From the Bookshelf: Passage

Working my way down a pile of books I’d bought at the city library’s “spring reads sale” a few months before, I came at last to the conviction it was time to leave the remaining nonfiction for later and read one of the novels I’d found. That I’d managed that at all had seemed something given how often for the past several years I pass by fiction sections without so much as picking up a volume to see if its blurb does anything (even as I take in “stories” in media less respectable than prose). Still, taking the next step onto a knife edge between “what if I just think it beneath me?” and “what if it just goes over my head?” had stayed a little intimidating in itself.

For one of the novels, that old-fashioned draw of the author’s name had first caught my attention. Years ago, the educational-channel speculative fiction talk show “Prisoners of Gravity” had talked up Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, and not that long afterwards I’d found a paperback of it in a used book store. The time travel story, with its slow build and wallop of a payoff, had had an impact on me, and I’ve read it more than once and often over the Christmas season it’s set during, although not lately. A fair while after that I’d found a used copy of her To Say Nothing of the Dog, set in the same time travel milieu although with a rather different mood to it. Then, before the Science Fiction Book Club went out of business, I bought two linked volumes by her, only to see someone’s dismissal in unspecific terms of them before I could get around to reading them, such that they’re still sitting in my basement. That I couldn’t recall having heard of a book by her called Passage was interesting, but even as I bought it from the library book sale I could ask myself “and what if there’s a reason I haven’t heard of it?”
( Not judging by its cover )