so it is a good one. W of T did nothing until last year but just sit for about three years, then, it took off. (Sleep, creep leap, but I think there were two sleep years). kay

Finished The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Agree with chisue about the self-absorbed nature of the characters, but that’s precisely the essence of teens and 20+ year year-olds in the throngs of self-doubt and self-discovery, right? Loved — simply loved — the authenticity of grad students and post-grads doing pure research (i.e. anything remotely readily applicable to real life), their life of intellectualism, poverty and blissful impracticality. Before I went into law, I did my doctorate in what was the beginnings of AI at a time when AI wasn’t a household word. With those street--creds (for what they’re worth), I can tell you the book felt like a capsule of those impossibly heady years of high-octane interdisciplinary discussions and debates that lasted all night. Evolutionary biology, yes! Stephen Gould, yes! Theory of meaning, yes, yes, yes!! Anyway, you get the point, the author gets it, it’s the real deal. As chisue points out, the book also bears witness to the sad, slow and painful unraveling of the mind of a manic-depressive. (I recall Katherine Graham’s account of her brilliant husband’s descent into bipolar disorder in her memoir from the late 1990s, with uncannily similar details of a manic-depressive’s behavior.) The writing was quite good too. Overall, a great read if you’re into subjects of this kind. 3.5 to 4 stars.