Every now and then I find myself on the edge of knowing what’s going on. For instance, Gentle Readers will by now have figured out that Your Humble Blogger likes speculative fiction. This is, for the most part, a holdover from my misspent youth; I don’t keep up with the field. Not that I dislike the stuff currently being published. No, I’m just lame.\n
Anyway, I hadn’t actually been aware that Patricia McKillip is still alive, much less that she’s still productive. I happened to see Alphabet Of Thorn<\/I><\/a> on the New Book shelf of the local library, said ‘hunh, I guess it’s a new Patricia McKillip book’, and picked it up. It’s quite good. It’s a little, um, thin, if you know what I mean, but it’s exciting, spooky, and fun.\n Digression: for five years, my local library was a SUPERLIBRARY, an academic library that also had the latest fiction and, well, just about anything published on any topic. On the other hand, there wasn’t a New Book shelf with mysteries, sf, pop science, and mainstream fiction and nonfiction bestsellers. About a third of my book reading (not counting re-reads) comes from the New Book Shelf these days, which means I’m judging books by their covers again. On the other hand, there’s a nifty hold system that I abuse dreadfully, where I log in online, pick a couple of books for the staff to pull off the shelves and hold for me at the desk. It means a trip with my Perfect Non-Reader can end with books for YHB without attempting to browse and shush simultaneously. End digression.\n I suspect I read the Hed<\/a> books and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld<\/a> as a twelve-year-old, more or less the same time I read the Harper Hall trilogy and the Earthsea trilogy. I remember liking them, but I don’t remember much about them. About the McKillip ones, I mean, or for that matter the Earthsea ones. As I mentioned earlier<\/a>, I remember the Harper Hall books pretty well. Anyway, I never went on reading other books by those authors. Well, I tried a couple of LeGuin<\/a>s, mostly under duress, and I think I tried one or two McCaffreys, but they aren’t authors who I think of as putting out books I want to read. I wouldn’t think to get the library staff to pull one off the shelf for me. And it turns out that I’d quite like to pick up another McKillip.\n , Every now and then I find myself on the edge of knowing what\u2019s going on. For instance, Gentle Readers will by now have figured out that Your Humble Blogger likes speculative fiction. This is, for the most part, a holdover…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17090,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2195\/revisions\/17090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"