Kathryn Huxtable's Reading Material

My favorite novel for the past couple of years has been Little, Big, by John Crowley.

I have always read a lot. Generally, I focus in one area for several years and then move to something else. I've always read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, though I read less these days than I did ten or fifteen years ago.

My current reading is not really focussed in any one area. I've been reading some mysteries, some sf, some astrophysics, some mythological analysis, some history.

Fantasy and Science Fiction

Here are some works I've enjoyed for some time, along with some authors whose work I look for.

John Crowley

Little, Big is a big, quirky novel that took me three tries over about ten years to actually get into. Since then, I have re-read it several times, including once out loud to my then spouse. That was fun.

The book is a multigenerational novel centered around one family in upstate New York who have a certain contact with Fairies and other "supernatural" beings. It contains many other common fairy tales within it, woven so skilfully that you don't really detect them until after they're past. It's a deep book and repays re-reading. The style is not particularly that of science fiction, so people who don't like sf might like Little, Big.

Ursula K. Le Guin

I've enjoyed Le Guin's writing since I first encountered The Dispossessed back in the early 1970s. I can't think of a bad book she's written. Recently, I've noticed that I re-read Always Coming Home the most. It's not really a novel---it's more a novella length fiction piece interspersed with anthropological and mythological details about the fictional future people about whom she's writing.

Rachel Pollack

I first became aware of her through her writings on tarot, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in a psychological interpretation of tarot. Her Shining Woman Tarot is a deck of her own design, implementing her own insights into tarot. I'm not fond of her artwork, but I like the deck anyway.

More recently I've read two of her sf novels, Unquenchable Fire, and Temporary Agency and I highly recommend them to anyone interested in potential future spiritual transformations. They're set in a common future world, where in our future a spiritual transformation has taken place and the majority philosophy is of earth-centered spirituality and of religious ecstacy with a Witchy/New Agey flavor.

Unquenchable Fire is, in my opinion, the more insightful of the two. It is a chronicle of a woman who is made pregnant by a divine agency and who is not happy about it. It covers the duration of her pregnancy and labor with a flash into her past and a preview of a few future events with her daughter.

It has some interesting things to say about the nature of religious experience and how we seek different things from it.

Temporary Agency, on the other hand, is a detective novel with minor lesbian elements. I liked it, but it didn't shake my world view or open up any new vistas.

Contact kathryn@kathrynhuxtable.org with questions or comments about this page.

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This file was modified Wednesday, 15-Dec-2004 12:53:34 PST