The Book Thread

[Algeh]

I like The Birthgrave, I found the satanic stuff boring, if she's moved on I'd probably like that.

The Birthgrave was one of her very first published novels, way back in the 1970s, so she grew as a writer quite a bit after that (although I did quite like The Dragon Hoard, which is a very early YA book she wrote). My personal favorites of hers also tend to be some of her earlier works, but I haven't done a re-read recently to see how well they've held up now that I'm older, have read more widely, and have access to a wider and more current range of Queer Stuff, which was otherwise not easy to find in the early 1990s when I found Tanith Lee books originally. (Tanith Lee was one of the first authors I read from the "adult" side of the library starting at around age 11 back in the early 1990s, which gave me some rather odd ideas about "typical" SF/fantasy genre fiction to the occasional consternation of anyone reading my WIPs back in middle school. She also was one of the first authors I read who ever dealt with any kind of Queer stuff or Gender stuff at all, since that was much less present in genre fiction at the time, particularly YA-ish or classic/older stuff which was most of what would get recommended to me.) My favorites from my teen years were the Tales from the Flat Earth Series, Cyrion, Don't Bite the Sun, Volkhavaar, Dat by Night, and the short stories "Crying in the Rain" and "By Crystal Light Beneath One Star". I probably haven't read any of them in the last decade or so, though. Lee always seemed like an author who was at her best at the short story length and many of her longer works either were really compilations of short stories with some kind of framing idea around them.

I haven't read The Blood of Roses yet - I'll have to pick up a copy when I have the energy for that kind of thing again. (The last vampire books by Lee that I remember reading were Dark Dance, Personal Darkness, that series...I think that was back in the 90s?) I've liked most things she wrote, although I was unable to get through The Gods Are Thirsty because it had too much tendency to laspe into French-language poetry. I suppose I could give it another try one of these years.

In terms of what I'm actually reading right now, I think the only "new" book I've had the energy for so far this year (as opposed to a re-read) is Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire back when that came out in January. I'm currently re-reading Barbara Hambly's Darwath books yet again since I just don't have the energy for books with surprises in them right now. When I have slightly more energy this summer, I discovered recently that some, but not all, of Jim Kjelgaard's works have somehow escaped to the public domain (someone must not have bothered to renew the copyright on some of them at some point back when that was a thing?) so I'm going to read several books of his that my local library didn't copies of when I was growing up but which I can now get as free ebooks from Project Gutenberg. He's certainly From A Different Time in terms of sensibilities than a lot of other stuff I read, but I always enjoyed his books as a break from heavier stuff when I was in middle or high school (and otherwise mostly reading Tanith Lee) so I suppose I'll probably enjoy more 1940s books mostly about animals and/or hunting even if they probably don't really hold up in some ways.

I'm also debating buying a Worldcon supporting membership so I can get the Hugo packet and read through all of that this summer before voting. I last did that for 2020 and enjoyed most of it, but it's a big project and I'm just not sure I'm up for that much new stuff this year.