I'm reading Robert Silverberg's Majipoor series. I picked up a copy of Lord Valentine's Castle a couple days ago and was immediately captured by the story. The writing is triff, which must explain why this is an immensely popular series. Of course, I'm now embarrassed I haven't read it before. I hang my head in shame, honest I do. There's a lot of great sf from the 80's I haven't read because it was a period when I didn't have a lot of money, and I didn't go to the library much. I started reading sf again in the 90's, and I also expanded my taste to include fantasy. I've recently started to close the gap between my beloved feminist sf of the 70's and the current favorites. I might get caught up around the millenium.
Or not. I'm seriously addicted to mysteries now, and haunt the bookracks looking for new offerings from Stephen Saylor, Lindsay Davis, Kate Moss, and Lynda Robinson. I love historicals. There's no escapism for me in contemporary fiction, particularly as so much of it seems to be about other people's horrible families, and escape is what I'm seeking in novels. I don't read novels to educate myself, after all. I want entertainment, and I want it to have a happy ending. Away with your dark humor and gothic night terrors. Bring on the charming men, witty women, and delicious historical detail.
Sometimes I think I'm utterly shallow to prefer such light fare as my main reading material, but hey, I can only watch CNN for so long. Besides, I've had an epiphany of sorts recently. As you might have noticed from a hint here and there, I agonize a lot about whether I'm smart. This is possibly the most self-indulgent habit I have. It's pretty darned obvious that I have an above average brain but what obsesses me is an elusive sense of smartness, of having arrived at Smartdom. It's all these friends of mine, you see, who are incontrovertibly smart and accomplished, top notch scientists and editors and diplomats and programmers and lawyers. I measure myself against them, and I see how limited my own knowledge is. Of course, if I compare myself to the average K-Mart shopper I feel like Marie Curie but I rarely do that. So this epiphany I had was kind of overdue.
It runs like this: there's horizontal smart and vertical smart, breadth and depth. I have the vertical kind, smart in one or two areas, rather mediocre at the across the board stuff. This is perhaps why I've never made it through college. I'm great at certain things and I suck, badly, at others. You have to be able to do everything to get a college degree. So for me, that verticality has always seemed to make me a loser compared to my friends who are clever and quick at all sorts of intellectual pursuits. But that's okay, I'm still smart in the one or two areas, and I know some of those horizontally smart friends admire my skills in them. So fine. I've decided I am, too, smart. I'm just smart vertically.
Would you like to know what I'm good at? Languages. Music. Drawing. Writing. Not too shabby, even if it won't change the world. I leave that to the scientists and editors and diplomats and programmers and lawyers. Me, I'll be here in the corner reading Silverberg and enjoying myself.
