Katie Bruce thought she’d revisit some old faves to help battle a reading slump—but some SFF just should’ve stayed in the ’90s…
It’s fair to say that with everything going on in the world right now, my reading has taken a hit. The idea of starting something completely new is too daunting; I want familiarity, to find comfort in a story I already know.
So I decided it was time for some re-reads!
All those books that I loved and kept, carting them around from house to house because one day I would re-read them. Except whenever I thought about doing so there was a brand-new release that I’d been desperately waiting for, or multiple people recommended a book I bought years and hadn’t yet gotten around to yet. I’d go back to that old favourite next time.
And the TBR kept growing, and those re-reads got further and further away.
(Photo by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov on Unsplash)
Enter the reading slump: I desperately wanted to escape into a book but my brain could not bear the thought of new input. It provided the perfect opportunity to finally re-read all those books on my shelves I’ve been staring at longingly for years, the books from my teenage years, my early forays into the world of fantasy!
Reader, it did not go well.
Was That Actually A Good Idea?!
I started with a book that’s been on my shelf for the longest. It involves a deal with the devil and I first read it when I must have been about nineteen. On a scale of “was this good or was I just deeply nineteen?”, I was so very deeply nineteen.
The male MC is painfully misogynistic. It threw me right back into what it was like to live through that era and that is the very opposite of the escape that I was looking for. I DNF’d 50 pages in and freed up a space on my bookshelves.
The next was a proper fantasy series, a portal fantasy with a big mystery in it and a touch of sci-fi. It was a series I had read multiple times in my teens and early twenties—it had to be good, right?
It was not.
I got almost a hundred pages in this time before giving up. It has two POVs: a man, who is well-written, and a woman who is written exactly how you would expect a woman to be written by a man in the 1990s. She doesn’t quite breast boobily, but she is ‘unaware of her beauty’. She is so two-dimensional it is painful. No thank you. More space on my shelves freed up for new favourites.
(Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash)
And that is the point at which I gave up. Because as much as my foray into the books of my youth had been a failure, it had succeeded in getting me out of my slump. It reminded me of just how limited the fantasy of my teenage years was, how awfully women were portrayed, how few non-male writers there were, and that’s not even mentioning the lack of representation for people of colour, LGBTQIA+ folk, disabilities, etc.
This experiment made me appreciate just how far publishing has come. My TBR is more than 50% women, it has trans authors, queer authors, authors of colour, authors of different religions, disabled authors. It has variety and diversity that I could not have even dreamed of when I was nineteen and reading three-page descriptions of a woman getting dressed whilst the man has gone on an entire adventure in the same time. (No, I’m not going to name the books, that’s not the point of this article. Pick any book written by a cishet white man in the ’90s, that’ll do)
Representation Has Come A Long Way
The books that I read as a teenager and young adult did their job—they got me into fantasy, they gave me an escape—but I don’t need to cling to them anymore. I have worlds upon worlds upon worlds to visit now. Worlds that look different from mine, are filled with people that are different from me, and at the same time I can find my own representation any time I want. The idea of opening a book and finding a bisexual woman as the main character was not something I could imagine as a nineteen-year-old living in a small town that didn’t even have a bookshop. Now I can pull a handful off my shelves at a glance and know there are still more waiting.
None of this is to say publishing nowadays is in any way perfect. Traditional publishing still has a long way to go, especially when it comes to authors of colour and female authors of colour in particular. I am not trying to diminish that fact: there is still a long, long way to go.
But the failure of my re-read experiment has become a success for my TBR (which is so very close to being under 100 now!). Among the books that I’ve read since my failed dive into the past—and all better than anything I could have imagined back then—are:
The Last Place On Earth by Bex Benjamin: a cosy, sapphic, post-apocalyptic tale set in Yorkshire
The Night Ends With Fire by K X Song: a Mulan retelling, but instead of filial piety she wants to seize power for herself
The Bone Door by Frances White: a dark and twisted labyrinth with a brilliantly diverse cast of characters
Sometimes nostalgia can be fun, and there are certainly more old favourites on my shelves that I know I will still enjoy, but sometimes a reread can simply remind you to take off those rose-tinted glasses and look around at all that today’s bookshelves have to offer.
New worlds await, quests beyond your imagining! Go! Seize the adventure! Those old favourites will still be there when you need them.
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