This book is a lobster.

Posted by: Redhead on: February 13, 2017

• In: for the love of reading | Sheri S Tepper
• 7 Comments

The big mega-grocery store near us sells live lobsters at the fish counter. I’ve never bought one, I don’t know if they knock it out before you take it home, or what.  But they always have live lobsters in an aquarium, and I am fascinated/terrified of them.  A few times a year, I get brave enough to wander up to the tank, maybe tap on it a few times, and watch the writhing mass of articulated legs, eye stalks, and rubber-banded snapping claws crawl over and around itself.  To the amusement of the folks working at the fish counter  I last about 10 seconds before running away like a scared little girl. Those lobster critters really creep me out!!  But every time we go to that store, a little voice inside me says “let’s go  look at the lobsters!”.  because although they creep me out, I still want to go look at them.   see if maybe I can last more than 10 seconds.

(East coasters forgive me! I am a midwesterner!)

Sheri S. Tepper’s Sideshow is one of my all time favorite novels.  the 3rd book in a very loose series, you can read the books as stand alones and in any order, but if you read them in somewhat chronological order, you’ll want to read them Grass,  Raising the Stones, and then finally Sideshow.  It’s a very loose  series, the books take place on different planets in the same universe, but there are some behind the scenes things that make more sense if you read the books in the order they were published.  I’ve read Raising the Stones a handful of times, and Sideshow probably six or seven times, but I’ve only read Grass once.  All I remember about Grass was something about horses that were not horses, and that the book scared the shit out of me.

But, I wanted to reread this trilogy in the order in which it was published, so I took Grass down from the shelf on Saturday morning. By Sunday night, I’d read about half of it.

I remembered this book scaring me.  I remember being disturbed by it.  I didn’t remember how viscerally terrifying it was.  But I can’t put it down.  Every time I’ve put it down, I keep coming back, touching the cover, thinking to myself “I’ll just read a few pages, then I’ll go do something else”, and suddenly I’ve read 40 pages and an hour has gone by.

This book is a lobster. It scares the shit out of me and makes me feel all creepy crawly and I’m afraid of the nightmares it might give me, but a little voice inside me keeps saying “let’s go read that book!”.