Ten Books That Stuck With Me

Earlier this week, I got tagged over on Facebook with that "list ten books that stuck with you" meme, and I listed ten books with little additional commentary, save to note that "stuck with you" does not mean the same thing as "loved".

Here's the list:

1. Watership Down - Richard Adams
2. The Belgariad - David Eddings
3. Jitterbug Perfume - Tom Robbins
4. Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
5. World According to Garp - John Irving
6. Caves of Steel - Isaac Asimov
7. The Green-Sky Trilogy - Zilpha Keatley Snyder
8. Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
9. Time Enough For Love - Robert Heinlein
10. ...And Eternity - Piers Anthony 

I should note that the first seven are all books I first read between the ages of thirteen and eighteen.  I would have a hard time isolating exactly when I read which for most-- I know Green-Sky Trilogy was around seventh grade, Belgariad was the summer I was sixteen-- but they all were formative-reading-years books.  And those two-- both series, but the sort of series that are essentially One Big Story-- are the most Traditional Fantasy on this list.  Well, Belgariad is traditional fantasy.  Green-Sky is more Traditional Fantasy with New Age Sci-Fi hidden inside it like a Russian Nesting Doll. 

I've talked before about how Watership Down is one of my favorite books of all time.  And this book is really the Fantasy Epic that resonates the most with me.  It's sweeping in scope while being deeply personal, and it's filled with worldbuilding top to bottom.  The fact that it's a cast of rabbits is almsot incidental.  And despite being often labeled as a "children's book"-- mostly because back then a fantasy novel or a novel with a cast of rabbits would never be designated anything else-- it's filled with maturity and complexity.  I re-read it every few years and still find new discoveries.

Jitterbug Perfume is also fantasy, but you won't find it on those shelves, mostly because Tom Robbins is Tom Robbins and he's pretty much his own genre.  But a story about a man who lives a thousand years, and occasionally hangs out with the god Pan?  Yeah, that's a fantasy book.  World According to Garp isn't genre at all, save for crafting an alternate history where Jenny Fields is a major political figure, and there's an extreme feminist movement that involves cutting one's own tongue out.  But it is a book that's almost entirely character study, really forsaking anything resembling a traditional plot.  It takes a special talent to make that engaging, and it was one I attempted to emulate in early versions of trunked novels. 

Caves of Steel is here as the standard-bearer for all the Asimov I read, which includes the rest of the Robot books and the Foundation books, and scores of short stories.  Caves also stuck with me because it showed me that with sci-fi (and fantasy), a simple plot like a murder mystery can be the gateway into a strongly built world.  You can take two cops solving a murder and put it anywhere and have the promise of a good story.

Hitchhikers is just plain fun, and it was definitely an early influence.  I think somewhere in a box I have a hand-written start-of-a-novel from my teenage years that was, without any doubt, Hitchhikers with the serial numbers filed off.  My one vaguely clever idea in that was that no other civilization in the galaxy had mastered Visine, so having a small bottle in his pocket gave my protagonist a significant amount of wealth on other worlds.

Guns, Germs and Steel I've talked about several times here, and it's the only non-fiction book here.  It formed the template for my worldbuilding ideas, beyond simplistic things like, "Here is the psuedo-Europe, here is the psuedo-Arabia, etc...".

And then there are the last two, which "stuck with me" entirely for bad reasons.  Both represent authors and/or stories that just went off the rails in such a train-wreck fashion that they actually angered me.  And strangely, both of them involve immoral sex and time travel. 

...And Eternity is the seventh and sort-of-final* book in his Incarnations of Immortality series, a series that starts relatively strong with In A Pale Horse (or at least did to my teenage self), and wavers up and down before crashing into the ground with this book.  There's a lot wrong with it, such as a climax where one character's prophesized "saving the world" from the first book turns out to be casting a deciding vote in the Senate on whether or not God is Dead (and said vote actually removes God, as the Incarnation of Good, from his place so a new person can fill it... it's very strange.)  But the real Oh My God What element for me involves one of the main characters: a 15-year-old prostitute, who over the course of the book gets cleaned up and straightened out by two ghosts, and then takes up a romantic relationship with a judge.  Yes, a fifteen-year-old-girl and a judge.  But he justifies what he's doing to himself because the fifteen-year-old girl essentially time-travelled ahead four years.  So even though he knows she's only fifteen, on paper she's nineteen, so he decides what he's doing is fine.  

Time Enough For Love has a different kind of skeezy.  There you have two-thousand-year-old Lazarus Long in the 41st century, more or less ready to finally give up and die, because he's done everything he can do, so what else is there?  What else is there?  Why, there's new theories that might make time travel practical, for one!  Once Lazarus learns this, he's got a new spring in his step.  He's back to being alive and vital, so he can finally cross the final frontier: going back in time to seduce his own mother.  The last third of the book is entirely about that.

So those last two books had a valuable lesson: Writers can let you down, and hard.

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*- In that Anthony wrote an eighth book many years later, which I never read, but I'm given to understand it doesn't so much continue the story as shade in more background detail.

Talent, Discipline and the Lure of the Crazy Success Story

While I might sometimes be at odds with what makes "good writing", I do think there's such a thing as talent.  Raw, pure talent, an instinct for craft that gives an artist an edge over their peers.  I know my son has it.  He's been drawing since he picked up a pencil, and he has skill that astounds me.  I don't know where it comes from, because I can't draw worth a damn.  Do I have talent?  I'll let others be the judge.

Because here's the thing about talent: it needs to be tempered with discipline.  Discipline wins over talent, in my book: someone who does fantastic work but can't be bothered to deliver on time is not someone I'd call on; the solid, dependable work that's ready and on time will always win with me. 

This is where the Crazy Success Story creates difficulty, because it's usually about the triumph of talent.  Talent being plucked out and held up high despite discipline.  Or at least despite apparent discipline.

Take, for example, Stephanie Meyers.  Now, I've got no issue with the Twilight books.  I've not read them, and I won't comment on their quality one way or the other.  But it's got fans, so on that level, she's done something right.  So: good on her.  What I do take issue with is Meyers's own narrative of writing and publishing the first book, as I heard her describe on NPR some time ago.  She more or less described the process as some sort of wacky accident:  she was just scribbling stuff down, and someone told her she wrote a novel and she should get it published, and so she did!  Just like that!  She wasn't even trying!  It just happened!

This sort of story undermines what it takes to actually write a novel.  It probably undermines what Meyers actually did to write and publish Twilight in the first place. 

Another one to think about is Douglas Adams.  Now: I am a huge Douglas Adams fan.  HUGE.  But if we're being honest, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy probably wouldn't have been published in today's environment.  It's a Crazy Success Story that is very much the product of its time: Adams was working in BBC Television and Radio at a time when it was a grind job*, and wrote a sci-fi/comedy radio program that was a huge success despite being done on the cheap and shuffled away on Radio 4. This is Adams's talent shining out, pure as sunlight.  The radio show was such a hit that a novel version was demanded by the publisher.  So Adams, despite having no history with writing a novel, was given a contract to write the book.  Then he missed one deadline.  Then another.  Then the "no, really, THIS is the deadline" deadline passed.  Eventually the publisher called and said, "Where are you with it?"  "I'm at this scene." "Well, finish that up, because we're sending a courier on a motorbike to pick up the manuscript, and that's gonna be the book.  Write the rest in the sequel."**

Can you imagine that today?  Let alone George R. R. Martin taking a long time with the next Game of Thrones-- imagine the idea of an unknown, untested writer being allowed to do that?  Wouldn't happen.

But that appeals to the people who believe in talent over discipline.  It appeals to the idea of, "I have an idea for a book, so give me a contract and I'll write it."  Because despite completely failing in terms of discipline-- he didn't even finish the book, and they published it anyway!-- it was a huge hit and launched his writing career.  Because he was insanely talented. 

However, that's a-billion-in-one longshot.  You can't plan a career on that.


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*- Consider this: Adams was a producer on Doctor Who.  In the Tom Baker years. Because at the time it was considered something of a crap job no one wanted.  Can you imagine that being the case in the TV world today.  Especially on Doctor Who?
**- If you can, pick up Neil Gaiman's biography of Adams, Don't Panic.  It's quite a fun read.