Dear Diana

I discovered you by accident. A snippet of a kids tv show that fascinated me from the start – and turned out to be Archer’s Goon. Then, quite by chance, I found that book and snapped it up, figuring I could at least find out the parts that I’d missed on TV.

Shortly after this, I discovered that you were a REAL author with a whole list of books and I was pretty much lost. This was the tricky days to be a DWJ fan, and it involved a lot of hunting through second hand shops to flesh out a lopsided collection.

But then the Harry Potter craze hit, and suddenly a whole lot of my favourite children’s authors were being reprinted in bright, colourful covers and a completionist like me was like a sugar fiend in a sweetshop. A book archaeologist can tell which books of yours I found before this time, and which after. The later ones are prettier, but I still love some of the battered second hand paperbacks.

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So was anyone else bizarrely entranced by the finale of Lost, despite having never watched it apart from occasional glimpses and one random episode after it was already universally judged to have jumped the shark?

Or was it just me?

I’ve always been remotely fascinated by Lost, actually, mostly because the first season was a phenomenon that I missed out on entirely, and the waves of disappointment started coming in round about the first episode of season two, and there were so many comparisons to the ways in which X Files both failed and succeeded, and yet… the show kept going. For six years.

And for most of those six years, the two kinds of sayers (doom and nay) have been gleefully reporting that, you know, it was never going to end well. Seriously. It was going to disappoint. All of you who love it? DOOMED to be disappointed.

Now the episode has screened the reports are in, and it’s a mixture of wailing, gritted teeth, WTF, disappointment, and even a few ‘well I liked it actually’s sneaking in here and there. Opinions seem to be divided, depending on expectations – those who never wanted explanations for every event are certainly the happiest! I’ve been fascinated to read the various viewer responses, despite having little to no investment in the show itself.

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The lovely  editormum linked me to this poll attempting to determine the top 100 YA novels of all time. They are requesting each participant to vote for their own top 10 of YA books, in order of preference.

On the one hand, these things make me kind of cynical – on the other, lists are good. I love lists, especially the deeply subjective ones. They encourage people to read books, and I do love it when people read books.

So here we go. This was a tricky one. The list I started out with was weighted far more heavily with books I’d read in the last year or two, but then I kept remembering classics from my own childhood, that bounced out the more recent books. I am rather pleased I ended up with 50% Australian authors, too

I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
This is the queen of floaty old fashioned girls novels for me – I loved Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Jo March and Katy, but there’s something particularly wonderful and soppy about Cassandra Mortmain, her bohemian family, and the twisting dance of her sister’s (and her own) first romances, that just makes me melt inside. The movie was also weirdly perfect, even though it had Riley from Buffy in it. The casting was so good that it has imprinted now on to my memories of the book.

Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
Choosing which DWJ book to include here was tough, as I could of course fill an entire top 10 with novels by this author. But when it comes to favourite – it’s not about which has the best plot (Archer’s Goon) or the best romance (Fire & Hemlock) or the best magic (Charmed Life) or the best worldbuilding (The Merlin Conspiracy) or the deepest melancholy (Time of the Ghost) – it’s about which one you love best. Howl’s Moving Castle has all the hallmarks of a great DWJ novel – tangled plot, quirky characters, great dialogue, weird magic, bad parents, REALLY complicated plot, sweet romance – but on top of that it has Howl, and Sophie, and Howl’s hair. So it wins.

Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan
I can never stop talking about this one – it made it to my top 10 standalone fantasy novels too. I can only repeat what I said there: I don’t have an unbiased bone in my body when it comes to this literary retelling of Snow White and Rose Red with added dwarf smut, extra sexy bear men, and deep psychological trauma. I feel it’s one of the most important fantasy novels published in recent years, precisely because of its powerful themes about trauma and recovery from abuse, over-protectiveness, and indeed, the nature of fantasy itself.
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Going Bovine, Libba Bray
A deeply important, epic story of a boy dying of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, who runs away on a crazy, magical adventure to save his own life, and the world. Quite possibly one of the best road trip novels ever, this deserves to be the bible of disaffected & nihilistic teens for at least a generation, and to serve as a snapshot of weird 00s pop culture for every generation that follows.

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After yesterday, I’ve been thinking about how many fantasy novels are truly standalone. Girlie Jones declared on Twitter that she doesn’t read fantasy because she’s not interested in waiting for volumes to be written. It’s a fair cop – if the concept of a journey through an elaborate magical world doesn’t grab you from the outset, it’s hard to find a half-decent gateway drug to introduce you to the genre.

Fantasy certainly lends itself to extended series, either of the to-be-continued type or the ‘many standalone novels set in the same world/based around the same character’ type. One of the pleasures of fantasy is the exploration of a world and the ongoing consequences of changes to that world – but that isn’t all that fantasy has to offer and sometimes there is a deep pleasure in a short burst of magical fiction. It’s also a great way to lure a new reader into the genre. I suspect that his many and varied standalone novels are a big part of why Neil Gaiman, for example, has such a broad fanbase.

Standalone novels are, if you are not Neil Gaiman, mostly a luxury for fantasy writers. They turn up at the very beginning of their careers, in many cases, or sidle in from time to time. The accepted wisdom is that standalones simply don’t sell as well as trilogies or series books, even when by the same author.

I wanted to assemble a list of fantasy books I love that are not only standalone, but continue to be so – they don’t share their world or characters with other books. There are no sequels, sideways or direct. @crankynick pointed out on Twitter that I had set myself a hard task because “it’s a rare writer that doesn’t go back to the well if a book takes off.” This is a cynical but let’s face it, not untrue view of how the publishing world works.

By only including pure solo standalone novels in my list, that means I am excluding many great fantasy novels which share a world or character with one or some other of their author’s works, even though they stand perfectly well on their own: such novels as The Hobbit, Valiant, The Curse of Chalion, Anansi Boys. Even Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell can be excluded on these grounds, I think, as The Ladies of Grace Adieu is very much a sequel and companion volume, while not actually a novel. Thanks to Tehani and Nicole I also learned that Threshold, Sara Douglass’ lovely novel of maths, magic and glassworking is now linked to some of her other novels and no longer counts as a standalone in that pure sense. Damn it! There goes another of my best examples.

So: THE LIST (my top 10 super-solo-unsequelled-standalone fantasy novels) presented below…

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