reality collides with perception

I asked for Rachel Bach‘s Paradox Trilogy for my birthday last year, and, in my Read The TBR List In Alphabetical Order quest for 2015, I started reading them this week. I also discovered that my interest in them was a source of great confusion to Ted, who knows I hated Honor Harrington and had extrapolated that I disliked space opera/military SF, which is bonkers. I stared at him in utter astonishment and he said, “Well, they look like they’re up the Honor Harrington alley and you don’t like those kinds of books!”

“Like I totally hate the Jack Campbell books,” I said somewhat incredulously. “And I totally didn’t read all the OLD MAN’S WAR books. Or FOREVER WAR, for that matter. Or Lois McMaster Bujold. Or all of Elizabeth Moon’s military SF.” (Although, to be fair, I read those before I met Ted.) Anyway, he got a pretty funny expression of “all of these facts I was indeed previously aware of have conflicted horribly with this notion of reality I had created,” but it was all cleared up when I explained that it was the Harrington books in *specific* I didn’t like. (Which is something he also knew, but had just filed under “hates military SF.” Seriously, the first three chapters or so were just, like, filled with Specific Things Catie Doesn’t Like. It’s like Weber had a checklist of tropes that would get on my nerves and went down it assiduously marking them off. I didn’t get any farther than that in the books. I couldn’t stand it. :))

None of that has anything to do with the Paradox books, so although this was going to be a Recent Reads post instead it’ll just be an amusing anecdote post. :)

ytd wordcount: 16,100