The books we should have read…

Sep22

I do like lists. From the Huffington Post, here’s a list of books that apparently people claim to have read but haven’t.

The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer – I read the Knight’s Tale at school, and it’s on book mountain, but I haven’t read any more tales.

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville – nope. Maybe I should add it to the list.

Ulysses by James Joyce – nope. Probably won’t either.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens – nope. The excessive sentimentality of the films put me off.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie – no. It’s on book mountain so I probably will.

Moby Dick by Hermann Melville – why yes. Lots of lists of whales.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking – yes, I have. And I understood some of it.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace – um no, never heard of it.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco – no. Saw the movie.

Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust – no. But I really feel I should.

Don Quixote by Cervantes – no. It’s on book mountain.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner – no. I might though; I really like the title.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi – no, but it is on book mountain, so one day I will.

Two for me then. What about you?

Thoughts on reading: Virgin Slave, Barbarian King

Sep19

Oh goddess, it’s so embarrassing. I hate reading these things. But, following a workshop on the challenges of writing for Mills & Boon, there are several of them on book mountain. I’m perfectly prepared to believe that writing formulaic romance requires considerable skill and discipline. The second Mills & Boon I’ve read since the workshop has provided little evidence.

It’s ok. It’s way better than the first. There is description as well as inner monologue and there is a pleasing symmetry in the protagonists journey which makes the patriarchy marginally easier to swallow. It has Goths; not quite Vikings but close enough. Other than that, it has little to commend it.

It did make me think about the dynamic of love stories, though. Protagonist 1 meets Protagonist 2 and finds them horrible/infuriating yet attractive. Protag 2 feels the same. Yet, they can’t just enjoy each other. No, instead they must be convinced that it would be wrong to love each other and very angry about what they are feeling. Why? What sort of relationships are like that? Not healthy ones, for sure. Mixing love up with shame and anger is not a cocktail I want to drink. But there’d be no story if there were no conflict, would there? If the conflict were external, it would become a different type of story like a quest or an adventure. To keep it a romance the conflict must be internal, fueled by misunderstanding and insecurity. And that’s why they follow this pattern. If they don’t, it’s not a story. So, I learned something from reading Virgin Slave, Barbarian King by Louise Allen.

My non-fiction was more edifying. I read the Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus and it was life-changing. The main essay is Camus’ thoughts on how one can respond to the absurdity of a godless world. Surprisingly uplifting.

Thoughts on reading: The Turn of the Screw

Sep15

Last year, there was a television adaptation of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and thus there followed much discussion of its horror and psychological twists. Well, what more reason do you need to read a book?

I struggled with the language. This was a surprise. I read the odd classic and although it takes a few pages to get into the rhythm of the writing, usually I find that it is perfectly clear once you get used to it. Perhaps it’s because the classics I tend to read are by English authors – Dickens, Hardy, Austen – and James is American. I wondered if the reason I was finding it hard to get to grips with was because it was an American classic and the language was subtly different to English literature of the same era.

What I found really frustrating was that I didn’t know what was going on. Things weren’t spelt out. There were coded references to socially unacceptable behaviour, which to me could have meant all sorts of horrors. Some people find that leaving things to the imagination makes it more scary. Not me. I can imagine a lot of things and not being able to choose which is the thing being described (because there aren’t enough clues to nail it down to one thing) is frustrating. It certainly underlines my belief that detail is what convinces in fiction. For me, the horror was reduced by the vagueness and ambiguity, not increased.

My non-fiction book was Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan. It was excellent, full of good advice, good examples and lots of things to try out in my work-in-progress.

Thoughts on reading: Whit

Sep11

Whit by Iain Banks has been on book mountain for a while. Years in fact. I was put off Iain Banks’ mainstream fiction by not being able to get through A Song of Stone.

It’s a slow start and I only stuck with it because this is my work. If I was reading for entertainment, I probably would have put it down well before I got halfway through. Not that there’s anything wrong with it – Banks is a fine writer. It’s just that the story wasn’t compelling. I know what I like; vikings, vampires, adventure and sex. There was none of that. It was a story of a insular community and their relation with the outside world and it wasn’t that interesting to me. Until about halfway through. Then it becomes clear that certain people are up to no good and there is a bit of a mystery at the centre of the story.

So, the second half of the book is better, but I don’t think I liked it that much. Which is not really the point as we’re here to talk about the writing. The main thing I noticed about this book was the worldbuilding, perhaps because I don’t expect it to be so obvious in mainstream fiction. Banks is describing the world of a group of people who live in a way that makes them quite alien to ‘normal’ people. He carries this off well. It is in the first person and the (sole) POV character, Isis, is completely invested in her way of life. She is special in this world, the very opposite of an outcast, and it takes several large event to make her start questioning the status quo. The worldbuilding takes place via Isis, and as she’s not an outsider, Banks has the discipline to convey her total acceptance of her world. It is the outside world, the contemporary world, that is portrayed as strange. Her strangeness, the weirdness of her world is shown to us by her skewed interpretation of the people and events around her. It was a skillful demonstration of worldbuilding that brought the reader into the world, rather than leaving them watching from the edges.

The other element of note is almost the flipside of the first. Choosing a protagonist who is at the centre of her world, with high status, who feels loved and accepted, enabled excellent worldbuilding. But it also meant that shaking that belief in the goodness and rightness of the worldbuilding would take some significant events and that had to be done convincingly. I feel that contributed to the slow pace of the unfolding of the plot. Banks spent the first half of the book building Isis and her world up and then the second half tearing it down. I think I would have prefered more foreshadowing than Banks gave us.

In non-fiction, I read The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton. I thought it would be about how humans are biologically wired for faith, but is actually more about how beliefs affect the science of biology. Some interesting ideas, if not a totally convincing theory.

Learning from reading

Sep7

A lot of the posts on this blog are about the books I’ve read and what I’m learning from them. But it would be true to say that I don’t do this in any systematic way, other than thinking about it and making some vague notes on this blog.

Then I read a post on the Querytracker.net blog on learning from the masters. The idea is that you fold up the pages where a passage strikes you as being particularly effective. Simple, no? Except I’ve always believed that writing on books is sacrilege, and while I’ll fold down a little corner to mark my place and break a spine to read it more easily, the idea of folding over half a page seems less like turning a small corner and more like scibbling notes. Of course, when I write it out like this it sounds like the nonsense it is. So, folding up the pages is on.

The next steps are to transfer the passages that you marked into a dedicated notebook, then analyse them and look for patterns. So that’s what I’ll be doing. I’ve got a couple of books marked up already and just waiting for transfer into a notebook. What do you think?

Thoughts on reading: Non-Stop

Aug19

Number 33 of the SF Masterworks is Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss, which deals with the generation-ship vision of spaceflight. As I’m doing with the Fantasy Masterworks, I’m sort of making my way through the SF Masterworks as well. So far, I’ve read 2, 4, 43, 46, 52, 53, 60, 61, and 67.

I enjoyed this. The worldbuilding is good and there is a mystery that builds up to an excellent reveal. What I noted particularly about the writing was the use of language. Aldiss uses words that indicate one thing to the reader and manages to convey that the characters of the story understand something else by them, for example, ponics (the crop the characters harvest) and ship-related words. There’s a lovely point at the end where the main character, Roy, sees the sun for the first time and says he imagined it square because the lights on the ship were all square. Having said that, sometimes, often enough for it to be noticeable, Aldiss uses cliches and adages that are too contemporary and it jolts the reader out of his world. So, I found use of language both good and bad in this book.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger is a book based on a 1970s TV series of the same name, examining the role of the observer in studying art and the myth and meaning of oil painting in Western culture. Fascinating, thought-provoking and challenging. The ideas in this book really excited me. Recommended!

Thoughts on reading: Black Man

Aug17

I read a lot and as I’ve got better at writing (and more confident in my writing), most of what I read either makes me feel ‘I can do this too’ or ‘That’s a good way of doing it’. Occasionally, I read something that makes me feel talentless and stupid, that makes me realise how big the gap is between where I am and where I want to be. Richard Morgan’s Black Man is one of those books. It was amazing.

Something about this book made it seem better than everything I’ve read in a long time. All the basics are there and are done well. It’s a great plot, with twists and turns but no cheats. There are two key moments where I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next (in a good way) and in the end everything came together to create a full understanding of what had happened. The plot was really strong and well paced.

Worldbuilding is something I particularly noted. Morgan throws the reader into his world immediately and just leaves them to catch up. It’s slick and realistic. I don’t know if it’s just that I haven’t read much new science fiction lately, but it seemed really modern. It seemed like Morgan is really up on current affairs, cutting edge science and social/psychological theory and his vision of the future jumps off from now. He has lots of little details that really ground the book and make it real, such as having the characters reference celebrities, music, intellectuals and gurus. My over-riding impression was that this was a really intelligent, thorough book.

The characters were well-drawn, believable, with deep inner worlds and congruent outer actions. It was all done through inner monologue, for the POV characters, dialogue and action. The action scenes were exciting, convincing and pacy.

It’s not perfect. I noticed one or two clunky adjectives and awkward turns of phrase but that was all in a 600+ page book. I think that what makes this work so well is that all the elements are done to a high standard. There are many enjoyable books that have good plots with ok characters, or great writing and weak plots, or fascinating characters with nothing to do. Few books get everything right, and this is one of them. And on top of that, the themes are intelligently thought through in a fascinating way. Read it. It’s amazing.

In non-fiction news, I read The Courtesans by Joanna Richardson, which is a book of short biographies of 19th century French courtesans. Interesting, and full of tidbits for the work-in-progress!

30 Days of Buffy meme – Part 5

Aug6

Day 25. Favourite Buffyverse saying. See, I think this is about catchphrases and Buffy didn’t really have catchphrases. There was great dialogue and some amazing lines, and a slanguage all it’s own, but no catchphrases. This is a one of its strengths. There are few things more annoying than having catchphrases endlessly repeated at you. I definitely went through a phase of adding ‘-age’ to nouns though.

Day 26. Favourite Scooby moment. The bit in Primeval where Buffy, Giles, Willow and Xander gather to discuss the things that were said in The Yoko Factor. They are not ok as friends but they decide to do what needs to be done anyway.

Day 27. Cutest moment. Anya dressed as a scary bunny in Fear, Itself.

Day 28. Character you love to hate. This really has to be Buffy. She is often whiny, miserable and self-righteous. She struggles to find the fun and hides behind her responsibilities. But then, she does get put through the wringer and you can’t help but empathise with her.

Day 29. Episode you hate that everybody else loves. Don’t know what everyone else loved. I wasn’t overly keen on Him in Season 7.

Day 30. What you think made Buffy so great. So many things. The wit, the music, the feminism, it had vampires. It had great characters: the heroes were a little bad and the villains were a little good. There was some awesome dialogue and great chemistry. It didn’t take itself too seriously. Buffy had It, the X-factor, that indefinable thing that makes something greater than the sum of its parts.

30 Days of Buffy meme – Part 4

Aug4

Day 19. Character you like that everyone else hates. Again, not sure I know who everyone else hates. People seem not to like Kennedy and Glory; I thought they were ok. Glory had some great lines and a really good plot device in the form of Ben.

Day 20. Best Spike-centric episode. They’re all great, obviously. But I think I like Lovers’ Walk largely because of this piece of dialogue from Spike: “You’re not friends. You’ll never be friends. You’ll be in love ’til it kills you both. You’ll fight, and you’ll shag, and you’ll hate each other ’til it makes you quiver, but you’ll never be friends. Love isn’t brains, children, it’s blood. Blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.”

Day 21. Best Willow-centric episode. Doppelgangland. I love vampire Willow and this is close on one of my favourite episodes of the whole show. It’s a little slice of a different imagining of Buffy, how it might have been if Whedon was a grittier, darker writer.

Day 22. Best Xander-centric episode. Xander doesn’t have that many episodes to be centric in, does he? I think The Zeppo from Season 3 because Xander gets to take care of himself and learns that he can. The Triangle is fun too, but I’m not sure it’s really Xander-centric.

Day 23. Two characters you wanted to get together that never did. Spike and Faith. That would have been hot. And also Joyce and Giles, even though they kind of did a bit in Bandcandy.

Day 24. Favourite example of 90’s special effects. There’s a training montage moment in When She Was Bad in Season 2, where it is clearly SMG’s stunt double.

30 Days of Buffy meme – Part 3

Aug2

Day 13. Favourite potential slayer. The potentials didn’t really become individuals for me until Season 8, but I’m not really counting that. I’m going to go with Kennedy, mainly because she’s the only one I can remember.

Day 14. Favourite female villain. Faith. She rocks. If I was a female villain, I’d be Faith.

Day 15. Favourite male villain. Spike. Close runners up are Caleb and the Mayor.

Day 16. Episode you like that everyone else hates. Well, I’m not sure that I know what episodes everyone else hates. A few people seem not to like Dead Man’s Party, which I quite enjoyed.

Day 17. Character you relate to the most. Faith, definitely. For a lot of the time she was deeply unhappy and, particularly at the time it was on tv, I was pretty unhappy too. She takes independence to a paranoid extreme and I get why. Possibly not to quite the same extent.

Day 18. Character who didn’t get enough screen time. Faith! Or possibly Caleb. Or Cordelia, she was hilarious, and I was gutted when Season 4 opened and she wasn’t in it. As I remember I had to wait a week to find out she was in Angel.