On My Wishlist #18: The Tempering of Men by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear

On My Wishlist is a fun weekly event hosted by Book Chick City and runs every Saturday. It’s a meme where participants list books they want but haven’t actually bought yet. They can be old, new or forthcoming.

I should be getting a review copy of this from Tor at some point soon, but this book is definitely at the top of my Wishlist…

I cannot wait to read this book! But rather than sharing the summary, I think I’ll just relate a funny and mildly embarrassing story I have relating to this book’s prequel, A Companion to Wolves.

Another library in the area was using A Companion to Wolves for a Sci Fi/Fantasy book discussion and I was trying to pick more recent selections for my own club. So I decided to use the book without reading A Companion to Wolves first because I had to pick the books well in advance.

If you haven’t read A Companion to Wolves, you ought to do so because it is quite good. However, you can only imagine my delight and also abject horror upon reading and realizing that I’d picked a book with several intense gay sex scenes to share with the older men who made up my book club.

Now I loved the book and I didn’t actually regret selecting it, but I was a bit… well, concerned.

On one hand, I don’t want to censor people or have to warn people off of books for any reason although it never hurts to ask readers for what they want. Personally I think its awesome when books come out that don’t make turn being GLBT into some big stage production or ordeal. I want to be able to read them myself and I want to be able to support the authors who do provide me with hope for the future.

On the other hand, I wasn’t sure what the hell was going to happen during the discussion or after wards. I also didn’t want to loose what few book club members I had because I’d picked a book that was likely to be outside of the comfort zone of every single one member I had.

Thankfully, fans of the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres are pretty awesome and open-minded. My book club liked the book just as much as I did even if they were a bit baffled by certain scenes.

In fact, the biggest obstacle to our discussion was simply the names and pronunciations of them. In the end, we eventually moved on to giving each other reading suggestions.