A Change of Mind

I'm thinking it's time to change my reading habits. For quite a while now, I've been reading one book at a time, and usually racing to finish it because there are so many other books I want to read, and there's only a limited number it's possible to read in a lifetime, for God's sake.

In fact, The Big Issue always used to give this figure as 3000, which terrified me. There are so many more good books than that... I mean, I own more books than that. Assuming an average reading lifetime of 60 years, this works out roughly a book a week, and I start to panic if I don't manage this. Fortunately I got a considerable headstart when I was a student, as I didn't have a great deal to take up my time other than reading books. At present, however, trying to juggle a job with a writing career, it's a struggle to make that figure.

I think it's time for a change of approach, though. I'm doing the books I read a disservice in rushing through them so fast, and that there's no intrinsic reason, except for this Big Rush, why I shouldn't read two or more at a time. A lot of people work this way: indeed, I used to do the same myself when I had more reading time available. I just need to retain the details of several books in my head over a reasonable period of time, and how hard can that be?

So, then. I'm Now Reading Red Dust by Paul J. McAuley, a well-known British sf writer with a bit of a mystical bent but a strong grasp of science -- rather like a latter-day Arthur C. Clarke, although he can write rather better than Clarke did for the majority of his oeuvre. Red Dust is set in a Chinese-dominated civilisation on a terraformed Mars some 500 years hence, and is marvellous at depicting a planetary civilisation with a realistic cultural and historical texture. (So far it's better than Amazon's reviewer says it is, anyway.)

I'm also reading The Clockwork Woman by Claire Bott, an excellent fable of early feminism and the world in which it operated. The story, which has strong echoes of both Mary Wollestonecraft and Mary Shelley, demonstrates "womanhood" as a cultural construct by making the narrator a literally artificial woman. It's part of Telos's Time Hunter series, and is a sophisticated read.

In between times, I'm reading the latest issue of Fortean Times, which has a splendid article on early attempts at cyborgisation. Apparently in the nineteeth century snails were thought to be telepathic, communicating through an exchange of "escargotic fluid" in the aether. Fantastic.

When I finish The Clockwork Woman, I intend to start What Does a Martian Look Like?.