Ships and battles are not a downside, per se, but not something I really look for or require. :) But the main problem was simply that before I heard everybody talking about her in the lead-up to Wiscon last year, I had never heard of LMB.
I was a big sci-fi and fantasy junkie when I was very young, because those were the books that I found tucked away mysteriously in our house library. (This is actually more of a mystery than it might seem on the surface -- neither of my parents reads sci-fi or fantasy, nor do either of my sisters, and there are a whole lot of weird artifacts that I pulled from the family home that became very formative for me but which nobody in the family seems matched to or will claim ownership of.) However, I mostly just read along established lines, buying more and more of the books by the authors I already knew. I didn't have any friends who were into sci-fi and fantasy and had no connections to the fannish folk. I expanded a little by joining the Science Fiction and Fantasy book club briefly, but that didn't get me that far, surprisingly. They tended to also feature the same authors over and over. Just before highschool, I started to get more into existential writing, general stuff filed under "literature," and so on. It was easier to explore because I knew more people who talked about it, the books were more likely to reference each other or make comparisons to other authors on the jackets, you heard references to them in public discourse more often, the presentation and jacket art are more likely to be themselves appealing, the slip cover blurbs are more likely to identify the major themes. It's still my meat-and-potatoes, but I've become over the last several years interested in reading some sci-fi and fantasy again. After such a long hiatus, though, I walk into the sci-fi and fantasy sections and find that there's just an overwhelming array of choice, very little way to tell what's going to be good and what's not, and mostly that I've never heard of anybody.
firecat has been making suggestions which have been helpful. :) I'm in the middle of reading, "Little, Big," which will occupy me for a while. (That's where my aversion from experimentation in reading comes from -- I love new things and surprises, but I read very slowly, so picking up a book totally at random is a significant commitment in terms of personal time.) When I'm done that, though, I believe I will be reading some LMB, because my curiosity has been growing. :)
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I was a big sci-fi and fantasy junkie when I was very young, because those were the books that I found tucked away mysteriously in our house library. (This is actually more of a mystery than it might seem on the surface -- neither of my parents reads sci-fi or fantasy, nor do either of my sisters, and there are a whole lot of weird artifacts that I pulled from the family home that became very formative for me but which nobody in the family seems matched to or will claim ownership of.) However, I mostly just read along established lines, buying more and more of the books by the authors I already knew. I didn't have any friends who were into sci-fi and fantasy and had no connections to the fannish folk. I expanded a little by joining the Science Fiction and Fantasy book club briefly, but that didn't get me that far, surprisingly. They tended to also feature the same authors over and over. Just before highschool, I started to get more into existential writing, general stuff filed under "literature," and so on. It was easier to explore because I knew more people who talked about it, the books were more likely to reference each other or make comparisons to other authors on the jackets, you heard references to them in public discourse more often, the presentation and jacket art are more likely to be themselves appealing, the slip cover blurbs are more likely to identify the major themes. It's still my meat-and-potatoes, but I've become over the last several years interested in reading some sci-fi and fantasy again. After such a long hiatus, though, I walk into the sci-fi and fantasy sections and find that there's just an overwhelming array of choice, very little way to tell what's going to be good and what's not, and mostly that I've never heard of anybody.