Engine Summer

Wow, what a gorgeous way to read. I feel like I have caught glimpses of light bouncing off glass in some of McKillip's stuff, but mostly I don't think this is the kind of reader I am. At this point in my life, I have been trying to figure out exactly what kind of reader I am for decades, but the only answer I have ever come up with is "it depends." I love the texture of language, if it is there to be had, and my favorite authors, including McKillip, really craft their texture, so that I get fuzzy and silken and crunchy and brocade and the fraying threads of old tapestries and the lumps of clay yet to be shaped and like that, only not literally about tapestries and clay, if that makes sense. And if there are lots of descriptions of taste, those work great for me too, except when I'm nauseated and then I have to be careful about what I read. I am mostly not a visual reader, and not at all an aural reader. I have a hard time figuring out how anything sounds except the words used to describe the sounds, and descriptions of scenes often just confuse me (I have been known to watch a movie adaptation of a book and exclaim, "Oh, that's how that looks!" Which is weird, because I do often visualize things as movies when I'm writing them). Where I am visual comes back to the shapes of the words on the page, which are also a texture, so maybe I am a tactile reader, though that's not a type of reader I have heard of when the question of how people read comes up. I know it intersects with my love of poetry.

I do get structural things, but it's again the feeling of them, which I guess is really where the sense of glass in some of McKillip comes from, because it's the slipperiness of it, and particularly the more fragile sense of handblown glass than, for instance, a cut-glass vase, and the glass is only bits because there are also the brocade bits and the tapestry and clay bits and so on.