Day 12 – A book or series of books you’ve read more than five times

Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean.

It’s probably been close to twenty years since I first discovered this, one of the few perfect books in the world, and I would have reread it every year or two since. Not for five years now, since my last Great Re-reading phase. I would like to again soon, as it’s the kind of book that grows up with you.

It’s basically a love story to a liberal arts college education. I read it for the first time before I attended university and the real thing could never compare to this – to the beautiful stone buildings and dingy dining halls, to the friendships made thanks to random rooming lotteries. To the lectures and seminars about Shakespeare and poetry and Latin.

(by the way, all Classics students are crazy)

This leisurely, poignant read follows Janet, the daughter of two professors, a girl who loves books, through her college years. Here, she befriends frivolous Tina and awesome Molly. She falls in love with earnest, music-loving Nick and hangs out with his friends, dramatic Robin and rude, cranky but ultimately romantic Thomas. She reads a lot of Shakespeare, and forgets to write poetry. She takes fencing, and goes for long walks in Autumn, and resists the pressure to take up Classics, because English is really her thing, honestly. She goes to plays, and parties. She and her friends all sort out contraception, and have sex for the first time.

And of course it’s a fantasy novel, but exactly how it’s a fantasy novel is not clear until the end, in fact a lot of layers of story do not make sense until the every end, like why Robin laughed, and why his name and Nick’s are written there, and why Thomas was rude that day, and who rode those horses, and why the Classics students are all crazy, and what happened that time with Professor Medeous…

Which is why it is a book to be read and reread and reread, though there’s a magic here and somehow every time I try to pay attention to the important details, they slip away like water because there are all these gorgeous other things to re-experience like a youthful discovery of Shakespeare and a paper theatre of The Lady’s Not For Burning, and homemade signs that say Must Take Pill, and first love, and imperfect love and broken love, and friendship that lasts forever, and that other love that was under her nose all the time…

I read this book by accident, not knowing what I would find. Best accident I ever had.

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My reading habits have drastically changed over the last few years. If I look at myself based only on my reading (and who doesn’t do that?), then I can barely recognise myself compared to the reader I was five years ago. If this reading meme has made me think about anything, it’s about my history with books and reading and styles, and how many different readers I have been in my life.

This is me now: I read YA books by the bucketload, mostly those that have come out this year. The same goes for SF and fantasy, mostly books by women, mostly standalones or urban fantasy in which every volume is short and sharp and self-contained. When it comes to the genre known as BFF (Big Fat Fantasy, referred to as such lovingly by fans and unlovingly by non-readers) I will defend it to the utmost and refer nostalgically to the books I consumed as a Reader Past, but in fact I don’t read much of it.

Or indeed, any. I don’t think I’ve cracked the spine of a BFF volume since the last time I judged the fantasy section for the AAs. I will wax enthusastic about current female fantasy writers such as Karen Miller, Jennifer Fallon and Glenda Larke, but the truth is that all of these writers have produced at least one if not several new series since I last read them. (I think Karen has put out about ten) I started keeping up with other aspects of the genre, and let this one slide. When I was remembering how much I love court fantasy with its intrigue and politics, I realised that I read all the books I love most from that genre some time ago. Because, you know, the books are long and they travel in packs.

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Yes, my reward to myself for… oh, something or other, mostly having money in my bank account for the first time in months, was the Big Ginormous Xena Boxset. It’s so shiny! I’ve been rather longing for a proper Xena rewatch for some time. So here we go, in order, from the top.

1.1. Sins of the Past
They manage to pack quite a lot into this episode. It’s rather clever in that it is basically a sequel to three linked episodes in Hercules: the Legendary Journeys from the year before, and yet there is no mention of Hercules or the fact that he pretty much set her on the road to redemption with his Magical Wang. Instead, we see Xena trying to deal with her decision to give up her warlording ways, and the various ramifications of this as she tries (not overly successfully) to change her spots.

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The other night I did a great interview with Paige Turner at local university-based community radio station Edge Radio. Paige has put up a podcast of the interview in which we discuss the appeal of fantasy in a tech-heavy world, how I come up with my character names, and the heavy classics/historical influences of my fantasy. As well as other fun things.

Check it out!

Episode 2 of the CreatureCourtCast is up at the Creature Court website. (use the second link if you want to play it on the site instead of downloading). You can also find it over in iTunes.

The theme for this episode is ‘fantasy with frocks.’ Because yes, this is one of those books where clothes get described, a lot. One of my protagonists is a dressmaker, and that means that she sees the world through clothes. When she struggles for metaphors and similes to describe the strange world she is slowly becoming aware of, she uses crafting terms to do so. As she learns about the mysterious Creature Court, and is introduced to them, one of the aspects that stands out for her is the way that they dress: to make statements, to impress each other, to show off.

They are, after all, part-animal, and as I mention in the podcast, we have a long cultural tradition of anthropomorphising animals and putting clothes on them. Puss in Boots with his floppy hat and awesome footwear! Jemima Puddleduck in her bonnet. Cat from Red Dwarf in his tailored space suits.

Clothes also form plot points in Power and Majesty. The dress pictured on the cover represents a turning point in the story, and I read one of the key scenes for that dress aloud in this episode of the CreatureCourtCast. Ashiol and the Creature Court find out about Velody’s existence because of the dress, and it also introduces the idea that a person’s magic (though the word ‘magic’ is never used in the books) can bleed out into things they make. This will be important later…

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There’s been some talk around the internets in recent days about how rare it is for women to declare and own their awesomeness, without apologising for it, or putting conditions on it, or basically explaining it away until it doesn’t exist any more.

This reminded me of a conversation that went around the traps a while back, I believe centering around Sarah Rees Brennan, who often endorses such wicked ideas, about how actually maybe it’s time we stopped calling female fictional characters Mary Sues every time they display awesomeness.

As with Twilight-hating, I fear I have to also come out against Mary-Sue-callage, something which may be utterly justified at times and yet contributes so much anti-female sentiment that it makes my skin crawl. Yes, that was a convoluted sentence, wasn’t it. Still, I stick by it.

Critiquing the portrayal of women in fantasy is a perfectly valid pastime, but that’s not what I’m here for right now. I want to talk about some of my favourite female characters from my early years of fantasy reading, why I love them and how they have influenced me. Let me know your favourites in the comments!

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I’ve been following Karen’s blog for the last couple of months, and was particularly caught by her post about the importance of New Zealand as the setting of her debut novel, Guardian of the Dead. The post came out of her frustration that overseas readers were referring to her and her book as Australian.

I read the book with this in mind, and I have to say that my first reaction was one big ‘what are you people, high?’ I can see why Karen was so outraged, as the book is not just rich in detail about its New Zealand setting, but the plot itself turns on the mythology and experience of that country.

The second thing that occurred to me was… wow. I really know almost nothing about New Zealand. And I mean nothing. Guardian of the Dead paints such a detailed picture of New Zealand culture, mythology and how they blend into the lives of modern New Zealanders, and… I’ve never seen this before. My entire pop culture experience of New Zealand consists of Hercules, Xena, Lord of the Rings, a couple of Margaret Mahy novels and that Worzel Gummidge series. I can’t help feeling deeply ashamed that this is a country so very close to my own, with so many overlapping ties, and I’ll bet there aren’t many 32 year old New Zealanders who don’t have a far more comprehensive understanding of Australia, our popular culture, and what it might be like to live here.

I loved the delicious mix of mythologies in this pacy, emotionally resonant YA paranormal novel. While Maori legend forms the largest part of the story’s influences, there was also an acknowledgement of world mythology as a whole, and how it works. I loved the connections made between stories and magic, and the idea that everyone has their own body of myths through which they see the world.

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Reading the interview with Felix Gilman in a recent Locus, I was gratified to hear someone else talking about cities in fantasy, and how awesome it is to have them (they are, after all, far superior to bogs, marshes, steppes and castles).

I promptly decided to write a blog post about awesome cities in fantasy, but it’s been a long week and all I could come up with was the Emerald City, Ankh Morpork & Lankhmar, in that order.

Oh okay and maybe Gotham City. Which I’m pretty sure counts.

So help me out – what are your favourite fantasy cities? Or haven’t they been written yet? What aspects of a fantasy city most interests you?

In recentish times I’ve talked about my top 10 standalone fantasy novels, why series novels should not pretend to be standalone fantasy novels, and the kind of standalone fantasy novel that’s really a stealthy series.

There’s one kind of fantasy novel I haven’t discussed in any depth, and it’s the fantasy format which is most iconic as well as the most vilified. It also, apparently, sells better than any other fantasy format.

I’m talking about the trilogy.

The trilogy gets a bad rap, mostly from people who don’t read fantasy novels. It’s the equivalent of Fabio book covers – the feature of the genre most fixated on by outsiders. In truth, fantasy trilogies are popular for many good reasons. They are long enough that you can tell a really epic story and build up a thoroughly detailed world, but not so long that people start worrying about the author’s life expectancy.

According to publishing legend, the format came about when the hardback of a moderately successful novel by some chap called Tolkien proved too long to publish in a single paperback edition. It was broken up into three paperbacks, and promptly became a zeitgeist-making, record-smashing, hugely popular book of a generation, and then another generation, inspiring publishers to actively hunt “something a bit like it”. While many of the immediate successors to Tolkien did not in fact write trilogies, ultimately the popularity of this format is laid at his door.

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Over at Justine Larbalestier’s blog, she asks the question: What do you think of the frequently mounted defence of Twilight and some other popular YA titles that no matter what you think of the writing style or content it’s intended for teens so that’s okay. Or at least it gets teens reading?

There have been some wonderful, inventive comments, not overly hamstrung by Justine’s insistence that the relative merits of Twilight not be under discussion in the thread (and fair enough too, it’s one of the easiest ways to derail said conversation).

I commented over there with a blog-length comment, mostly about how I don’t like the way the terms ‘bad writing’ and ‘good writing’ get thrown around (it is actually possible for one person to like a book, another to dislike it, and them both to be RIGHT), and particularly the way that they are used in regards to hugely popular works preferred by women readers. I recall overhearing a young teenage boy informing his mother in a bookshop that Harry Potter was ‘entertaining but badly written’ and I was stunned. Who was he to make such a pronouncement? Was it his own opinion, or one he had heard? How can you possibly dismiss a work as badly written if you find it entertaining?

Surely entertaining is one of those things that writing is intended to do?

After reading all the comments that have come in on Justine’s blog I have been formulating a different response to the question. I understand why people are reacting negatively to the suggestion that ‘it’s okay to let teens read bad books because they’re just teenagers, as long as they’re reading it’s good’ but so many of the responses to that are rubbing me up the wrong way.

Because, you know what? It’s none of our business what teenagers are reading.

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