I finished Ancillary Justice in about three days flat, which for me is fast, and I was still riding that momentum when I saw Dana at game night and told her, with more conviction than the situation probably called for, that she absolutely had to read it. Dana likes things clean and plot-forward, she’s told me this directly more than once, she wants to know who the characters are and what they want within the first twenty pages, and I handed her a book that opens with a narrator whose grammar doesn’t distinguish gender and a structure that splits between two different timelines without much hand holding. I knew this about her going in. I recommended it anyway.

She got maybe eighty pages in before texting me something to the effect of not being able to tell who half the characters actually were, gender-wise, and finding it more distracting than illuminating, which is a completely fair reaction to a book that asks you to sit with exactly that discomfort on purpose. I’d loved that same disorientation. I’d found it doing real work on me the whole way through. But loving a specific kind of friction doesn’t mean everyone should be handed that friction with no warning about what it is or why it’s there, and I hadn’t given her any warning at all, just excitement.

I tried to talk her back into it once, gently, offering to explain the ship’s distributed consciousness thing over coffee since I thought maybe the structure just needed a map before it clicked. Dana was polite about it but firm, said she’d rather spend that reading time on something that met her where she already was instead of asking her to relearn how to track a cast of characters from scratch. That landed harder than I expected. I’d been treating her hesitation as a problem to be solved with more enthusiasm from me, one more explanation, one more pitch, instead of just listening to what she’d actually said about what she wanted from a book.

What I keep turning over since is how much of that recommendation was actually about Dana and how much was just me wanting company in a feeling I’d just had, which is a pattern I’m apparently prone to and don’t always catch in the moment. I’ve started trying to ask myself, before I push a book on someone, whether I’m thinking about what they actually like to read or just replaying my own reaction and hoping for an echo.

Dana still hasn’t finished it. I’m not going to push. I did, however, immediately think of at least two other people in my life who’d probably love exactly what she didn’t, which tells me the book wasn’t the problem. My aim was.