Life, Death, and Taxes

I’m almost done with taxes.  If I hadn’t stopped to watch an Inuyasha disk I’d have finished.  It’s Mr. Al’s fault for luring me to the couch.  Anyway I still have a few hours to get it done in.

Usually at this time of year I dream in numbers.  I will be so immersed in the work that I see papers covered in instructions and numbered columns in my sleep.  Not this year.  In the last few days my dreams have been filled with the world Greg Bear created in his book Legacy.  I dream of ecosystems that are organisms in and of themselves.  I dream of hollowed out asteroids turned into star ships and strange, scientific thingies that let you walk into any number of different worlds.

I’m enjoying to book, but I can’t help making a few comparisons.  This is pretty typical Science Fiction fare.  It is written in first person narrative, yet feels several steps removed from the character’s experiences.  Although there is a significant romantic subplot, this book would never cut it as a Romance because it never evokes the feelings of love, lust, or attachment.

There is a lot of life and death in this book.  It features the massacre of a town, the sinking of a boat with the loss of all but five of those on board, and the struggles of a man who is alien to the local culture, which is in turn alien to it’s chosen planet.  Yet it doesn’t make my heart speed up.

In comparison Patricia McLinn’s book The Games featured skiing, hockey, ice skating, and biathlon.  In this case biathlon means cross country skiing and target shooting.  Although there are some moments when you can’t be sure the characters will all come out alive, there isn’t nearly as much death.  Yet it got my heart pounding.

Likewise, Jodi Henley’s book, Hot Contract,  has some heart-pounding moments.  It’s full of madness and mayhem, which I tend to like in my reading.  There’s a fair amount of death here, from a friend of the heroine who takes a nose dive from way too many floors up of an unfinished building, to a shoot out on the lip of a volcano.  It’s a tad bloody, but not depressing in the way parts of Legacy can be.

Both The Games and Hot Contract start off rough with confusing wording or head hopping.  In both cases I put my faith in the author and pushed through and was rewarded in spades.  I’m not sure I’d have pushed through with Legacy, even though I’ve read half a dozen Greg Bear books and enjoyed them all.  I think it’s because I knew Romance would give me an immediacy that is simply missing from most Science Fiction.

Don’t get me wrong.  I am definitely gong to finish reading this book, which is more than I can say for about a third of all the books I pick up in any given year.  It’s got it’s hooks in me.  Now if I can only figure out why.

Do you get hooked on books you don’t enjoy?  Enjoy books you think you shouldn’t?  Do you read for the immediacy of a story?  Or can the story be told from several steps back and still please you?