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.

(more…)

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…

(more…)

For the record, I didn’t intend for yesterday’s post to be particularly negative! I was hoping for more evidence that there were in fact whole slews of fantasy fiction which centres around more than one female character, and their interactions. Thanks to comments here and on LJ, I have a few more to add to the list:

Thoraiya Dyer reminded me that while big chunks of the Mists of Avalon are about Morgaine-Arthur-Lancelot-Gwenhyfar with the women being the only ones not really having a relationship, Morgaine does have relationships with Viviane and Morgause and basically the whole book is about women talking to each other. Sometimes not even about men. Which is true, and my only excuse for not remembering is that I read it in my teens and the book represents my first ever literary experience with an Arthurian threesome.

[in addition I'd like to shout out to Merlin, which looks on the surface to be a Boys Own show but does have Gwen and Morgana who are, though very very divergent from the traditional versions of said characters, are at least two girls who talk to each other, and this is much better than poor old Marian in Robin Hood who was only allowed to talk to smelly men in armour. I haven't got to see the second season yet but I just read Sarah Rees Brennan's summary about sensible girls and the romantic boys who love them, and sadly it looks like there isn't nearly enough Morgana in season 2...]

This discussion of Mists of Avalon reminded me of The Firebrand, which I think is a magnificent and much better book than MoA (basically does everything Bradley did in MoA but with TROY which is infinitely cooler than the Arthurian cycle imho) which gave me Kassandra and Andromache and Hekuba and Amazons and the wimpiest most annoying Paris ever and is basically awesome and stacked with womenfolk.

Rowan mentioned The Oathbound by Mercedes Lackey, which features two women from widely different backgrounds who become blood sisters, work together in everything and generally appear on the covers together. Mercedes Lackey! I definitely should have remembered her, and it makes me sad that I didn’t read enough of her books in my teens when I think they would have been at their best. I have quite liked her recent fairy tale books especially The Fairy Godmother.
(more…)