cleverpun's 2018 Reading Journal · 2:42am Nov 29th, 2018
To a writer, what entertainment one consumes is extremely important. I’ve lost track of the times where binging a show on Netflix or a specific music album have directly influenced my writing.
To the people reading this—members of a fanfiction website—this is perhaps preaching to the choir. But another important thing about consuming fiction, regardless of medium, is variation. Reading nothing but a single genre or author can often be limiting. And reading nothing but fanfiction is often just as dangerous.
Last year, I didn’t read very much, and the impetus to read more was the same as in 2016: lots of break time at work and the realization that library cards are free.
Here is every book I read/will read in 2018 (updated as I read more). Perhaps I should make these posts a more regular thing, as yet another incentive to read more.
* November:
The Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett. This book is a part of the Discworld series. The Discworld is a flat planet that is held up by four elephants and carried through space on the back of a giant turtle. But this doesn't come up very often. The series follows a set of various recurring characters, and focuses on satirizing various parts of real life by translating them (badly) into the fantasy trappings of the Disc.
This is one of the Discworld novels that doesn’t include as much satire, instead focusing on a more straightforward (by Discworld standards) fantasy adventure story. The plot concerns the recurring enemy--the Auditors of Reality--who find it hard to audit something as chaotic as humanity. It’d be much easier to keep track of the universe if nothing ever changed. And what easier way to cause that than to stop time? There happens to be an old fairy tale about someone who made a glass clock, and trapped Time herself within it…
There’s not much left to say about Discworld that hasn’t been said better by others. It’s witty, clever, and still manages to be dramatic, suspenseful, and even melancholic at just the right times. This entry is no exception, with plenty of amusing observations and well-executed twists.
The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. I initially chose this book because I discovered it on TVTropes during a wiki walk, and it had some concerning similarities to the novel I am currently writing. But I needn’t have worried: those similarities ended up being pretty superficial.
Maia is the fourth son of the Elven emperor, a leftover from a marriage that the Emperor was, shall we say, not fond of. After his mother died, his father exiled him to a manor in the boondocks, to live out the rest of his life in obscure seclusion. But then the unthinkable happens, and the Emperor and all three of Maia’s older brothers die in an airship accident. The book opens with Maia receiving the news, and things only develop from there.
This is exactly the sort of fantasy story I like: a slice-of-life tone and a fair amount of worldbuilding. While there is conflict, and the climax of the book has a few twists, most of the story follows Maia’s daily life as he adjusts to his newfound position.
But there are problems. Almost nothing in the book has an easy to pronounce name (half the characters have a name beginning with “Cs”, like Csvet and Csoru…), and everything from ship names to countries to honorifics are replaced with fantastic equivalents. And those made-up honorifics not only have preexisting real-world equivalents, but they change based on gender! 
Characters are introduced at a breakneck pace, and there’s no indication which ones are important. This may be slightly justified to put us in Maia’s shoes, but it makes countless moments in the book impossible to follow. There’s also some blunt racial metaphors and occasional pacing missteps, but I didn’t find that nearly as irritating as being unable to follow who was who was what was who.
Despite this massive impediment, I still enjoyed the story. Slice of life fantasy/sci-fi is something I’d like to see more of, and this is a story that does a decent job of it. (See Planetes for a sci-fi anime that does this concept really well.)
* November/December:
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. Speaking of slice of life science fiction… This is a novel that fits into the mold of “high concept following everymen” (like Planetes).
In an alternate history, Germany won World War 2, and Japan and Germany split the United States down the middle. The story is not concerned, however, with politics or high-level intrigue. It follows a handful of characters, from multiple strata of this new society, as they go about their lives. There is suspense and intrigue, but it only really appears in the final fourth of the book, and then only because it directly affects the characters.
This story asks a lot of questions of its audience and its characters. The Japanese in the story all like to purchase American historical artifacts, but it’s only to show off to other Japanese. One of the main characters is an American man who sells these artifacts to the Japanese, but a lifetime under their rule have made him an Uncle Tom who only knows how to act servile to the Japanese. Another character initially starts off as a forger of these items, but decides to quit his job and start making original pieces. Perception, materialism, and perspective…the book has many underlying themes, some subtle and others more overt.
I can’t really note all the questions the book asks of its readers, or all the themes it uses to do so; there's simply too many. I’m not even sure of the answers to those questions, on either a personal level or speaking for the characters. But the fact that it asks these questions so well is worth remarking upon.
I read A Scanner Darkly two years ago, and I was initially skeptical it could match its reputation. But it did. And after reading these two books, plus Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I think I can safely rank Dick as worthy of all the praise heaped upon him.
Nightfall by Issac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. Kalgash is a planet very similar to Earth. They have universities, newspapers, amusement parks and cars. But there is a major difference: Kalgash has six suns, and never experiences night. Every member of the population has a deep claustrophobia and a fear of darkness as a result. Everyone, regardless of age, sleeps with a godlight (nightlight). Buildings are constructed in such a way that there are no shadows, and if windows are not available then lamps and lights cover every area.
The first third of the book is mostly set up and worldbuilding, and the main characters discovering something: every two-thousand years, Kalgash experiences a total eclipse. And archeological records indicate that every two-thousand years, civilization ends.
This is a story that was originally a novella by Asimov, and Silverberg came along much later and expanded it into a full novel. Asimov himself didn't write any new material for this version, but approved of Silverberg's job. The middle third of the book is mostly the events covered in the original novella, and the last third is the aftermath of the eclipse.
I count Issac Asimov as one of my favorite authors. Longtime readers of my blogs may have noticed semi-frequent references to his ideas and stories. He has his flaws as a writer, but his concepts and clarity of style are exactly the sort of things I aspire to in my own writing. Robert Silverberg did a wonderful job of both expanding the story and mimicking Asimov's particular style. At the same time, the concept may be Asimov's, but a lot of the themes and plot points are things that did not show up often in his stories. Violence, madness, and disarray are huge parts of the book. Anti-intellectualism is rampant. It is a bit strange to see these un-Asimovian pieces around his central concept, but the final product is still a great story. Wonderful worldbuilding paired with a few twists and even a bit of death and danger.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. This is the first story I've ever read by Ursala Le Guin. Sadly, it joins the list of stories I did not finish. I didn't even make it past the first chapter. Le Guin has an incredibly obtuse, meandering writing style, using an excessive amount of metaphor and the purplest of prose. In the first chapter alone she describes a parade as a river of gold flowing through the street, and only vaguely mentions that this is a reference to the clothing of the participants.
It's a shame. I'd heard good things about this story and its ideas. It features themes that don't receive enough focus in science fiction even today (particularly of gender and androgyny), and is often touted as a seminal work of feminism. I fear that these ideas, their timing and novel nature, may have blinded people to the story's shortcomings. Or perhaps back in the 70s people just had a higher tolerance than I for purple prose.
You Should read Austraeoh.
4974247 Between everything I've heard about it, and it's sheer length, I'm very skeptical that will ever happen.
4974710
I have such a love-hate relationship with Discworld. I can't stand Rincewind and feel like his one-note running gag drags his books down. But as soon as the series moved away from him, the afterburners lit. The Guards! Guards! era was IMHO the high point of the series (this opinion shouldn't be a surprise if you've seen my own stories), but Pratchett was consistently marvelous for a decade or two. Then quality started to crater again. I think Thief of Time was about the last of the books I'd read again. I remember Monstrous Regiment and Thud being disappointments, and given some lukewarm reviews of his post-Alzheimer's books I've been giving the last ones a wide berth.
I haven't read The Man In The High Castle, but the pony reinterpretation is superb.
4976864 I've not read Discworld religiously: I read the entire Death series, and The Light Fantastic. I think the next sub-series I might start on is the Watch series.
Discworld is a strange beast. It's ostensibly a subversive take on the Fantasy genre. But it just as often follows the trappings of the genre, with a few more winks and nudges along the way. Thief of Time in particular fits this mold: the usual trappings of the Discworld (both in Pratchett's writing and the world itself) don't get much play.
Any series that went on for as long as Discworld is going to be hard-pressed to be consistent, and often harder-pressed to be good. But I've enjoyed my time with Discworld and intend to spend more time with it. But that doesn't mean it is for everyone.
I've just updated the blog, having finished The Man in the High Castle. I highly recommend it. I can't speak to the pony interpretation, but after reading a bit of the RCL interview, it sounds like the author was after some of the same themes: perspective, the effect of one's environment on their life, and perhaps even some of the same fatalism and determinism from the original.