Black Gate

I’m an unrepentant role-playing gamer; an addict, if you must know.  My gateway drug was the original Dungeons & Dragons – the boxed set with the pseudo-Smaug red dragon on the cover.  My grade school chums and I played at every opportunity, from quick encounters at recess to marathon weekends of goblin-slaughtering and lair-looting.  OD&D was just the beginning.  From there, I branched out into other games: AD&D, Traveller, The Fantasy Trip, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, Call of Cthulhu . . . the dragon’s share of my formative years were spent tooling around the galaxy, delving into catacombs, or losing my sanity to various squamous and rugose horrors.

The games changed over the years.  Oh, I still delve into OD&D, part of the so-called “Old School revival”, but most of my gaming time is spent playing D&D 3.5 or a homebrewed d20 version of Warhammer 40K: Dark Heresy.  I’ve explored story games like Grey Ranks and In a Wicked Age, where the tale being told is more important than the framework of rules.

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Most sf/f criticism can be sorted into three four heaps (as far as I’m concerned): book reviews, literary history, snark, and stuff that doesn’t interest me. The first two categories are obviously useful, I expect; I wish those last two categories overlapped more. One wastes a lot of time in the snarkosphere.

Every now and then, though, I read something that goes elsewhere. I wouldn’t call it a heap–there aren’t enough things there to qualify as a heap. More like a stack. These are pieces of sf/f criticism that help me think about reading and writing–that enrich my experience.

Like I say: there’s not much there. But sf/f isn’t unique in that respect: much (not all) literary criticism strikes me as stuff by people who can’t read who are telling other people how to read. I generally find it unreadable and, what with one thing and another, I have to read a lot of it.

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Bill Ward recently posted two articles on “hyperspeed reading,” the first a reaction to columnist Sarah Weinman’s claim of reading 462 books in a year, and the second taking a deeper look into reading speed.

I’m not a slouch when it comes to the amount of books I read in a year. I finished eighty-one in 2008, but that makes me look positively lazy and incompetent compared to Weinman’s mid-four centuries claim.

However, here’s my confession. I actually am a speed-reader. I taught speed-reading and reading comprehension courses for two years as part of a private reading school that sent me around the country teaching through various University programs. Now I am coming forward to talk about my own experience with what “speed-reading” encompasses and discuss what happens in your brain when you step on the gas and blast through pages like Wally West. (Or Barry Allen. Or Jay Garrick. Or….)

There exists no single speed-reading method. A number of different schools teach varying techniques. Some of these I do not consider “reading” at all, but a form of skimming. The method that I taught uses a broad approach that combines several techniques, but still requires that students read every word. Nevertheless, I offer this disclaimer about what follows: this is only one of the ways of teaching what schools classify as “speed-reading.”

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As a recovering English major, I sometimes just like to read for the hell of it, enjoy the story and not worry too much about literary merit or what any of the stuff might symbolize.  Moby Dick, after all, is a great yarn about high seas adventures.  But, then again, you’re missing something if you don’t also ponder what it is has to to say about God and the existence of evil (which is nothing particularly uplifting; Melville will never make the Oprah book club).

When I write reviews, I have to wear my English major hat, and frequently I realize that I missed something that I might not otherwise have considered if I were just reading for amusement and didn’t have to think about it in an attempt to say something semi-interesting that might actually be helpful to someone who may not have read the work in question, or read it the same way I did.

I actually like reading some literary criticism, but what I can’t stand are critics who suffer from “what I’m saying is more important than what the text is actually saying” syndrome.  And, sometimes, I just don’t feel like working that hard.  Case in point is this post at the blog for Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. I think I understand Niall Harrison’s responses more than I understand the points taken from Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory though, not having read the book (nor do I intend to) that’s probably my shortcoming, not his.
 

 

 

 

I have it on good authority (Laurene Landon herself) that Hundra 2 is filming in Portugal this summer, with the same director as the original.  He’s in Sintra/Cintra now.  I’m hoping it’s another good-looking widescreen production rather than a direct-to-video cheapie.

So Hundra is once again keeping the embers alive, this time of Sword and Sorcery movies . . .

The Grauniad is listing “1000 novels everyone must read” and lately the sf/f novels on the list have been bouncing around the genresphere. It was almost instantly memed. You were supposed to italicize the ones you’d read, strikethrough the ones that induced an existential crisis, and smear butterscotch pudding on the rest. (Finally, a use for butterscotch pudding!) Or something like that.

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