You're listening to all the backlist a weekly show about books that are not new.

I'm your host, Danica Ellis. This is episode number 463.5 and today I'm going to talk about a couple of queer SFF books that were too smart for me, but I still really enjoyed.

So here's the thing with me as a reader.

I obviously love reading and books.

I don't really need to tell you that.

But I do have quite a few shortfalls as a reader. One is that I have a terrible memory, especially for names and places,

and that makes a difficult to read any book that has a lot of characters that

relies on you keeping them all straight. So that can be anything from mysteries to political fantasy books.

Those I have a tough time with and mystery is also because they expect you to remember the plot points and I have already

forgotten them. I also don't visualize things in my head. I don't have full a-fantasia, but I'm pretty close to that end of the scale. I just see sort of vague, shadowy glimpses of images.

So that makes any book that relies on visuals really difficult for me to

maybe not read but enjoy. That again is a lot of fantasy novels. A lot of fantasy novels are really written so that you will

picture this amazing fantastical world and that is kind of the strength of the book. But because I don't see anything, it is not very appealing to me.

So as I think I have outlined, fantasy can be a difficult genre for me.

Fantasy is a huge broad category, but epic fantasy, high fantasy,

those sorts of dense fantasy books with a lot of world building, that can be really

hard for me to keep track of and to enjoy. So I don't read a ton of them, but every once in a while I'll pick one up and sometimes it's a hit and sometimes it's a miss and every once in a while I don't really understand what's happening I'm not

following it but I am still enjoying it and that's what happened with these two

books what is sci-fi when fantasy. I wasn't totally following everything. It

definitely challenged me as a reader because it plays to my weaknesses, but I still had a great time, I still recommend it. I have a theory that these

flaws of mine as a reader are also kind of a strength because I am used to letting a book just wash over me. I am fine with

reading a book and thinking, I don't really understand what's going on right now, but maybe

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