{"id":22,"date":"2013-12-17T01:12:28","date_gmt":"2013-12-17T07:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/?p=22"},"modified":"2013-12-19T21:45:38","modified_gmt":"2013-12-20T03:45:38","slug":"ten-books-mostly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/?p=22","title":{"rendered":"Ten Books (Mostly)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/b>\"chronicles\"<\/p>\n

Hold on to your butts, children, I\u2019m going to blog about a meme: I\u2019m going to cross the internet streams!\u00a0 Explosions of cat pictures and a Korean man dancing like a horse are no doubt in our future, but I\u2019m going to plunge on past that eye-wateringly terrible fate and do it anyway.<\/p>\n

Lingering on Facebook recently has been a meme demanding (and tagging) you post 10 books.\u00a0 It goes like this:<\/p>\n

\u201cRules: in your status list 10 books that are important to you – not necessarily great works, just books that have influenced you (without thinking too hard) then tag 10 friends, including me.\u201d<\/p>\n

First, I like the \u201cnot necessarily great works.\u201d\u00a0 Don\u2019t be a jerk and post \u201cWell, how can I not include all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past <\/i>by Proust\u201d unless those books actually mean something to you.\u00a0 But posting on Facebook gives limited space, and I don\u2019t like tagging people, and\u2026hey, I have a website, might as well pretend I know what to do with it.<\/p>\n

These books are in no particular order.<\/p>\n

1. The Drizzt<\/i> series, by R.A. Salvatore.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Number one and I\u2019m already cheating by including a series; it won\u2019t get better folks.<\/p>\n

2. The Dragonlance Chronicles<\/i> Trilogy by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman<\/strong><\/p>\n

See, I told you it wouldn\u2019t get better.\u00a0 Both 1 and 2 for me represent my birth into being a fantasy reader.\u00a0 I was in third grade when my step-father Spike handed me R.A. Salvatore\u2019s The Crystal Shard<\/i>, and I was hooked.\u00a0 I read all of the Drizzt books, followed by all of the Time of Troubles book in the Forgotten Realms series.\u00a0 And then I moved, on the recommendation of my friend Dustin, to the Dragonlance Chronicles<\/i> trilogy.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know what it was about the Heroes of the Lance that hooked me again, but it did hook me all over again.\u00a0 Maybe it was the sense of camaraderie and friendship shared between these disparate people at a time when I had scarce few friends myself.\u00a0 The Drizzt books had friendship but not the sense of old friends reuniting the way the Chronicles<\/i> did. \u00a0And that is what made the story all the better for me, as the friendships change and sour and grow; it was not just epic events, but a group of friends facing them and finding the changes to their world reflected in themselves.\u00a0 Both books were hugely influential on me as a person and what I would read for the rest of my life to date, but in stoking the nascent desire to be a writer.\u00a0 They opened my eyes to epic fantasy, for which I still owe Spike and Dustin a huge debt of gratitude.\u00a0 I still read Chronicles<\/i> every couple of years.<\/p>\n

3. \u00a0<\/i>The Lovely Bones<\/i>, by Alice Sebold<\/strong><\/p>\n

Books have made me angry, jubilant, depressed, and even brought me to tears from time to time.\u00a0 The Lovely Bones<\/i> is the first book that was able to consistently bawl like an unflattering gender comparison.\u00a0 I just\u2026many feels.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 I\u2019m going to go cry again now.\u00a0 I don\u2019t normally dip my toes into the Oprah Book Club pool, but this is an amazingly beautiful book.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0\u00a0<\/i>Ender\u2019s Game<\/i>, by Orson Scott Card<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s make one thing very clear: Orson Scott Card is a foul, loathsome bigot upon whom I no longer wish to bestow a dime.\u00a0 He declared \u201cwar\u201d on the U.S. government over gay marriage, and there is nothing that isn\u2019t ****ed up about that on three or four different (and incredibly stupid) levels.\u00a0 But Ender\u2019s Game<\/i>, you guys.\u00a0 Yes it\u2019s got some weird subtexts and a lot of naked boys in the shower for a man who hates homosexuals, but\u2026they spoke my language.\u00a0 Anyone who has been a gifted child, intellectually older even if physically (and let\u2019s be honest, emotionally) younger, can see themselves in the travails of battle school.\u00a0 Buy it at a used bookstore if you haven\u2019t read it, and remember: The enemy\u2019s gate is down.<\/p>\n

5. \u00a0The Harry Dresden<\/i> series by Jim Butcher and Kitty Norville<\/i> series by Carrie Vaughn.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I read a lot of modern fantasy, and a lot of it is of\u2026questionable quality.\u00a0 I loved the Anita Blake<\/i> series right up until she caught a disease that literally made her have sex all the time<\/i>.\u00a0 And then I kept reading for two books, guys, because I wanted to like it that much.\u00a0 There is a lot of modern fantasy out there that is thinly veiled sex, because there is a kind of person who looks at wolves in the zoo and says \u201cYeah, I\u2019d be down with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

I started these series fairly close on to one another, and they were breaths of fresh air.\u00a0 Jim Butcher\u2019s Harry is wise cracking, funny, bad at talking to women, not covered in sex and did I mention funny?\u00a0 And Carrie Vaughn, who is a friend and a wonderful person, starts with a werewolf named Kitty and never forgets that this is inherently funny.\u00a0 Ultimately that is what I love the most about both of these series: They remember that humans laugh<\/i>.\u00a0 Yes both of them go through terrible things, and there are some really terrible parts of them, but they smile.\u00a0 They laugh.\u00a0 They mess up, and they have good days and bad days.\u00a0 Modern fantasy can tell us about the essential humanity in all of us, and can give us deeply human characters facing mind-bogglingly supernatural situations.\u00a0 That is what Harry and Kitty are, real and fresh and blessedly human.<\/p>\n

And when they do get laid, those scenes are mercifully under-described, as I said to Carrie once in person after her second book was published.\u00a0 It is probably the oddest review I\u2019ve ever given a book, but it\u2019s pretty damn meaningful in comparison.<\/p>\n

6. \u00a0The Caves of Steel<\/i>, and the rest of the Robot <\/i>series by Isaac Asimov, and the\u00a0Vorkosigan Saga<\/em> by Lois McMaster Bujold.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My brother loves the Foundation<\/i> series, and I\u2019ve never really been able to get in to them.\u00a0 But the Robot <\/i>series continues to change my life regularly.\u00a0 It started as my introduction to Asimov, and the 3 Laws of Robotics, and whole large swaths of science fiction.\u00a0 Later in life as a writer it taught me that Science Fiction isn\u2019t really a genre, it is a way of viewing the world that can be applied to any genre\u2014it expanded my view of the tropes and philosophies of sci-fi.\u00a0 And on top of that they are really good stories, with interesting characters and the kind of forward looking consideration of consequences that characterizes the best science fiction.\u00a0 Living in Bangkok for 18 months I promise you I frequently thought of Elijah Bailey and his mile high cities filled with men and women too terrified to leave their steel wombs.<\/p>\n

The Vorkosigan Saga<\/em> is similar in how it expanded my view of Sci-Fi. \u00a0Miles is funny, and flawed and human. \u00a0He broods, yes, but he also laughs; this is a common thing for me, it seems: i like characters who can look at their situations and see the humor. \u00a0Miles and his mother Cordelia change worlds and whole quadrants of space, but never lose their fundamental humanness and humor. \u00a0They are\u00a0great<\/em> science fiction with brilliant plotting and pacing, that run through genres from action\/adventure to comedy of manners. \u00a0Again, expanding how I view science fiction tropes and realize it is a lens to view things–not the thing itself. \u00a0I credit three people for all telling me to read it. \u00a0My friends Pam and Cory (Wichita Cory), and my father Michael. \u00a0I then turned my mother and step-father on to it!<\/p>\n

7. \u00a0Name of the Wind<\/i>, by Patrick Rothfuss<\/strong><\/p>\n

8. \u00a0Mistborn Series<\/i>, by Brandon Sanderson<\/strong><\/p>\n

9. \u00a0The Wheel of Time<\/i>, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another set of three al clumped together.\u00a0 Like the Dresden\/Norville entry and the Caves of Steel<\/i>, these had an impact on me because they made me consider the tropes of the worlds I like to live in.\u00a0 Mistborn<\/i> starts off as a heist novel in a fantasy world, which blew my mind when I read it and made me wish I\u2019d written it.\u00a0 The Wheel of Time<\/i> examines how badly it would suck to be the chosen one in a way that I hadn\u2019t necessarily considered before.\u00a0 Both of them helped me think about the field of magic as science, something that as a reader I find intriguing and as a writer I find maddening largey because I\u2019m so bad at science.<\/p>\n

Name of the Wind<\/i> is a recent read (in fact I am still reading it as I type this), but it\u2019s just so well written I had to fall in love with it at least in part.\u00a0 I resisted reading it for a long time because it is a little cutesy and on the nose with some things (a story teller named Kvothe, pronounced like quoth?).\u00a0 But it is almost a master class on unreliable narrators and finding the right voice for your characters.\u00a0 You can hear Kvothe\/Kote, and there is a luxuriant richness to the voice that makes him startlingly real.<\/p>\n

And finally, All Seven Volumes of Remembrance of Things\u2026<\/i>nah, I\u2019m just screwing with you.<\/p>\n

10.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i>The Westing Game<\/i>, by Ellen Raskin<\/strong><\/p>\n

To this day The Westing Game<\/i> remains one of my favorite stories, and one I still pick up from time to time.\u00a0 I love it as a mystery, even though it has some \u201cinteresting\u201d parts.\u00a0 I love the puns, I love the characters, I love how it hooks middle-schoolers into mysteries.<\/p>\n

11. \u00a0John Dies at the End<\/em>, by David Wong<\/strong><\/p>\n

JDatE is, to state it plainly, f\u2019ng hilarious.\u00a0 I was presented this by my friend Cory (Denver Cory) as \u201cThis is what it would be like if we were in a horror movie.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s brilliant, funny, deeply stupid, and awesome.\u00a0 I read it in college when I was reinventing myself as a person, and it had a major impact on my humor today.\u00a0 Non-sequiturs, the absurd, and some truly awe-inspiring turns of phrase make it one that I (again) turn back to regularly.<\/p>\n

So there it is.\u00a0 There\u2019s an article here on recency in best of lists, wherein a number of these are things I read in the last three years and as such might just be fresher in my mind.\u00a0 But each of these had a major impact on me as a person, a reader, or a writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Hold on to your butts, children, I\u2019m going to blog about a meme: I\u2019m going to cross the internet streams!\u00a0 Explosions of cat pictures and a Korean man dancing like a horse are no doubt in our future, but I\u2019m going to plunge on past that eye-wateringly terrible fate and do it anyway. Lingering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/33"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dishonoronyourcow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}