# case hartshorn/5HC *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 26 May 2002* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Michael Andre-Driussi *26 May 2002, 20:52* > Hartshorn wrote: > It happened to me. On my first reading of 5HC as a young twentysomething I > thought if a fine bit of writing but rather confused, fragmentary plotwise. > The depths bypassed me entirely. It was not until I met other readers > that the book was opened up for me. > > Mea cupla, mea maxima culpa: but it was Wolfe taught me that SF books > *could* be like that. Scratch that, it was Wolfe who taught me *books* > could be like that. Thank you for the example. This must be a fairly common experience for Wolfe-readers: the reader, through talking with other readers, through reading lit crit from John Clute and others, begins to see things that formerly escaped the eye. OTOH, hartshorn, it does not seem from what you wrote that you initially disliked 5HC. It sounds more as if you liked it okay and then developed a deeper understanding of it, which probably (but not necessarily) raised your opinion of it. I'm not certain, but it seems to me that many people use something like a two-tiered track: the one tier is the like/dislike axis, running from love to hate; the other tier is something like "respect," ranging from "lack of respect" to "total respect." Putting these tiers together results in odd combinations that sound like what people often say about books: "guilty pleasure" would be "like" + "low respect"; "grudging respect" would be "dislike" + "high respect"; et cetera. =mantis= SIRIUS FICTION booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley Lexicon Urthus out of print! http://www.siriusfiction.com/ ---