Trying To Expand

I told all of you before that I’m trying to expand out my reading habits.  I tend to get caught in a few books that I’ll read over and over again.  When I find a writer I enjoy, I’ll read and re-read their work.  Unfortunately, that also limits me sometimes as I don’t find fresh stuff as often as I’d like.

Therefore, I’ve tried to expand my horizons…and I’m failing miserably.  I picked up Earthclan by David Brin and have tried getting into it several times.  I really have.  I’ll pick it up, read ten or twenty pages, and make a date to read the next ten or twenty the following day.  However, I’ve had to go back and re-read several times, and I’m barely beyond page 100.

This hearkens back to what I wrote a few days ago about the weirdness of science fiction.  The basic premise of what Brin wrote is good – species throughout the galaxy “uplift” other species into sentience, whereupon that species owes fealty to its progenitor for 100,000 years.  However, not only have humans uplifted themselves without any sponsor, but they uplifted two other species(dolphins and chimpanzees).  Now humanity has found a derelict fleet of spaceships that may hearken back to The Progenitors(ie, the first sentient species in the galaxy), and everyone is fighting over the crew that found the prize.

Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, Brin also writes it in a kind of weird style, even with the Terran ship in question.  I get needing to mix things up to show alien differences, but it is often incomprehensible(to me), and I can’t understand some of the significance of what’s going on.  If things were a little less…alien, then I could enjoy it more.

That’s where I find myself with a lot of books I want to read – they have a great premise, but the writing is so out there for me that I can’t follow it well enough in order to enjoy the work.  Perhaps there are simply some authors I can’t get in to, but it gets both time consuming and expensive to keep trying out new ones.  Maybe that’s why I’d like to get back to browsing bookstores again.