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Reading questions ----------------- Semi-recently, Christina (you know, the twisty one) posted a series of "Reading questions" to her phlog[1] and encouraged people to answer "any, some or all of them". I'm going to opt for "some". Perhaps you should too? > Can you list three to five of your favourite authors? Why are they your favourite? As much as it's a bit of a cliche, I can't pretend for a second that William Gibson is not my number one favourite author. I can't really put my finger on why - I enjoy the early Sprawl stuff and the later Bigend stuff equally, so I can safely so it's nothing to do with cool cyberpunk tech or sexy razorgirls. It has to be something to do with the way he writes, because more so than any other author and I just can't put down, on first reading, anything of his, and I don't think he's written anything at all that I have had to struggle through (maybe "The Gernsback Continuum" in "Burning Chrome" is the closest thing to a "meh" he's ever extracted from me). When I say "the way he writes" it's just in a technical sense, like sentence structure or choice of words or anything like that, although I strongly suspect that's a part of it. Just as important, though, must be the perspective on things that his writing imparts. I really can't say what it is, just that his novels are simultaneously the easiest *and* most satisfying things to read that I've found yet. It's no secret that I'm a Bruce Sterling fan (I write, here at zaibatsu.circumlunar.space), but I actually do find him a little closer to hit-and-miss, compared to "ol' Gibby" (as tob calls him). I love Schismatrix to death, for (among many other things) its perspective on human lifespan and ambition and the relationship between the two, and have certainly also enjoyed other things he's written (these days I think "Red Star, Winter Orbit", which he co-wrote with Gibson, is my favourite short story in "Burning Chrome" - at some point it overtook "New Rose Hotel" which was a younger me's favourite). But I have struggled through other things and I really can't quite handle the odd "consensus reality" stuff he's done in some other works. I think this crops up in all the stories featuring Leggy Starlitz, which is a shame because I think that is perhaps the greatest character name I've ever read. Another bit of a cliche, but I am a Neal Stephenson fan. Probably beacuse he does such a very good job of writing "nerd's nerd" characters, which I can relate to. Possibly I enjoyed Anathem more than anything else for this reason. Leaving sci-fi aside, because I swear it's not all I read, I would have to say Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose "First Cirlce" is perhaps the leading contender my number one favourite book (is it okay that my number one favourite book is not written by my number one favourite author? I think it's okay). It's the best thing I've ever read on the subject of the human spirit, dignity and freedom. Shooting for the maximum of five, let's add Haruki Murakami. Mostly because I just really enjoy reading most of his books, but also in part because I first learned of him when a dear friend gifted me Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, so reading Murakami always makes me think of her and of that time in our lives. He is best known in the West for Norwegian Wood, which I do love, but which is also the least typical of all his works. I've enjoyed just about everything else of his I've read, too. A lot of his non-Norwegian Wood books share quite a large number of recurring themes and I can easily see how that would make a lot of people write him off as lazy and repetitive. It doesn't bother me too much, really, it just makes the books feel in some way cozy and familiar even before I've finished them for the first time. I think increasingly I get a lot of enjoyment out of them because so many of them are set in the 80s or earlier and feature detailed descriptions of daily life in those times, which increasingly feels like a mystical other world. I enjoy reading stories set in a world of landlines and letters, hardcopy photos and maps. That's five favourites. Three of the five are science fiction authors, which I guess makes it pretty cleary that I have a type. I'm really not as horribly narrowly read as the above might imply. While they're not favourites, I have read and really enjoyed books by plenty of authors who would seem out of place next to the above, such as Margaret Atwood, Anthony Doerr, Audry Niffenegger, Marcus Zusak and surely others who aren't coming immediately to mind. > What is your favourite film adaptation of a book? This is very easy to answer - "Bladerunner" (my love for which is well-documented[2]) - but it feels like cheating, because I don't love it qua a film adaptation of a book. It's just my favourite film, period, and I think it actually surpasses Dick's "Do Androids Dream" in most ways. > What fictional world or novel's setting would you like to live in? This one is easy - the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, as envisaged in Gibson's Bridge Trilogy. Briefly, for the unfamiliar: a massive earthquake devastates the Bay Area. SF is repaired at great expense using fancy nanotechnology, while Oakland (a low socio-economic area on the East of the Bay) and its homeless masses, are left to fend for themselves. The bridge connecting the two is fenced off, ostensibly because the earthquake has rendered it unsafe, but probably in fact to keep refugees out of SF. Eventually the refugees scale the Oakland-side fence and do what we would nowadays call "occupy" the bridge, turning it into a kind of small, crazy independent city-state. Improvised squatter's homes, built of of plywood and plastic sheeting held together with high-strengh epoxies acrete over the bridge and over each other in the total absence of central planning or authority. Ad-hoc plumbing and electrical networks are built, and maintained in a mutaul aid kind of fashion. The people of SF fear the Bridge and never go there, and have convinced themselves that the Bridge People are crazy and dangerous. And surely some of them are, but most of them are just smart, resourceful, thrifty, hard-working, ordinary people trying to build a life out of the scraps of their previous ones. I've loved it from the day I first read about it, although I surely completely missed out on a whole lot of the intended socio-cultural setting of the place at that time, having absolutely no idea what kind of places SF or Oakland were, and also having absolutely no political awareness at the time and being totally unfamiliar with ideas like mutual aid. I think I loved it just because I loved the idea of people basically building a crude but functioning city out of junk using only their own brains and hands, like the ultimate DIY project. I still kind of think it would be The Most Fun Ever, even if I can't deny for a second that it would be a long way from comfortable or safe and that I might not last long in that kind of gritty survivor's world at all. I've not said anything here at all about Skinner, who lives on the Bridge, or the little plywood shack he lives in high up on a pylon - and I won't, to keep this post somewhere vaguely in the territory of "short", but he and it are wonderful (and are the subject of the aptly-named short story "Skinner's Room" which preceded and was in fact the earliest seed of the Bridge Trilogy). If you want to know more, you should just read the Bridge trilogy. > What are your favourite classic books? I don't really have a strong answer to this, although I feel like I should. I've made a point of reading most of "the classics" on the subject of technocratic dystopias (e.g. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, We), and issues of power structure in society (e.g. Lord of the Flies). About 15 years ago I went through a Russian literature phase, and read a bunch of stuff, not all of which I even remember (Crime and Punishment was amongst them). I think I got something out of most of them at the time, but it's been a *very* long time and I can't really claim that much of it left lasting impressions that I have retained to this day. Perhaps I'd get more out of them now, being a little older and, if not a little wiser then a lot less naive. This is no answer at all, really, is it? I've read plenty of classics, and in general I like them, but I suppose none really jump out at me as favourites. > What is the most recent book you didn't expect to like, yet did? Probably "The Handmaid's Tale", which my wife read and then told me she thought I would enjoy. I had never previously read anything by Margaret Atwood, and somehow I had mentally tagged her as an author of boring crime/mystery novels for middle-aged women. I suspect this might be because I once saw "The Robber Bride" on a shelf somewhere and immediately judged it on its cover, or heck, even on its title, which even now sounds like the last thing I'd ever read. In fact I really enjoyed it, and later read her "Oryx and Crake" and enjoyed it even more. I intend to read the rest of that series sometime soon. [1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~christina/ReadingQuestions.txt [2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/let-me-tell-you-about-my-mother.txt