Thank you fior your kind words. I’m not a particularly gifted reader of most literature. For instance, I like very little poetry, but the few things I like, make me feel like the top of my head is being sliced open. Similarly with fiction: most of it I just can’t connect with, and I’m irked because I wasted my time in incomprehension; but the stuff I actually grab onto, I finger and sniff and dream about and carry around with me for years.
Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person.”
R.C. Hutchinson’s “Child Possessed.”
Shusaku Endo’s “Silence.”
So we’ll see if Gene Wolfe grabs me!
I rarely even use the word “literature”, most people who do wouldn’t consider the stuff I dig up to snuff. I reckon you can read stuff either because a bunch of elbow patches say it’s good(doesn’t mean that it’s bad writing), or just to please yourself(doesn’t mean that it’s great writing). If at the end I have found it enjoyable then what more can I want?
Good luck with Book of the Long Sun, as well as the gardening! There’s passing mention of a garden in BotLS if I recall...
Freegards