The Sword and Laser discussion

I read Mickey 7 over the weekend and it landed in a similar place for me as last month's book. It was fine. I didn't mind reading it, definitely enjoyed parts of it, and thought it was well-crafted with solid execution. It's not one I would have picked to read on my own initiative and I wasn't surprised by it. And that means I very much doubt I'll read the sequel and I don't have any urge to seek out other work by the author.

However, having a similar reaction to a book selection two months in a row did make me think a bit about how I categorize things I read. And I realized I have three pretty clear overarching groupings.

1. Reading for information, knowledge, insight, deep reflection, and personal growth. Sometimes fiction will fall in this category for me, but this is mostly a broad swatch of non-fiction. That includes everything from memoir to science to politics to philosophy to any sort of spiritual work from any tradition (e.g. my periodic reading of the Tao Te Ching). I would generally put poetry into this category as well because of the way I read and reflect through poetry.

2. Fiction that challenges or surprises me in some way. That could be through the way a central theme is explored or pushed in new directions. It could be through a beautiful or surprising use of language or literary structure. It could be through the characters. It could be a use of plot and worldbuilding that truly surprises me or lands as something different in some significant way from things I've encountered before. Basically, this category of fiction stretches me in some way. In order for it to work for me, it's important the author succeeds at what they are trying to do. But I have a deep love of fiction that pushes me in unexpected directions or changes how I view something. And I want to note this category doesn't mean "hard to read" or anything similar. In fact, if a work is a slog, that usually means the author isn't really succeeding at what they are attempting. A good recent example in this category would be Scalzi's "When the Moon Hits Your Eye" which is funny, very easy to read, and will challenge the way you perceive the world and people around you all at the same time. And carries quite the emotional oomph.

3. And finally there are works I read almost purely for entertainment. I include in that category comfort and escape reads. There's a ton of fiction in the world, even if limited to SF/F genre fiction. So what do I look for these days when I just want to escape and be entertained?

I say "these days" because the answer to that question has clearly evolved over the course of my life and will almost certainly continue to change with time. I looked through my shelves and the audiobooks that I turn to the most for that sort of escape these days and came up with some of the things that lead me to take a second look at a book. (Obviously, ongoing series I continue to love fall in this category too, but I was more looking for the reasons I choose new books in this category.)

1. Inclusion of queer elements. Sometimes that can be a full on queer romance of some sort, but in many cases it's just a world or setting where aspects of queer identity are simply part of the characters or context. I have a definite bias toward such works. I'm more likely to dig deeper. Doesn't mean I'll pick it up, but it will almost always garner a second look from me.

2. A story or worldbuilding that doesn't use generic whiteness as the "default". If it's going to draw from European culture, I want it to be from an actual culture with specific cultural elements that have real meaning in the story not the bland "default human being" sort of context. Otherwise I want humans and non-humans (when relevant) to be draw from all sorts of sources. It need not be a focus, but no "default" should be assumed in descriptions. (I'm not extremely fond of efforts to create a different "default" either. Those are rarely well-executed.)

3. I noticed in a discussion that came up some months ago that I tend to select fewer male authors to read these days. Clearly my choices have indicated my tastes for more the pure entertainment and escape sort of reads have trended away from books written by men. I find myself curious about that shift since it was not a conscious choice. Something is driving it, but I'm not sure what. I suppose it's possible that women authors tend to write more of the books that fall into my first two escape reading categories.

4. And depending on my mood, I may be looking for a book that will really hit me in the feels. That varies and I'm more often surprised in that department by a book I picked for other reasons.

Outside of those broad categories, my pure entertainment category tends to be all over the place. But for new reads it does seem to mostly fall along those lines these days.

I'm curious if anyone else would care to share what they look for when it comes to pure entertainment, escape, and/or comfort reading these days?

I don’t have anything in particular I’m looking for in entertainment other than good craftsmanship.

Representation is important so I don’t get my panties in a bunch if a book or movie doesn’t have a straight white guy as the lead or even as a supporting character (see the incel foofaraw about the gender-swapped Silver Surfer in the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, for instance, which gives me eye roll-induced migraines because the complainers are so lame). I don’t necessarily seek it out but that’s mostly because I don’t care.

At some point in this group within the past few years it came to light that men mostly read male authors while women mostly read female authors. That baffled me because it never occurred to me to do that. My favorite books as a little kid were The Call of the Wild by Jack London and Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. As a young teen my faves were The White Dragon by Anne McCaffrey and Midnight at the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker. In high school my favorites were Wild Seed by Octavia Butler and Protector by Larry Niven. The only thing those books have in common is excellent writing.

I don’t particularly need to be challenged by entertainment; life is challenging enough. If I also gain some insight into life, that’s purely a bonus.

Similar for me growing up and through early life. My reading choices were often unusual and only accidentally age appropriate but I had no particular bias toward any gender. That's why it stood out to me when I assessed my fiction reading habits over the past decade that there were so few male authors on the list. That was a change from much of my life where I tended to read both. And it wasn't a conscious or deliberate shift like some of my other choices. I still don't have any clear insight into why that changed for me. But I found it an interesting observation.

I separated out the pure entertainment category from fiction that challenges me intentionally in order to ask just about the entertainment category. But I probably should have made it clearer what those initial three categories were for me.

Category 1. In my head, I tend to label this one as, "Feed the beast." I can't remember any point in my life, going back to 5-6 years old when that hasn't been an essentially insatiable demand. The subject matter has been all over the place. Some areas of interest have been lifelong. Others more transient. But in no sense does this sort of reading feel like entertainment. It's meeting a need and if I don't do it things will start to get pretty out of sync and dysregulated for me. I can delay it for a time if there's something else that needs my focus in the moment, but that's about all. There can be a sense of satisfaction, like eating a large enjoyable meal, if I really indulge this need, but I would never use a word like "relaxing" for it. I now know this part of my mind is almost certainly an expression of the autistic parts of my brain, but that just gives me a different lens for understanding it. The shift in perception is helpful, but it changes nothing about how it operates. It can be an enjoyable sensation when things really click and connections start being made across the information I've absorbed, but it does not fall into the "fun" category.

Category 3 is the pure entertainment or escape category for me. That's where I would put Mickey 7 and DCC. And neither of them really worked that way for me. It's not that I disliked either or found them a slog. They were quick, mildly enjoyable reads. Using a dessert analogy, they felt more like an after dinner mint rather than something richer and more luxurious like a cherry cheesecake (substitute any dessert you really enjoy). Anyway, that's the category I was trying to ask about.

I added category 2 because I realized my reading doesn't break down simply into the "feed the beast" and "fun" categories. As I reflected on it, I realized I do need some of the fiction I read for fun to not only be fun and enjoyable but to challenge and stretch my mind in some way. If I don't feed my brain that sort of entertaining read periodically, it can start getting bored and restless and the pure "fun" reads start becoming less enjoyable. It's not as bad as trying to suppress category 1 but it's not something I ignore either. However it's also not what I was asking about.

I was curious what sort of thing others read at present purely for fun and especially in how they identify a likely candidate. After all, there are more potentially interesting books out there than any of us will ever read. When you read something about a book or run across a book when browsing, what makes you take a second, deeper look after that initial surface look? And what tends to push a book over the threshold so it becomes one you actually read?

Hopefully that's a little clearer than my initial and somewhat muddled post.

And I realized the recent club read, The City & The City, was a solid example of that category of fiction that challenges my brain in some way. My mind latched onto the device of "unseeing" in it and gnawed at it from all sorts of different directions. I found the book enjoyable, but the way my brain kept pulling out everything it could to more deeply understand that mechanism and continued to do so long after I finished reading meant that it wasn't the sort of fun that was at all relaxing. I need some books that do that, but I also need the pure escapist reads that I can get lost in while reading in a way that releases mental tension rather than creates it. I was mulling what makes that sort of read for me today and why neither DCC nor Mickey 7 really fit the bill.

I catch your drift. I really enjoy it when a book presents me with a new way of looking at the world or just has an interesting concept that I hadn’t encountered before. Those really have staying power.

When looking for entertainment I can never just “turn my brain off” and enjoy a book. There’s always a part of my mind visualizing it and analyzing what’s happening. I’ll let most authors get away with anything if they don’t violate their own internal consistency and get to the point. Sometimes, though, it’s so badly done that I get annoyed, but the writer really has to drop me out of the story to get me.

I mean, I read a lot of superhero comics, so my ability to let things slide is top tier. I don’t get bogged down with “how would this even work?” because I’ve already calibrated my brain to “silly comic book” and set expectations accordingly. For example, earlier this afternoon I was wondering how Superman trims his fingernails. Thinking about stuff like that gets in the way of enjoying the story.

I find I have to do that to varying degrees with every book, and sometimes I just can’t get past the “this makes no sense” alarms going off in my head. (See my review-rants about Binti and Hell Divers for examples.)

Dungeon Crawler Carl really flirted with the “makes no sense” line and it was probably the audiobook performance that carried it for me. Mickey 7, on the other hand, did what I like: created a world with interesting characters and a cool premise and didn’t overstay its welcome. That’s why DCC barely got 3 stars from me while M7 was flirting with 5.

Scott wrote: "I read Mickey 7 over the weekend and it landed in a similar place for me as last month's book. It was fine..."

Well, I thought Carl was pretty great, but I'm right there with you on Mickey. It was pleasant enough, which made it work pretty well as an audiobook, but I don't feel like I'll every think back to it.

Great, thought-provoking post.

I think a pure entertainment read is any book (usually SFF) that I selected because I enjoy the topic or the author.

I do occasionally, do a "work" read - like a classic book or "must read". Examples include Dracula, Frankenstein, or Pride and Prejudice. Sometimes those turn out to be entertainment reads - Dracula felt like that more for me than Frankenstein, but both were more enjoyable than I thought they would be.

As for the mention of the multiple categories like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc - SOMETIMES I do that as a "work" read, but rarely so. The industry (or at least the chunk of the industry that I read) seems to naturally be going in that direction anyway, especially with short stories, novellas, and YA books. So most of those end up being enjoyment reads even if I end up also learning a lot about a category that I'm not a part of. (with the recognition that no author can represent an entire category with themselves or their characters)

I don’t really have any distinction in my mind between an “entertainment” read and a “work” read. Either I think a book is good and I’m enjoying it, or I think it’s bad and I stop reading it. Sure, some books take more mental effort to read than others, but I often quite like a book that’s a bit more “chewy”. This book hit a good spot for me of having a fun sardonic writing style, together with some interesting concepts and world building.

Ruth wrote: "I don’t really have any distinction in my mind between an “entertainment” read and a “work” read. Either I think a book is good and I’m enjoying it, or I think it’s bad and I stop reading it. Sure,..."

Good points on this book. I found it to be a good remix or blend of a bunch of concepts I've seen explored in other books, but put together into one book in a new way.

I rip thru the Antimatter Blues in a couple of days.

I appreciate the feedback and thoughts others have shared. I find it helps me clarify my own thinking.

Trike, my brain certainly never shuts off either. The closest I've ever come to that has been the experience of spinning and moving on a dance floor to music I can feel pulsing through my body. But losing myself in a world and story created by an author has been my primary escape through most of my life. When I'm reading purely for "entertainment" that's generally the mechanism I'm seeking. I wanted my mind to be absorbed in the flow of the story. Comics have also been another lifelong interest and I expect no consistency over time in them. Nor do I expect any sort of "realism". I do need internal consistency in the story a particular creator is telling during their arc. I just read the first TPB of "Exceptional X-Men" and I love what Eve Ewing and Carmen Carnero are exploring with Kate/Kitty Pryde. While I have some general background, I dip in and out of specific comics for the most part these days so I don't know all the background details referenced. But in comics you don't need to know everything to dive into the story. (I'm also intrigued by Gail Simone's direction in Uncanny X-Men.)

Engaging my brain in the work and the story provides the mental release I'm seeking when reading for "entertainment". I do like the other sort of fiction that starts my mind working and drawing connections to aspects of my experience in the broader reality outside the book. I mentioned how The City & The City did that. Nnedi Okorafor's Death of the Author is another recent read that did the same thing. I loved it more than I can articulate, but the themes it tackles are ones that my mind kept pulling on and making connections outside the context of the story. I enjoy that experience and also look for it, but it's different than losing myself in a world, a story, or a collection of characters.

Eric's comment about selecting a book for "pure entertainment" because of the topic or author is the place on which I was focusing. I didn't specify author, but when I mentioned that books in ongoing series I already love are a given, the same thing is true for new books by an author I already know I love. I'll almost certainly look at those more closely.

I was digging more deeply into the topic category. Something in the title, the cover art, a blurb, or short description might catch my eye and cause me to look more closely at a book. Lots of books don't. I also read plenty of sources that recommend books, like The Big Idea posts on Scalzi's blog. Many recommendations I skim right past, but some catch my attention.

But once a book has my attention in that liminal moment, what tips the scales one way or the other? More often than not, I set it aside and move on. Sometimes the scales tip the other way and I get it and read it. My instincts are usually right in the given moment these days. Almost every such book I pick on my own will end up falling into my second or third category and I'll enjoy the experience. But that decision process is mostly operating in a less than fully conscious manner for me.

And I then compared that personal history selecting books to the two most recent book club reads and my experience with them. I wouldn't have picked either of them to read on my own initiative. I know that for certain when it comes to DCC because I remember when I first heard Felicia Day excited about it years ago on her "beta" podcast.

But by itself, that fact doesn't explain much. I never would have picked The City & The City or The Ministry of Time to read on my own initiative, but I'm very glad I read both of them. Moreover, I have no real complaints about either DCC or Mickey7. I didn't dislike either. I thought they were well-written and constructed and I felt like the author created the story and experience they set out to create. But neither story really pulled me in and "it was fine" was my only real reaction when I finished reading them.

So I considered what sorts of not fully conscious elements is my brain running through when something has led me to take a second look at a book by an author I haven't read before? Because I don't usually spend a lot of time debating whether or not to get a book in that moment. Most of the time the answer is 'no' but when it's 'yes' the book almost always turns out to be what I described as my second and third categories, especially in the past couple of decades. I can't remember a recent time when my reaction after reading was in the realm of merely "fine".

When I tried to think about it in those terms, I recognized the four qualities about a book I mentioned tended to recur in recent decades. I read and have always read a lot, especially in this book club's genre. They aren't the only ones, I'm sure, that might tip the scales toward a 'yes' in that moment of consideration, but it feels like those are some of them.

That's the question I was exploring. In that period of consideration, what elements or qualities about a book in its description or in reading some of its text will push me to acquire and read a book by an author I haven't read before instead of simply moving on?

And I think I'll add another item to my list. The author's prose and use of language can grab me and make me feel I have to read this. Max Gladstone falls in that category. I was already reading Toby when I ran across Seanan McGuire's Middlegame so it crosses boundaries with the "favorite author" category. But the opening chapter of that book seized my brain and I immediately knew this was something different and I had to read it. And immediately dove in.

Anyway, I appreciate the thoughts everyone has shared.

This is not DIRECTLY related to what you wrote, but I think the author has some interest ideas in here and their mention of what a challenging read is made me think of this thread that you started here. https://reactormag.com/how-do-you-sol...

I've read my fair share of actual romance genre books over my lifetime. It's not a genre I have the same intense interest in as SFF, but I never have minded relaxing into a well constructed and written romance novel. And a part of me craves a story where relationship problems are solved. I hadn't thought about the welcoming and inclusive nature of the romance genre, but that feels accurate. And I recognized a similar drive in myself on a thread where I was pushing open-ended and inclusive genre boundaries on the S&L discord.

Of course, SFF has always included elements of other genres at times including romance. I can think of lots of examples where most of the genre elements were hit including a happily ever after. I would say romance authors tend to handle romance better than many (but not all) SFF authors. And some authors can be such a hot mess (looking at you Heinlein) that sometimes it's not entirely clear exactly what they are writing. But I looked over my shoulder and saw the omnibus edition of Chalker's Four Lords of the Diamond series and realized that romance was really the central driving force in every individual novel and the series as a whole as well. It's been too long since I last read it to remember if the stories would actually qualify as romance genre, but I think they might have been a blended genre. (And not saying his skill at doing romance was great. I honestly don't recall. But I do remember it was a pivotal force in each story arc.)

But I've never been a critic of Romantasy, however it's defined. I haven't read Maas, but I love the Empyrean series.

Enjoyed the article. Thanks!