(sighs) A Wind in the Door gave me trouble in earlier years, and it's worse now. The book has such a strange and discordant vibe—I can be totally with it for a bit, for a couple of pages perhaps, and then L'Engle lets slip something that's just so whitebread Christian that I immediately look for something else to do. Hence our reading has been extremely piecemeal. It really says something about us, perhaps, that we're finding "Hellbound Heart" an easier read. The Hellraiser movie does not do that story much justice, sad to say, but it was probably impossible to make a faithful adaptation of such a story and sell it in the 1980s horror-movie marketplace.
~Chara
This definitely resonates. I was pretty indiscriminate in my reading for a long time, and once I had decided to lift the cover (often on a whim, or because I was curious about the cover art), I'd just bulldoze ahead whether I could make sense of the work or not. I read the entire Time Quintet more or less back to back and felt disoriented the whole time. It was clearly "speculative fiction," but what it chose to speculate about, and how, was so wildly different from the norms of the other paperbacks I was chewing through in those days that I found myself plowing forward in the hopes that it would begin to make its own kind of sense. Having not yet received my "apologetics decoder ring" in the mail at that time certainly didn't help any.
The only experiences I remembering finding quite as mystifying during that time were reading The Final Encyclopedia (1984) having no idea that it was the (widely-considered-to-be-boring) fifth book in a series; and reading The Dosadi Experiment (1977) purely because it gets cited by the excellent and timeless Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials (1979) and thus again not realizing it was sequel.
