Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I have a bit of history with this book. When I first read it, I was maybe 13 years old. I had been reading and devouring Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators books at a rate of about three a day before my aunt found out how quickly i was reading them and told me I should get something more substantial. She was the one who always bought my books for me, from the mall, so she took me to Waldenbooks and let me choose.

Janissaries was slightly bigger than other books (trade paperback sized, but that was unusual back then) and had soldiers, so it grabbed my attention and that was the one I chose.

And I didn’t like it. It was too different for me and unapproachable, and even though I looked at all the pages and read all the words, I did not really retain anything that I had read. So I put the back to the side, and the next time I chose a fantasy title instead. (Piers Anthony’s A SPELL FOR CHAMELEON)

I really experienced this book this week because Audible has started a new program that allows members to listen to thousands of books (as far as I can tell) for free, and Janissaries was one of those. I still did not care for it very much, but now I realize that i did not like it back then due to several factors:

* I do not like militaristic books. Or movies. Or video games. As much as I respect the people who serve in our military, it just doesn’t appeal to me as an art form
* I wasn’t old enough at 13 to understand the world in which the characters of the book interact. Relationships and pregnancies and so on ... I had no tie-in
* none of the characters seemed especially relatable to me. Probably because they were adults and I was still very much a kid. But even now, re-experiencing the book, I’m not connected to the characters

So anyhow, that’s a lot of words just to give something a two-star review, but I think it’s interesting that I have stories about books.