Coming Out of the Closet: Fantasy & SF

I am a geek. This is no big surprise to anyone, right? Unfortunately, I'm not the kind of geek who makes tons of money and has all these mad technical skillz. No, I'm the pathetic kind: the comic book reading, SCA meeting attending, dreaded voluminous fantasy and science fiction reader! I read voluminously, that is, I don't read voluminous things. I do try to stay out of the billowing subgenres. Mostly. I don't read the real dreck - and yes, there is some real dreck out there - but there are also great writers. Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Elizabeth Hand.

I tried to hide this for years. Not only my general geekiness, but my taste in books, because it is wildly socially condemned. You'll get a better reception saying that you disembowel puppies every morning for breakfast than you will if you say you read fantasy and SF. Yes. Yes you will. Most people back away in pity and horror if they discover that you read that weird stuff. That weird stuff that only total and complete loser nerds read. My entire family - except M - is appalled by my taste in literature. Because it isn't literature, it can't be, it has nothing in common with Literature at all. You can bring up Garcia Marquez and Borges and Mark Helprin and god help you, Edgar Allan Poe all you want. Their work isn't fantasy. It's something else, something good. Well, I'm old enough now to be proud to be a geek - what the hell - and I don't care anymore. I'm happily reading my way through Guy Gavriel Kay and Charles de Lint and Terry Pratchett; I have the new Neil Gaiman on early order from Amazon, and I don't even try to hide them before more acceptable books anymore. I'm geek and I'm proud, damn it! Sing it, sister!

The only problem is that now I've gone and gotten a library card. This is historically unwise of me, somewhat akin to starting a land war in Asia. I have this trouble with library cards: I'm not good at returning things on time. Not good at all. Not because I haven't read them yet, because I usually read them within 48 hours of borrowing them, but because I get busy and I just can't get myself over to the library (or the video store, which is why I now owe not only Orbitz but Blockbuster significant - more than $10 - sums of money.) Once things get really late, my own particular neurotic form of conflict avoidance kicks in, and I just can't stand to bring them back so late. That gets worse every day, and finally I have to move to another state. Or something. So A is concerned about my library card. She's also disgusted by the books I'm bringing back. She read some Terry Pratchett by mistake a couple years ago and has not yet forgiven me for the sheer weirdness of it all. That's okay. She is partial to time travel historical romances, which are clearly (except for Diana Gabaldon, only not the last couple books, because in the beginning of the series each book covered like 20 years and now, the books are even longer yet they cover 2 or 3 days, which I understand is because she doesn't want them to get old, but come on, nobody has that eventful a couple of days, also I hate the daughter with an unholy passion, she is so annoying) a vastly inferior form of book.