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[shreena]

One of my friends linked to this post by sashagoblin  on what to read to get inside her head.  It got me thinking because I don't think I read in the same way.  I don't think you could tell all that much about me from the books that I love.  I read to get inside other people's minds, not to get further inside my own, it very much feels like an extroverted

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[khalinche]

There are some books that I love because they describe things which are very dear or essential to me - maybe not even dear, maybe even loathed, but nonetheless integral to how I experience the world, or descriptive of the world that I experience. Alan Warner and E Annie Proulx are the best examples of this - dark, dirty rurality with vivid imagery of the natural world as ambivalent, beautiful and threatening and humans getting up to sinister and mundane acts of cruelty, love and survival within them. At the risk of being precious, if you can't on some level *get* those books, then there's a part of me that you can't appreciate either. Also, if I tell you that I love Jackie Kay, Audre Lorde, Marge Piercy and Colette, then you can probably guess that I'm a great feminist queermo.

On the other hand, I love urban writing that sparkles and fizzes - Zadie Smith, Dickens, Peter Carey. I love deftness and wit and the complex tangle of social and romantic relationships. But I also like manfiction, with lots of wacked out ideas, 2-dimensional square-jawed characters, aliens, pacey plotting and conspiracies. I like gory detective books with slatternly women and dark mysterious men, too. I don't think you could divine that much about me from those. Zadie Smith or John Scalzi, it's all entertainment.

I suppose they're all grounds for connection though. I've had some wonderful conversations enthusing over rediscovery of Joan Aiken recently - her intrepid, fast-talking, daring female characters, her fabulous made-up words and her love of place. It's a way to communicate and share with someone, like any other.