I used to read a lot of fiction, but then the stick turned blue.
In fact, the moment I became pregnant I began to limit my reading to stuff like the What to Expect series. After a while, the parenting non-fiction stuff narrowed itself down to “How to” books, such as How to Keep Your Children from Turning All Your Brain Cells Into Slime. Not that any of it worked.
Then I got ahold of an old Asimov’s magazine from the Carlsbad Library used book store and read Kage Baker‘s “Caravan of Troon.” Asimov’s August 2001.)
The humor, the characters, the language, the road trip plot line—all of it added up to the kind of a story that sticks with you, the kind of a story you return to while shopping in the produce section and the next thing you know, some smart-aleck is asking if you’re going to buy that head of romaine or ask it out on a date, and you realize you’ve been staring as you wondered what kind of menu Mrs. Smith could’ve created with your miserable pantry.
I subscribed to Asimov’s in the hope that I’d catch any stray stories Kage Baker sent in that direction, I bought everything Baker had in print and then I preordered all her upcoming novels.
And one day a preorder showed up on my doorstep: The Anvil at the End of the World. It was the Kage Baker novel containing “The Caravan from Troon” story and I got to enjoy it all over again, except that it was even better because there was more.