Buy, Borrow, Bin: the Terry Pratchett edition

I haven’t done the Buy, Borrow, Bin game in a while, and I decided to make this one a themed episode for an added challenge. So I’m selecting three random novels by Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors. Let’s see which books are our contestants this time, and which one gets the chopping block!

Using a random number generator, I came up with the following three titles: #31, Monstrous Regiment; #21, Jingo; and #13, Small Gods.

So, let’s do them in order. Monstrous Regiment, sadly, gets binned. For starters, it’s a standalone Discworld book; while there are a few cameos from Vimes, Angua, and William de Worde, among others, the vast majority of the novel follows a rag-tag group of women masquerading as men in order to join the army and fight for their country. I did enjoy the novel — the story was good and I loved some of the characters (like the vampire recruit Maladicta and their medic, Igorina) — but the idea of the all-girl regiment felt a little contrived to me, as did the ending. And while I have read it more than once, I don’t have a strong desire to read it again.

The choice of where to put the remaining two is tough. Jingo is a Watch book — my favorite kind — and it features fun cultural satire abroad in Klatch, plus some wonderful bits with Vimes’s electronic Disorganizer, which I adore. And we see Vetinari outside of the Oblong Office, which is unusual and entertaining. On the other hand, Small Gods is utterly, utterly brilliant satire, skewering religion to hilarious effect. But only one can go in each slot… so…

I’m going to pick Jingo as my Buy selection, largely on the basis that I end up re-reading it more often than Small Gods. There are a few scenes of torture in Small Gods, and while they aren’t seriously gruesome or explicit, they still bother me, and they’re the main reason I haven’t read the book in a while. So Jingo wins, and Small Gods ends up in second place with Borrow status.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!

An interview with author Jonathan Wood

And now, for something completely different: a chat with Jonathan Wood, author of No Hero — the book Barnes and Noble called one of the best paranormal fantasy novels of the last decade

Cheryl: You have three books in the pipeline right now: No Hero (in stores next week), Yesterday’s Hero (coming in September), and Anti Hero (slated for a March 2015 release). Which is your favorite, and why?

Jonathan: You mean, which of my children do I love the most? What a terrible thing to ask…

Cheryl: I know. Sorry — I couldn’t resist.

Jonathan: Seriously, that is a very difficult thing for me to answer.  No Hero is the book that got me published, got me a deal, so I will always cherish it for that.  And some people have said some very nice things about it.  Yesterday’s Hero was, for me if no one else, a refinement of the formula.  It wasn’t necessarily as easy to write but it felt like I was consolidating a lot of what I learned writing No Hero.  And for me—though I am a terrible judge of my own work—it feels like a better book.  And Anti Hero… well, after my deal with Night Shade books went south, I thought I was never going to get to write Anti Hero. And now it’s coming out next year. It closes out a subtle arc that’s been going on with Clyde, one of the secondary characters, so that was just very satisfying to write. Plus I got to move the action to New York, where I lived for a long time and where I still work. It’s terribly good fun to write about the zombpocalypse happening in areas you normally commute through.

In the end I’ll pick Anti Hero, but that’s probably as much because I haven’t yet had to proof read it as many times as the others.

Cheryl: An excellent reason. It’s a wonder that series writers don’t hate all their characters by the end of the first book.

Speaking of characters: your protagonist looks to Kurt Russell for inspiration. Are there other people, performances or projects that have influenced your writing in general (and the Hero books in particular)?

Jonathan: The Hero books are rife with pop culture influences. The whole series was sort of inspired by my love of pulp novels, but my hatred of pulp writing. I wanted to do something that harkened back to those old stories from the thirties but which had a more modern feel to the prose and narrative. I’m not the first to do that, so there’s a lot of influence then from movies like Indiana Jones and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Also, it’s not like I hide the Lovecraftian influence in No Hero, though that actually comes more from the Hellboy comics than it does specifically from the work of Lovecraft himself.

In terms of specific people who influenced me… While I don’t really write in that subgenre, the New Weird movement/genre had a huge impact on me and my writing. People like Jeff Vandermeer, China Mieville, K. J. Bishop, Forrest Aguirre. I think that comes through a lot more in my short stories, but I really hope that there’s a weird edge to my novels too.

As for Kurt Russell himself… I guess in my own personal headspace he just personified the idea of “second tier action hero.” I don’t mean that as a knock. I love Kurt Russell’s movies, and I think he tends to be under-appreciated, but he never quite got to that Schwarzenegger/Stallone level of stardom. There was something about that second-stringer vibe that I wanted to reflect in Arthur Wallace (my protagonist).

Cheryl: The Hero trilogy is urban fantasy, but your short stories have explored other genres, like steampunk. Do you see yourself writing other styles of novel-length fiction in the future?

Jonathan: Part of the joy of short stories is you get to experiment with other genres, try things on for size. No Hero actually came out of three pieces of flash fiction I’d written.

As for the long term… I don’t know. So far I’ve sold my books one by one. At a basic economic level, writing a series makes the most sense, so there’s a good chance there will be more Hero books in the future. That said, I’d love to write an epic fantasy one day. That was the genre that really captured my heart as a kid. If I could craft something that captured another kid in the same way, that would be pretty awesome.

Cheryl: Agreed! I love epic fantasy and hope you get to write that book one day.

Let’s pull back the curtain a bit more. Most writers characterize themselves as either plotters or pantsters. (For those unfamiliar with the terms, a plotter plans and outlines before writing, while a pantster discovers the story during the writing process.) Which camp do you fall in – and do you envy your peers who do the opposite?

Jonathan: I think the plotter-pantser thing is more of a spectrum that people say. A lot of people do a little of both. That said, I am at the pretty extreme end of plotting. I can’t write a project without having a few sentences for each scene, letting me know all the major plot points and character moments I need to hit. My typical novel plan runs about eight or nine pages, and I stick to it slavishly. Sometimes, once I’ve written the first draft, I’ll go back and tweak something, but almost never while I’m in the drafting process. On the handful of occasions that has happened, I’ve taken the time to rework the whole plan before I go back to drafting.

To use a term I heard Jay Lake use once, it’s do with “span of control” or how much of the story I can hold in my head at once. When I’m planning a novel, I’m dealing at a very macro level. I can hold all the plot lines in my head, see how they should intersect and build on each other. Once I’m down in the weeds of the draft, I lose all that. I just have to trust that I knew what I was doing at the beginning, stick to the plan and get through it.

Honestly, I don’t envy pantsers. I’m glad it works for them, but it so doesn’t work for me, that it’s not something I spend any time dreaming about.

Cheryl: What length of fiction do you enjoy writing most: short stories, novels, or somewhere in between?

Jonathan: I think my favorite length is the completely unpublishable novellette. Something in the 15,000 to 25,000 word range. For some reason, that seems to be my most natural length. Unfortunately, nobody wants to read or publish anything that length.

One of the toughest things I’ve done as a writer is learn to beat my natural tendency towards bloat to a minimum. I remember I’d written a 6,000 word short story. I showed it to a friend, and she said, that’s great, now get it down to 3,000 words. It was awful to do, but I managed it (or pretty close any way) and that was my first pro-market sale.

Cheryl: A fun question now! You have three books and you have to put one in each category: buy, borrow, or bin. The books are The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams; and The Call of Cthulhu, by H. P. Lovecraft. Which book would you put in each category?

Jonathan: Wait, I have to put a book in the bin? I’ve never put a book in the bin…

Cheryl: Sorry! I know it’s tough.

Jonathan: OK, give me a moment… I think the keeper is actually The Hobbit. That was one of the first fantasy novels I ever read. Or, more accurately, that my mom read to me. I was around 8, and I think a lot of my current genre tastes can be traced back to that book. It’s important enough to me that I think I’d want to have it close.

That leaves binning Cthulhu or Hitchhiker’s

Given the Lovecraftian overtones of No Hero, this may seem a little odd, but I’m going to bin Cthulhu. I have a lot of love for the mythos. The RPG Call of Cthulhu has a ton of good memories for me.  But I’m honestly not a huge fan of Lovecraft’s prose style. The whole of what he created is monumental, but the individual parts appeal to me less. Honestly most of my Lovecraft influences come second hand.  If it was a Hellboy anthology, for example, things might not be look so rosy for The Hobbit.

And that leaves me borrowing Hitchhiker’s. But that’s a book I love enough that I’ll probably end up owing a fairly hefty library fine…

Cheryl: Speaking of your reading preferences… Author E. Catherine Tobler recently blogged that it had been over two years since one of her male writer friends had read a book written by a woman. Admittedly, women aren’t as well represented in the SF/F field as men, but I’m curious: do you keep track of your reading stats, and if so, did your reading over the past year include books by women?

Jonathan: I had never considered my reading stats until this question. I just tend to grab the next thing that looks interesting. Thinking back over the past few years, I’ve read Natania Barron’s excellent Pilgrim of the Sky (I know that one because I blurbed it), Kameron Hurley’s God’s War, Courtney Schaeffer’s The Whitefire Crossing, and I was fortunate enough to be a beta reader on a novel by my friend Michelle Muenzler, which led to my agent taking her on as a client (seriously, she’s going to be tearing up the charts in a year or two, it’s an amazing book).

However, it would be remiss for me to not also say that the vast majority of the books I’ve read have been by male authors.

I think the most dangerous thing about our biases is how blind to them we are. I have always been conscious to try to populate the Hero books with kick ass women. But when I stop thinking about it, all my third tier characters tend to be male. I have to go back and fix that sometimes. By consciously addressing a bias, that’s how we train ourselves to unconsciously fix it. So, I don’t think I come out of this question spotless by any degree, but I am very grateful you’ve asked it.

Cheryl: Since that was a tough one, let’s close out with a light-hearted question, based on a recent controversy that J. K. Rowling stirred up: in your opinion, should Harry and Hermione have ended up together?

Jonathan: I loved the Harry Potter books. My wife and I started reading them out loud to each other very early on in our relationship. Reading book 5 constituted a large portion of our honeymoon. The first movie is the only movie we’ve seen in the theater twice.

That is all to say that I am, essentially, completely happy with the books the way that they are. Of course, they are problematic on a number of minor fronts, but overall, I had a ton of fun reading them.

J. K. Rowling is, like any author, entitled to regret decisions she made, and wish she’d done things differently. But she can’t actually change any of that. It’s done. This attempt to ret-con the stories reminds me of George Lucas’s increasingly awful attempts to canonize Star Wars. Sometimes it’s better to just let things lie.

(That said, in 15 years time when I want to fix all the mistakes I made in the Hero books, I’m going take this all back and do it.)

Thanks to Jonathan for sharing his thoughts here! If you want a copy of No Hero, you can pre-order it now on Amazon — or check your local bookstore next week.

Buy, Borrow or Bin, Round 2

Zemanta Related Posts ThumbnailIt’s time for another round of buy, borrow or bin! If you missed the first post, I pick three books at random from my Goodreads collection and relegate one to each category: I’d buy it; I’d only borrow it; or I’d chuck it in the bin. Sadly, you have to put one book in each category, but so far, my choices haven’t been too painful.

My random number picks this time were 44, 100, and 127, so here are the contestants:

  • Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
  • Misery Loves Cabernet, by Kim Gruenenfelder
  • Shopaholic & Sister, by Sophie Kinsella

This one is harder than you might think. Feet of Clay is great, but it isn’t my favorite, while Misery Loves Cabernet is all kinds of fun. But I have to choose, so here goes…

BUY: Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett. While it’s not my favorite of the Night Watch books, it has a lot going for it — particularly the fact that it introduces dwarf constable Cheery Littlebottom, a character I’ve come to love. I also enjoyed other colorful new characters and elements, such as the College of Heraldry, Wee Mad Arthur, and Nobby Nobbs’s ancestry. (The golems are interesting but were a bit depressing in this book; I like them more in later stories like Going Postal.) The villain, Dragon King of Arms, was also very well done. So we’ll call this one a keeper.

BORROW: Misery Loves Cabernet, by Kim Gruenenfelder. Yes, more chick lit. Spare me the groans — sometimes a girl just needs a funny, feel-good book, and this one delivers. The narrator, Charlize “Charlie” Edwards, is assistant to Hollywood star Drew Stanton, a character as loveable as he is crazy. The Hollywood setting and twists combined with the character of Drew really set this book apart from the cookie-cutter novels that have littered the chick lit genre. (You just don’t forget Drew buying a hippo and then needing Charlie to get it removed from his pool.) But I’m putting it into the borrow category for two reasons: one, if you’ve read the preceding novel, some of the scenarios with Drew will seem repetitive; and two, I’ve got to be in the right mood to read chick lit. So it’s a borrow — just as long as I can borrow it when I feel the need.

BIN: Shopaholic & Sister, by Sophie Kinsella. I’m sorry, Sophie; really, I am. I was a big fan of the first three Shopaholic books, and I like some of the standalone books as well. But this one was a dud. The plot felt too contrived and it just wasn’t that funny. There’s no question about it: this one goes in the bin.

I hope you enjoyed this round! Next time, I’m going to try a different randomization tool, since this one isn’t giving me great results; it’s definitely skewing towards numbers over 100. Or, who knows, I may just pick three myself with an aim for making things interesting! I’d certainly like to get a few more fantasy selections in the mix; based on the six choices so far, it looks like my library is mostly chick lit, which definitely isn’t the case.

Until next time… happy reading!

Buy, Borrow or Ban

Zemanta Related Posts ThumbnailYesterday, I was reading a fun interview with writer friend Amanda C. Davis and I discovered a delightful game I couldn’t wait to try. It’s a variation of the “Kiss/Marry/Kill” game (to use the polite name), where you rate people you might find attractive. The rules are simple: you’re given three names and you have to put one name in each category. You can’t say, “Oh, but I don’t want to put anyone in that last category!” You have to choose, like it or not.

For the book version, you take three titles and put one in each category: Buy, Borrow, or Ban. (I admit, I changed the last category, which was “Burn”, on the grounds that I can’t imagine burning a book, ever. “Ban” captures the idea while being slightly more civilized.)

So how do you pick your books? Amanda picked the three most recent titles on her Kindle, but I opted for another method — partly because my Kindle is new and I’ve only finished one book there (coincidentally, it happens to be Amanda’s. Instead, I exported my Goodreads collection into a spreadsheet and sorted them by title, then used a random number generator to pick 3 numbers between 1 and 202.

The numbers I got were 117,  167, and 194, so my selections are Remember Me? by Sophie Kinsella, The Nanny Diaries by Emma Mclaughlin and Nicola Kraus, and True Love (And Other Lies) by Whitney Gaskell.

I’m a little surprised to have two chick-lit selections in the mix, and kind of shocked that there’s no fantasy represented, since that’s the main genre in my collection. Not sure what that says about the randomness of my picks, but oh well.

The “Buy” choice is easy: The Nanny Diaries. You can rail about the vapidness of bestsellers, but I really enjoyed this book — it was both funny and poignant, and it offered a detailed glimpse into both the world of the nanny and the inhabitants of New York’s wealthier class, who seem far, far removed from the real world. I’ve read it several times over the years, and it’s stayed in my collection through many, many moves, so it’s a proven keeper.

Deciding between the other two was a bit harder, but I’m going with my initial instinct: the borrow slot goes to Kinsella’s Remember Me, while True Love (and Other Lies) ends up banned. Both are lightweight novels — beach reads to some, though I think of them as travel reads: something breezy and entertaining to pass the time while you’re in an airport, on a plane, or enduring a long car ride. (For the record, that’s exactly how I read True Love — on a New Year’s guerrilla road trip to visit family, with stops in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.) While both were entertaining, the coincidence factor in True Love was too high, and the events too predictable; hence it gets the losing spot.

I hope you enjoyed this post and have fun playing the Buy, Borrow, Ban game yourself! I plan to revisit the game here once in a while, since I think it’s a neat way to provide mini-reviews of books I’ve read.

Happy New Year and happy reading!

UPDATES: Per Amanda, credit for the book version of the game goes to Gef Fox (@WagTheFox on Twitter). Also, I like Amanda’s suggestion that we call the last option “Bin” instead of “Ban”, so I’ll be going with that in future.