Not over yet
I’m afraid to read. I’m afraid to write. At every turn, it seems like words may take the shape of Pynchon’s terrible haunting and suddenly transform into orgies of corpophagia and rockets and chess symbolism and pirhanas in the dildoes and who knows what else. It’s terrifying. I tried picking up another book, and I kept seeing bits of Pynchon’s style and found myself unable to go any farther. Maybe it was just a poor choice. Either way, I’ve perhaps unfairly reconsidered the opinions of the person who recommended it as unreliable. I don’t think I’m ready for another serious book yet. I need a palate-cleanser, something that doesn’t mean a damn thing and doesn’t get all fancy with the words.
I’ve decided to read Sisters, Lynne Cheney’s lesbian Western romance that I paid three digits for a while back in a moment of poor judgment. I bought it mostly for the hey-look-at-the-goofy-thing-I-have aspect, but maybe I can get a buck or two worth of entertainment out of it, too. I read the first chapter, and it looks like it’ll be as bad as I could have ever hoped. Even the typesetting is awful, as if some of the letters just don’t have the energy to hang onto their given line. Attacking the cheap printing is really kind of ad hominem, though, and the writing itself is not short on failings. It reads like bad slash fiction, full of inflated descriptions of nonsense and words that should never appear in serious works. I’m pretty sure that there has never been a “settee” in anything worthwhile. I know from the Internet that it isn’t going to be as titillating as I might hope, but it’s still delightfully bad. It even gives me a little hope in that it apparently doesn’t take a whole lot in terms of quality to be published. I just hope I don’t have to marry a rich Wyoming politician.