Skip to main content

Do I Still Want to Read Fantasy?

I was looking at my TBR shelf yesterday--the books aren't as neat as they were in the beginning of the year but they don't seem to be leaving the shelf, either--and it struck me that maybe I don't like to read anymore. Or...maybe I don't know how to pick my books. And then I saw an announcement for the 2021 SPFBO (a contest for self-published fantasy books) with a long list of 300 self-published fantasy books and I thought...maybe I could take a genre that I used to like but have fallen out with and see what's up with my taste in books.

And so I typed up the entries in my own list, looked each one up on Kindle, downloaded a few sample chapters and reshuffled the list into samples downloaded, samples I might want to download, categories I don't have any desire to read, and books not available on Kindle. Having followed SPFBO for the past couple of years, I'm well aware that my tastes don't generally align with the grimdark, longform tastes of many of the judges but the long list provides a collection of several kinds of fantasy and there's nothing that feels more productive than typing and organizing lists. 

Here are the samples I've downloaded:
  • A Troll Walks Into A Bar (Douglas Lumsden)
  • As I Was On My Way To Strawberry Fair (Raymond St. Elmo)
  • Blood Indigo (Talulah J. Sullivan)
  • Death by Miracle (Fowler Brown)
  • Emergency Shift (Daniel Potter)
  • Finnian's Fiddle (Chandler Groover)
  • Fool's Proof (Eva Sandor)
  • Fourth Sister (M.L. Farb)
  • Graves Robbed, Heirlooms Returned (Ashley Capes)
  • In the Jaded Grove (Kindred Realms #1) (Anela Deen)
  • King of the Hollow Dark (Cat Hellisen)
  • Order of the Magi (Christopher Scott)
  • Reign & Ruin (J.D. Evans)
  • Shadows of Ivory (T.L. Greylock/Bryce O'Connor)
  • Shift Happens (T.M. Baumgartner)
  • The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex (K.R.R. Lockhaven)
  • The Deathless Ones (Niranjan)
  • The Museum of All Things Lost & Forgotten (A.R. Henle)
  • The Wayward Wizard (Alesha Escobar)
  • The Wrong Path (Jane Glatt)
  • Waking the Witch (W.V. Fitz-Simon)
I also have a few additional poetry zines in the basket. I'm curious to see what the notes & reading reveals about my tastes--are they changing that much? Are changing tastes at the root of my writer's block? Are lists the best way to feel productive?

Hope you're having a good week!

-- Chrissa

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Turn Away

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse , for #193. Turn away, like the moon, listening... Listening to the planet that rumbles with a hundred million slaps. All the feet, all the rockets, all the  pistons in the cars on the asphalt over the chasm where the veins run deep, blue in sunlight, black at night. Running over the chasm.  Once or twice they ran to you. Once or twice they ran by. Greetings and salutations. The sky is an entertaining shade of concrete yellow as the rain promised earlier in the week makes good on its arrival. It's a disturbing bright sallow sky, the kind of sky that puts you in mind of old movies and degraded film stock and the pops and crackles incidental to the main story.  Several years ago I made a resolution to journal more and last year I came across a video that suggested I actually re-read those journals, at least those of the previous year, at the beginning of each new year. Technically, I have kept the journal resolution, making daily notes in...
15 comments
Read more

The Soul and The Spine

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #195 . Come and share! When it blew out the candle, It began to speak, voice low,  eyes dimmer than flame. Jenn believed, once upon a childhood (she's still there... but it's waning), it inhaled fire. Spines, tonight. Gears ladder bones and metal and plastic, all that lived, rungs to heaven. Heaven is a level of space where you can't breathe  so they used to send the dead. When the flame goes, it takes our memories with it. But not bot files. Maybe it believes  she'll sleep easier if bots go breathless, too. It continues murmuring and she pretends she's hearing a confession in a box Like the song her mother plays when the dark stretches  between signals We can handle shocks. She can handle the dark, the small  not-flame of its eyes. It's finally winter!! Which means bitmapped frost on the roofs, cold mornings, and a table full of succulents that are pretty much glaring at me because the kitchen window isn't the same as full su...
14 comments
Read more

A Single (Terrible) Poem

 I did not buy the poetry book whose sample Was page after page of essay and praise. I'm not following the trumpets. Today I follow the ringers-- Huzzah and call out the streets! Lift your arm, swing the bell; Call out the quiet, call out the neat Call out the loud, call out the bold Call out the wrong, call out the wise We remember the bells We shiver the skies.    This isn't about...anything. It's not about nothing. It should go without saying that a poem shouldn't need an essay or a textbook to be what it is. And I'm not sure why, with a stack of poetry at hand to be read, one silly Kindle sample (and writer's block and anxiety and...) would push my buttons so badly. But seriously. Where is my parody book full of fake blurbs that runs for 50 pages and ends with a single (terrible) poem?  -- Chrissa
11 comments
Read more