And those teenage hangups are hard to beat

[sovay]

I had forgotten the thread in Katherine Kincaid's Beloved Bondage (1993) that now reads like Christian inspirational romance, but then again that is an occupational hazard of narratives set in early imperial Rome. I've seen Ben-Hur (1959), and Quo Vadis (1951), and keep having to double-check about The Robe (1953). Now I want to re-read I, Claudius (1934), which thanks to the exigencies of my current life is in storage when it used to be one of the books I always unpacked first. In tenth grade, the majority of my friend group was reading Mercedes Lackey and I was reading Robert Graves. To each their id.

Comments

[larryhammer]

I do not appear to have an upper limit of books I can read per day, if permitted the time.

I don't anymore, but it was probably good for my grades that I no longer devoured two or three SFF paperbacks per diem, at least till I graduated high school.

That's really neat about the Kesh.

I've mentioned before that my first attempt at writing a fantasy novel, when I was 15, involved incompletely stripping the serial numbers off Tolkien (the most proximate source text being The Simarilion) by giving it a distinctly New World setting; and that my second attempt at 16 was based on The Farthest Shore with a plot inspired by The Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger". I don't think I've mentioned that the third, when I was 17, started after a deep dive into Always Coming Home with secondary inspirations from "The Creation of Eä" (for a magic system) and Howard Jones's "Hide and Seek" (for a cosmology). None of these attempts did I ever write as much actual story as I did background material, but I came closest with that last.

Then college arrived, and I set fiction aside (aside from a creative writing class) for poetry, and didn't take it up again till grad school.