Books read and stuff

[mrissa]

So very tired. Oof. Am hoping that dinner will give me a second wind. A third wind? As long as it doesn't give me the wind, I suppose we should all be grateful and leave it at that.

Ista went outside to give the neighbor dogs their instructions, and she came in full of vinegar at the very least. We have already had our walk today. We are not having another. It is cold and dark and I am tired. I see Red Dot in my future.

I read some books lately.

John Barnes, A Million Open Doors. I had been deeply unimpressed by the first John Barnes novel I read, so deeply that I fully intended to never read another. (If you're going to model your book on a Heinlein juvenile, and you want me to like it, do not under any circumstances model it on Podkayne of Mars. With either ending. Blarg.) But rysmiel said this one was good, and rysmiel would not deliberately mislead me, so I went out and got it. And I liked it enough to put the sequels on my wishlist: the culture clash with no culture in the right, that was quite good enough to sell me on this series. And I will maybe give another of his books a look. Just in case.

Michael Chabon, The Final Solution. So if you have a book this short, in this flavor of litty, I think what you're going for is the sort of book people will describe in mineralogical terms. A perfect little jewel, lapidary, etc. This was not such a book. I had great difficulty caring about anything or anybody, and I don't feel Mr. Chabon did nearly as much as he could have to help me along. Refugee kid with a spy parrot: meh. Who would have thought meh? But meh it was. Also the illustrations seemed to go with a different style of book entirely, one by Norton Juster or Salman Rushdie, but maybe that's just me. (Also lumping Norton Juster and Salman Rushdie together as the same kind of thing is maybe just me. Dunno.)

Tamora Pierce, Beka Cooper: Terrier. Hmmm. Well, it got better -- the ostentatious description of getting barley water and getting sneered at for it made me think it was going to go even farther than the Trickster books in the direction of trying to undo any good the Alanna books may have done anybody ever. But it didn't go farther. It probably didn't even go as far. I'm provisionally willing to keep on in this series, in borrowed copies, but this book being set 200 years before the rest of the books kind of undermines the "portraying a social shift" justification for the way the Tortall books have gone after the Alanna series.

Geoff Ryman, Lust. And what a dear man he is, to have written such an unerotic book on such a porny topic. Wow. The geekage level was just amazing. If you've ever been the person picking apart what is supposed to be a hot love scene going, "Wait -- where is her foot? I don't think curtain rods are rated for that usage. And did they just happen to bring one of those with? Just in case they found someone similarly inclined? My land, what else must they have in that suitcase, to be prepared like that?", then this is a book for you. (It doesn't pick apart love scenes like that. But the approach is rather similar.)

(I have said many times that I could not go dreamy-eyed in high school watching "Ghost" because I couldn't forget that the body doing the hot love scene was Whoopi Goldberg's, not wossname's, even though they were showing wossname's. Also, wossname is So Not My Type anyway. As much as I hate hate HATE the explicit central thesis of "When Harry Met Sally," and as much as Billy Crystal is not, shall we say, my masculine ideal, at least his character had an inkling of sense of humor about himself. The things that pass off as romantic without any laughter or self-awareness at all...oof. But that is an unrelated rant for another day.)

Nick Sagan, Idlewild. First novel. Most things I could say to characterize it, other than that it has heavy use of virtual reality, would be spoilery. Suffice it to say that this is not a cheerful novel, and that the ending is rather abrupt. But winning the not a cheerful novel, ending rather abrupt sweepstakes for early November, conveniently appearing in order by authorial surname, is...

Adam Stemple, Singer of Souls. They tried to warn me about the ending. They did not convey the magnitude of it in their warnings. It was not that it was an unhappy ending -- I like ambiguous endings better than happy or unhappy ones, but a good happy or unhappy ending will do fine with me. But this specific one went clunkclunkSCREEEEEEECLUNK in my head. Not in a "my world is now different due to the undermining of genre conventions" way, either, I'm afraid, although I could see where it might hit some people that way. The rest of the book was really good, and I've liked his collabs with his mom. I will buy his next book. It's just the last few pages that...didn't do it for me, let's say.

Rex Stout, If Death Ever Slept, Might As Well Be Dead, and Three Witnesses. I liked several things in this segment of the series. I liked how Wolfe's introduction to a rather nice dog was handled -- the dog was beautifully characterized, the monkey not so badly either. But the one that's sticking out in my head is the way that Wolfe and Archie's status as famous detectives actually bites them in the butt. They don't get to have the advantages of Being Famous Detectives without actually having to be famous detectives. Good stuff.

Charlie Stross (autopope), Glasshouse. I was not as impressed with this book as I wanted to be. I still enjoyed it, but there were holes that kept poking at me. He played fair with character memory loss, as far as I remember, but sometimes the reactions to that memory loss were a little strange to me. Some character beliefs were not questioned soon enough, and at least one of them -- in the resolution -- never was. But I still had fun with it.

Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer (1crowdedhour), The Mislaid Magician. Third in the series. Much fun. After my friend Ed's daughter was born, before we'd seen them with the kiddo, I wondered what Ed would be like with a baby. And the answer was, "Just exactly like Ed, but with a baby." Good enough, and this was like that: characters growing up and remaining themselves. And they've returned to epistolary format, which is good, I thought.

To-do list: move forward. Stop second-guessing self. Everything else as listed on extremely long to-do list here.

So okay, lots of you have gone over the 50 "most influential" works of SF/fantasy, and that's fine, but here's what interests me more: tell me about one work of SF or fantasy that has influenced you. Not the single most influential if you don't feel like it. Just tell me about one. How old were you, where did you find it, why was it important, do you think its importance to you is in line with how good it is or disproportionate for some reason, etc. etc.

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I was in my mid teens when I read the Heechee series by Fred Pohl. I know I'd read a lot of SF before then, but for some reason, the sheer magnitude of the concepts, of people and other intelligent species doing thing that required planning and working in deep time, really hit me. I haven't read them since, because I'm afraid my memory of being totally awestruck might be ruined by rereading. :)

Tanith Lee's Tales of the Flat Earth series also hit me at that time - I was in prime emotional territory for becoming addicted to ornate prose and florid concepts, with a sense of deep history, happening over hundreds and thousands of years. She was at her best in them, in my mind, before she ended up going overboard and writing a bunch of books that read to me like a series of exquisitely described tableaus* with no action connecting them.

I still tend to get sucker-punched by things that deal with deep time or with layers upon layers of history.


* I wrote "plateaus" for this at first, which led to some interesting mental images.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I never did get into Tanith Lee -- maybe I found her at the wrong age.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

When I was in college, I read A Wizard of Earthsea and was radically disappointed. I hadn't read any Le Guin before, and I resolved not to read any more. I concluded that she might be all right for some people, but I didn't like her.

Then I read an essay of hers and was overwhelmed. I concluded that I only liked her nonfiction and bought Dancing at the Edge of the World and devoured it. Then my girlfriend read me "The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas," and I had to grudgingly acknowledge that maybe I liked some of her fiction, after all.

It wasn't until a couple years later that my partner read me The Dispossessed aloud on a long roadtrip. It changed me, not because it convinced me of something I had previously not believed or anything like that. It was the sensation of reading it - hearing it, and then taking it and reading it over immediately for myself. I can't remember any other book I'd read up to that point which had me saying, "Yes. YES. Yes, THAT." I didn't really expect books to do that for me. Books served other purposes; they were foundational in my life and I loved reading, but they didn't go around making me feel like someone smarter and sanee and older than me had already thought about and perfectly articulated all the most important things that were struggling around, half-shaped and urgent inside my chest.

I don't compare other books to The Dispossessed. There wouldn't be any useful function served by trying. It's not that other things haven't influenced me strongly; they have. And it's not that The Dispossessed influenced me more. It's not linear. It's a superlative of one thing. There are an infinite number of other ways other things can have an effect on me. That one's just itself, is all.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I will never forgive that book for depriving _The Mote In God's Eye_ of it's richly-deserved Hugo award. And, as I re-read it many years later, I find myself feeling manipulated and cheated by it. Not, at this point, one of my favorites!

_A Wizard of Earthsea_, on the other hand, I remember loving extremely.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

While I don't feel that way about The Dispossessed, most of the books that have influenced my strongly are not comparable to each other. They are themselves. That's what they're supposed to be.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock. I was maybe ten or so. I put down that book and said, "I want to tell a story." And I haven't stopped.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Also, the Trickster books really disappointed me on a craft level; Pierce seriously chickened out on one of the hard parts of her plot, making the bad guys take care of it so the good guys didn't have to, and overall, nothing actually went wrong at any point for the protagonists. Is Beka Cooper better enough to be worth picking up? I love Tortall, but haven't been enamored of the recent stuff.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I read it when we first lived here, three years ago or so. Maybe two years ago. But it's still really awesome.

[todfox.livejournal.com]

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, definitely influenced a lot of my thinking about relationships and social relations. I read it very young, maybe 10?

Alternately, Ray Bradbury's R is For Rocket, which my mom forced on me as soon as I was old enough to understand all the words. I thought it looked dumb. I've been reading SF and fantasy ever since.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Marylyn, one of my best teachers who is now a friend, had a Ray Bradbury unit for our seventh grade Communications (honors English) class. The Illustrated Man and R is for Rocket. I went and found F451 on my own after that and scared myself witless for awhile -- I have always been more frightened by human inhumanity to books other humans than by supernatural ghoulies.

I read Piercy not that long ago, after I'd already read Joanna Russ and Tiptree and LeGuin and a bunch of other feminist SF. So it probably felt a lot more like part of a thing than it would have if I'd found it early and by itself.

[aszanoni.livejournal.com]

Anne McCaffrey's _Dragonsinger_. I chose that over _Dragonsong_ because it was thicker. :D

My seventh-grade science teacher made everyone choose an sf book for one homework assignment... Thus I discovered science fiction as a passion.

Also reread Andre Norton's _The Year of the Unicorn_ and _WitchWorld_, which I'd read about a year previous. Then began reading everything else sf/f that caught my eye. A lot did.

I've always felt lucky that so many authors have written. -does the happy dance-

- Chica

[guipago.livejournal.com]

Dragon Prince Melanie Rawn

I found it when I was 13 years old, picked it up based on the cover, read the back blurb and fell in love with the book. I'm the first to admit that the first hundred pages or so are slow, but it picks up. It was the characters that drew me in and kept me reading and re-reading the book. It was important because the main characters were human but didn't let their powers corrupt them. It taught me that you can be both powerful and humane. Playful and wise. It was good for a young girl who wasn't quite sure about who and what to trust in the world thanks to a procreating bastard of a father who'd tried to kidnap her that summer.

It did a lot for me, and I still re-read it yearly.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Those are good lessons indeed.

I read that series at about the same age, and I liked them enough to send away for the fan club newsletter (through the mail, so now everybody can marvel at how old I am) and get pen-pals through it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I read Blue Moon Rising and cannot dredge up how it was. I keep trying. It's on the tip of my brain. I should just reread it and have done.

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

RAH's Starship Troopers did a lot to crystalize my move from so called "Christian" morals to finding and building a set of ethics of my own. Then MiaHM came and really pushed what I was (A "good" southern boy) into what I needed to be to live.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Narnia.

Opened me up to fiction on more than one level. (This was when I was a kid, obviously.) Read it as a young kid, liked it, read it again later and found the Christian allegory parts of it. Did not feel betrayed, but rather gleeful that there was more to draw out of the books.

(Also, they were fun and affecting and touching (at times), and very very English Of A Certain Period.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I still occasionally get the urge to tell people that they are being a brick about something, but it seems like it would come off all wrong.

Also my obsession with sea serpents is pretty clearly traceable.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

This is really embarrassing to admit--

RAH's To Sail Beyond The Sunset. It was the book that really, really, really got me hooked on SF (and fantasy) forever and ever amen. It's a horrible book, but there was something in it that worked for me when I was a teenager. I don't know what that was, though, because as an adult, I find it almost completely unreadable.

Another book that was hugely important for me was Joan D. Vinge's Catspaw, which gets better every time I read it, still. Although The Snow Queen is better (I love the colonial theme in that particular series of books).

[telophase.livejournal.com]

So many of the books I read and loved as a teenager, I bounce hard off of now. I read Dune six times it didn't hurt that I was a fan of Sting, but I'd read the book twice before the movie was announced, but bounce off it now. Same with Marion Zimmer Bradley.

I think I just have less patience with things now. If I find the characters unlikable or the prose turgid or I find myself desperately hoping one of the characters would turn a light on so I could see the stupid story, I put the book down, whereas as a teenager I'd just plow on through to the end, assuming that I'd figure out what was going on eventually.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

Yet another voice piping up here to name a Heinlein book. In my case it was Friday, which I discovered at age 13. My local library growing up owned exactly one Heinlein book, and for some reason whoever managed their collection decided the one Heinlein book they owned should be Friday. It opened up a while new world for me. It contained enough of Heinlein's later political and sexual ideas to broaden my mind, but not so much as to make my head explode (remember, at the time I was a rather sheltered 13-year-old in a small town in southern Mississippi). I still come back to it quite frequently (after reading it pretty much every year during my teens, I'm now down to reading it every two or three years or so), and still take something new away from it every time.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Yes, Friday's a big one for me as well. The other Heinlein for me is The Past Through Tomorrow; while I really like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress I don't know that I can call it a prime influence.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Tombs of Atuan, at roughly the same age, I think, lateish elementary school--I'm very vague about ages. Sea voyages and identity and what do you do when you don't necessarily find what you expect when you get where you're going.

[rosefox]

It's interesting that you seem to be using "it's important to me" and "it influenced me" interchangeably. There are a lot of books that are important to me, but I can't say that they influenced me in any particular direction.

Gael Baudino's Strands of Starlight is both, though, or was when I was... twelve? thirteen? and acquired it somehow. Maybe I even bought it new, though considering its ragged state, that's hard to believe. I don't remember a time that didn't have that book in it, and that I didn't have it essentially engraved upon my memory.

It gave me a deity image that made sense to me and was wholly different from any other I'd encountered, a deity who was neither hopped-up human nor remote and unknowable. It gave me a complex world with complex people. It gave me a protagonist who was angry and hurt and sullen and selfish who was still able to be a good person and do good things for all of that. It gave me the first glimmerings of what it might be like to create a language. It gave me an understanding of the fear behind prejudice, and an understanding that as one's shape changes one must necessarily change with it but not necessarily in expected ways (I don't think I could have put that into words at the time, but it was very important for adolescent me, always struggling for a more womanly body than I had, to know in some fashion). It gave me a wise, magical people who still had to make difficult decisions (and a deity who wouldn't do it for them), and whose wish to all people--not just a general generic all-people-on-earth but the flawed and complicated people they encountered and knew every day--was that they could find a little peace. Magic was peace, and healing. I don't really have a way to explain how fundamental a shift in thinking that was from the wizards-as-magical-warriors outlook I'd picked up from Tolkienesque fantasy. Until I read this book, peace and healing were for wussy timid religious types, and if you had magic, you used it as a tool or a weapon. This was thoroughly, shockingly different. And there were people who disagreed with each other and cared about each other anyway, and ways in which all of them were right to think and act as they did.

I don't reread it very often; I don't need to, and I'm always a little afraid that it won't be as extraordinary and revelatory as it was. I mean, of course it won't. I know too much about the mechanics of it now, too much about the absurdity of the elven language, too much about the Mary Sue-ness (-nesses, really) of the protagonist, too much about Baudino's own politics and prejudices. All the same, when I do reread it, it's like coming home.

Perhaps I'll read some of it tonight before I go to bed. I don't usually read before bed--too easy to get caught up in what I'm reading and stay up too late and get all emotional and involved and awake--but I think I can still slip in and out of it without it owning my head that way. It's so easy to see that world, without even really trying: carved wood, a strand of red hair, the night sky from a precarious perch atop a turret, two women on horseback and a penny in a toll basket, two mugs on a table, shopkeepers crying their wares, and underneath it all the monstrous unfairness and frustration and difficulty and pain of the world, and over it all a cloak of stars.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think part of the conflation of importance and influence for me is that as a writer, a lot fo the books that are important to me also influenced my approach to fiction on the atomic level or below. I have a great deal of difficulty separating out how War for the Oaks or Beggars in Spain or whatever other thing influenced me as a writer vs. as a person. I'm not sure how much difference is genuinely there.

[kjc.livejournal.com]

Influential books from my childhood...

Probably one of the most important books to me was Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster, which I read in either my early or mid-teens (after falling in love with the Flinx and Pip series). I was moved and influenced by the deep seated need of both cultures (so utterly different) to communicate and understand each other.

I read and re-read and re-re-read Dragonsong and Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey starting when I was a pre-teen and continuing all through my teens. They spoke to my loneliness, alienation, and outcast status. The scene in Dragonsinger where Menolly tells Sebel and Piemur about how wretched her life was (they had no idea) still makes me teary-eyed.

Books that I consider influential are ones whose scenes float into my mind at random times. Ones that shifted my worldview or broadened it or inspired an "I can do that!" response.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

I could talk about re-reading the "Alanna" books a gagillion times as a tween/teen, or the DarkAngel trilogy by M. A. Pierce, found close by on the YA shelves, but the book that probably touched me the most was _Harpist in the Wind_ by Patricia McKillip. It's one of those books that I read and say "Yes! That's It!" without being able to define what "it" really is. I love the sense of mystery throughout the entire trilogy, the ending that just hits me in the right spot every time, and the characters who are never quite what you'd expect. Morgan, and the wizards, and the harp, and Raderle, Hed, crows, ruins, kings, friendships, everything.

[intrepida.livejournal.com]

"The Cage" by S.M. Sterling and Shirley Meier. It was one of the first books that I read (along with 1984 and Animal Farm) that didn't sugar-coat violence, or sentamentalize sex. And it was one of the first books I read with take-no-prisoners feminist heroines. I still re-read it every couple of years.

[carbonel]

I feel much the same way about Singer of Souls. I didn't have any warning about the ending, and ick uck yuck. Lydy says there's supposed to be a sequel in the offing, but I'm not sure it can be redeemed.

Pat loaned me Beka Cooper today; I snarfed down all the other Tamora Pierce books recently, but I think I prefer the Circle of Magic ones to the Tortalle ones.

As for influence, I'd have to say it was the lump of Heinlein novels that I read when I was a freshman in high school (IIRC). I'd read many SF short stories, but never so many books by one author before. I learned many life lessons (and catchphrases, I'll admit) that are still with me from those. I still have Heinlein in my brain, though not as strongly as I used to.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

A sequel? My God.