A-Z Of Books

I saw this blog challenge thingy on the site of the excellent horror author Thana Niveau who picked some great books. So I thought sod it, I'll give it a go too. Because it's basically just another excuse to talk about books... not that I really need excuses.

AUTHOR YOU’VE READ THE MOST BOOKS BY: A score-draw threeway between Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King and Terry Pratchett.

BEST SEQUEL EVER: The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe by Douglas Adams.

CURRENTLY READING: A Cold Season by Alison Littlewood - as you might expect, so far this is bloody brilliant. Oh and I'm also rereading The King In Yellow.

DRINK OF CHOICE WHILE READING: Currently a glass of Marston's Pedigree. 

E-READER OR PHYSICAL BOOK: I read both; in fact I'm normally reading a book on each at any given time.

FICTIONAL CHARACTER YOU WOULD HAVE DATED IN HIGH SCHOOL: Knowing my luck, Carrie White.

GLAD YOU GAVE THIS BOOK A CHANCE: Emma by Jane Austin. I guess my view of what Austin was like was coloured by half-watched TV adaptations. But she's so much more cynical and astute than her reputation for period romance might suggest.

HIDDEN GEM BOOK: Ice Age by Iain Rowan. A stunning collection of weird-creepy-shit stories.

IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR READING LIFE: I've mentioned this before on here, but when my Dad handed me a copy of Salem's Lot from his bookshelves.

JUST FINISHED: The Wanderer by Timothy J. Jarvis, which was fantastic, and the The Best Horror Of The Year 6 edited by Ellen Datlow.

KIND OF BOOKS YOU WON’T READ: Anything where it's so obviously been written aiming for a film adaptation. Plus anything where the blurb is some kind of mashup such as "Like Harry Potter in Space!" or something equally repellent & cynical.

LONGEST BOOK YOU’VE READ: Not sure really. Vanity Fair? Anna Karenina? Crime & Punishment? Spot Bakes A Cake? 

MAJOR BOOK HANGOVER: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. An absolutely stunning achievement. But Christ, it makes most end of the world novels seem like Enid Blyton.

NUMBER OF BOOKCASES YOU OWN: Eight.

ONE BOOK YOU’VE READ MULTIPLE TIMES: The Waste-Land & Other Poems by T.S. Eliot. The language is so breathtakingly poweful and precise, sometimes I just reread the same lines.

PREFERRED PLACE TO READ: Somewhere with a view of the sea.

QUOTE THAT INSPIRES YOU FROM A BOOK YOU’VE READ: I'm not going to pick anything trite and inspirational, I'm just going to pick what I consider to be one of the most perfect openings to a novel ever written. It's inspirational because it's what I'm aiming for, and constantly falling short of:

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Shirley Jackson

READING REGRET: That I'll die before I read everything I want to, even if people stopped writing now. And yet, non-reading people get to live on average the same length of time. There's no justice; their years should be mine.

SERIES YOU STARTED AND NEED TO FINISH: The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks.

THREE OF YOUR ALL-TIME FAVOURITE BOOKS: Three? Three? Jesus, it was bad enough picking five for a recent interview. So here's three that I didn't include there:

1. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
2. House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
3. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

UNAPOLOGETIC FANGIRL/BOY FOR: Ramsey Campbell. He's the guvnor.

VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS RELEASE: Too many to mention, obviously, but I'm very much looking forward to The Grieving Stones by Gary McMahon.

WORST BOOKISH HABIT: When I'm reading and someone comes to talk to me and I look like I'm listening to what they're saying, but really I'm still thinking about the book...

X MARKS THE SPOT: START ON THE TOP LEFT OF YOUR SHELF AND PICK THE 27TH BOOK: The Woman In The Dunes by Kōbō Abe.

YOUR LATEST PURCHASE: Bodies Of Water by V.H. Leslie and Oh! The Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss, for my daughter because it was one of the readings at her Naming Day.

ZZZZ-SNATCHER BOOK (LAST BOOK THAT KEPT YOU UP WAY TOO LATE): Phonogram 3: The Immaterial Girl. I love these graphic novels, in which music really is magic. There's some fantastic use of pop-cultutral imagery and references in this third volume, especially when the protagonist becomes trapped in a murderous version of the video for Take On Me. And the Appendix, explaining all of the musical references is a delight, so I stayed up late reading it and looking up various music videos on the internet.

Terry Pratchett & Magic

"This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why..."

So begins the first Terry Pratchett book I ever read, Equal Rites. I was fourteen and I bought it for £2.99 from WH Smiths in the Victoria Centre in Nottingham. I've still got the same copy, battered and with a huge crease down the front cover. I tried to take a photo tonight on hearing the truly sad news that Pratchett had passed away; my cat kept trying to get in the picture, but when I remembered how much Terry Pratchett liked cats that seemed appropriate.

I've written on this blog before about how many authors I discovered by perusing my Dad's bookshelves, but Terry Pratchett was the first adult author I can remember discovering myself. (And my Dad discovered Pratchett through me, and loves his books as much as I do. Indeed, all these years later the latest birthday present I've got for is Pratchett related. Sorry it's late!)

Equal Rites, the third Discworld novel, is possibly the best one to start with. It's not quite at that level of effortless brilliance Pratchett sustained for so many years, but it's almost there. Whilst the first two Discworld novels used his comic universe to satirise the tropes and cliches of fantasy fiction, Equal Rites seems to be where Pratchett realised how wonderfully he could use the Discworld to mock and illuminate our own world. It's about a young girl who has accidentally been gifted the power of wizardry; but on the Discworld only men can become wizards. Apparently. For some reason. An obvious common-sense reason, but one that no one can quite explain to the girl in question... It's a wonderfully comic and humane story about stereotyping and sexism, eloquent and sensible without being dogmatic. Pratchett's exceptional gifts of characterisation and dialogue are already fully on display, and it's the first book to feature one of his most enduring characters, the witch Granny Weatherwax. And it features Death too, of course. ("I HAVEN'T GOT ALL DAY, Death said reproachfully.")

After Equal Rites Pratchett went on to write a seemingly endless stream of brilliant books about magic and power and dragons and war and Shakespeare and trolls and opera and undiscovered continents and identity and orang-utans and religion and music and cats and jingoism and vampires and growing up and newspapers and growing old and football and story-telling and Death and death. And I loved them all.

Given how many books he wrote and how good they all were (and how utterly re-readable they all are) Terry Pratchett is undoubtably the author who has given me the most amount of pure pleasure in my reading life. For me, he's up there with the greats, possibly the finest comic novelist in English (Douglas Adams might equal him in quality but only wrote a fraction of Pratchett's output). One of the finest novelists full-stop.

Of course, some people are sniffy about fantasy writers or comic writers and especially comic fantasy writers, but those people are idiots. Terry Pratchett was a monumentally talented writer and by all accounts a thoroughly decent human being. He wrote over fifty books and even that still doesn't feel enough on hearing today's news. But it's what we have and it's a wonderful legacy. It's where the magic came from and still will, for generations.

"It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living." 

RIP