I read across genres pretty deliberately, that’s most of the point of this whole blog, hard science fiction one week, dense theory the next, something literary after that, and I like to think of myself as someone without a real blind spot in speculative reading. Then Ted mentioned, gently but pointedly, after I’d turned down a recommendation for the third or fourth time, that I’ve never actually finished a straightforward secondary-world high fantasy novel, the kind with a map in the front and a chosen figure at the center of a quest. He’s right. I’ve started at least six over the years, on strong recommendations from people whose taste I generally trust, and I’ve finished exactly none of them.

I’ve tried to figure out why and I don’t have a clean answer. It’s not the length, I’ve finished plenty of long books, and it’s not invented vocabulary either, since I got through New Sun’s dense archaic terminology without much trouble. My best guess, and it’s genuinely just a guess, is that I want the strangeness in what I read to be doing some kind of work beyond world texture, an argument underneath it the way Le Guin’s inventions are always in service of a real anthropological or political idea, or a formal trick the way Wolfe’s unreliable narration is. A lot of straightforward quest fantasy, at least the specific books I’ve tried, seems to want me invested in the world and the journey on their own terms, and something in me keeps declining that invitation about eighty pages in.

I want to be clear that I don’t think this reflects badly on the genre, plenty of people I respect read almost nothing else and get enormous, legitimate value from exactly the thing I keep bouncing off. It’s a gap in me, not a flaw in the books. Dana’s been quietly building a list of what she considers the ones most likely to finally get me over the hump, and I’ve agreed to actually try the next one she hands me with something closer to good faith than I probably brought to the last six attempts. I’m not optimistic. I’m trying anyway.