Author: MS Manz (Page 1 of 5)

Piers Anthony – The Xanth Series

December 24, 2024 / MS Manz / 1 Comment

Boy, this is starting to become a habit. Yet again, I’m reviewing a book I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) finish.

In this case, it’s a book from a series I read many moons ago when I was a young’un. I remember enjoying them well enough at the time, though I did find certain aspects of them mildly annoying. To be fair, I wasn’t the most discerning of readers. I would happily read almost anything, and frequently did.

This is clearly no longer the case. I got about a third of the way into A Spell for Chameleon and that’s as far into the Xanth series as I’m willing to go. It’s a shame. Piers Anthony was quite influential in encouraging young writers back in the day, and in helping navigate and mitigate dodgy publishing practices. He ran (and still runs) a website called Hi, Piers! (although it seems to be barely functional at the moment) that used to serve as a hub, nay a nexus, for aspiring writers to get good, reliable industry information and advice. But the issues with A Spell for Chameleon are numerous, horrifying, and, if I remember correctly, continue (and worsen) as you go through the series.

Now, let me preface this next bit by telling you that I am very well aware of the difference between an author’s world view or opinions and those of a character in a book written by that author. It is entirely possible for a writer to write characters who subscribe to ideas the writer finds abhorrent. This is not what is happening here. The world view and opinions that are problematic in this series (and in much of Anthony’s other writing) are woven into the fabric of the story in such a way as to leave no doubt that they are those of the author. And they are pretty bad.

I don’t feel the need to go into too much detail, but the accusations of pedophilia and misogyny (in his work) that have followed Anthony for much of his career are very much warranted. Female characters are nothing more than objects of desire or disgust. Girls as young as 14 (several times, just in this book) are described as sexually appealing and desirable. Rape victims are potentially “asking for it”. The main character – a 24 year old man with the intelligence and emotional maturity of a 12 year old – sets off on a quest to allow him to stay in Xanth and therefore stay with his sweetheart of the past 8(?) years but promptly forgets all about her as soon as he sees literally any other girl. The whole thing is gross.

I remember being put off by these aspects of the book when I read it initially, probably at about the age of 9 or 10. Reading it now, though, I found myself unable to continue. I mean, shit.. the opening scene of the story involves the protagonist attempting to create a mindless sex-slave, which his father characterizes as perfectly normal and understandable, except girls are all unreasonable about that sort of thing. WT-actual-F?

Looking beyond those hard-no issues, the story itself is poorly written. Anthony was never in any danger of winning any literary awards. The characters are all two-dimensional puppets with no emotional affect at all, moved about by the whims of the plot the author wants to follow, and the puns are… plentiful.

Anyway, my advice would be to give these books a miss. I just checked my list to see if the Apprentice Adept, Mode, Battle Circle, or Incarnations series are on there and they are not. Probably for the best. I don’t remember the mode series very well, but the Apprentice Adept series shared many of the same problems this one suffers from. Incarnations I remember fondly and as being less problematic. That one might be worth a read.

Next on the list is Falconer by John Cheever. I hope I like it.

Out of the Silent Planet (The Space Trilogy book 1) – C.S. Lewis

November 24, 2024 / MS Manz / 0 Comments

Let me start this review off with a caveat. Well, two caveats. The first is that Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad set a very high bar for this book to hurdle. The second is that I’ve never much liked C.S. Lewis. I read some of the Narnia series as a kid, and I didn’t really care for it. This book was no exception. Dull, dull, dull.

I think my problem with Lewis is the same problem I have with Madeline L’Engle and Christian Rock ‘n’ Roll. They’re all so focused on the Jesus-y bits they forget to do the rest of it well. Any story with an agenda is unlikely to be a very good story, and this story is effectively agenda from cover to cover. I disliked it enough that I decided not to read the other two books in the series even though that was my original plan. Mostly because a little birdie (on Reddit) has reliably informed me that the first book is the least preachy of the bunch and that one was far too preachy for my liking.

Aside from that aspect of things, there were a couple of story things that really rubbed me the wrong way, one major and one minor. I’ll try to avoid spoilers.

The major issue occurs in a scene in which a major character, someone who has been a friend to the protagonist, Ransom, dies. Ransom shows not a moments emotion over this. In fact, later the same day he finds himself wondering that he ever thought of the Hrossa as people at all and even begins to think fondly about the two men who drugged him, kidnapped him, and planned to sacrifice him to the aliens – merely because they are shaped like him. Absurd.

The minor thing is the deus ex machina way in which the story ends. Perhaps it’s the nature of religion-infused fiction but the characters all seem robbed of agency, and the only character whose thoughts and actions matter is the “higher power”. I find it unsatisfying.

At any rate, I’ll not bother with the other two books as I’m confident I won’t enjoy them. I believe the Narnia series is higher up on the list though, and I suppose I’ll have to give them another shot when I get to them. Perhaps I’ll like them better than this one.

Next book(s) on the list is the entire Xanth series. I’ve read them before (though probably not *all* of them*) but not for a very long time. There are apparently 47 of them, so I may or may not read all of them. If I do read all of them I’ll likely write a short review of each one as I go, otherwise it’ll bee weeks before my next review.

Ta for now.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (a review)

November 20, 2024 / MS Manz / 1 Comment

I was looking forward to this book tremendously as soon as I looked it up. It’s got an unusual (possibly unique) story structure, it’s loosely centered around the world of punk rock and the music industry, and it’s relatively (by comparison to some of the books on my reading list) new. I suspect it was partly my anticipation for this book that made The Death of the Heart such a disappointment.

Spoiler alert: I absolutely loved this book.

There are two things I mostly want to mention about it – the story structure, and the 12th (chapter or story, depending on who you ask) “Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake”. I suspect both of these things are what other reviews also tend to focus on, but I’ve made an effort not to read any one else’s reviews before writing my own, so who knows.

The structure of this story is, as I mentioned, is unusual. To the point that some people apparently don’t consider it to be a novel at all. It’s a collection of standalone-able stories with no continuous main character. Instead the main character of each story has some connection, whether profound or profoundly casual, with a main character in a previous story. A few of the characters appear in multiple stories, some only in one. What interested me about this structure is that, off the bat it sounded similar to the structure of the first draft of a novel I just finished writing. In mine, there are three loosely connected stories where the throughline is a shared set of events.

It turns out the shape of this story is nothing like mine. Oh, and in my opinion Egan’s story actually does have a main character. Time.

Over the course of the book, a couple of characters (I think it’s a couple, it may have only been the one) refer to Time as a Goon. The book is called A Visit From the Goon Squad. The one consistent theme that appears throughout the book in various guises is that of the effects of time, in particular as relates to memory. I would argue that there is a main character after all.

Interestingly enough, I was recently involved in a workplace chat that found its way to the topic of memory – specifically childhood memories. I made the point that all memory is constructed (as is all experience of the world) and that while we have to act as though our memories are accurate in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we shouldn’t necessarily trust that they are accurate. Someone else pointed out that people who stay in their hometown and hang out with the same people from high school tend to reinforce (a version of) their remembered experience through reminiscing whereas those of us who moved away (in this case to China) don’t – and when we do go back (for reunions and the like) our memories of high school can vary greatly from those of the people who stayed.

And yes, I work with some pretty unusual people.

Egan treats memory in much the same way. Characters remember different elements of their shared experience, remember the same things differently, and in some cases don’t remember anything much at all. Time really is a goon.

The stories in this book vary quite widely in style, suiting themselves to the point of view character, but none quite so much as the 12th story. It’s written not in prose, but in presentation slides (no, actually presentation slides, like in a business meeting), and it’s brilliantly done. I don’t really know how to describe it any better than that. You should just read it. It’s amazing and I stand in awe of Egan’s talent in pulling this off. It seems like it should be too gimmicky to fly, but it not only flies, it soars.

It’s called Great Rock and Roll Pauses and, just as the songs mentioned in it are defined in large part by their pauses, so too is this story defined by the gaps caused by the way in which it’s presented (pardon the pun). It also ties back into the fragmented nature of memory depicted elsewhere, and to the idea that we build full stories about the past based on the bits and pieces we hold on to. In this story we are given only the smallest pieces of information, and yet it is a full and satisfying story. The whole book is enjoyable, but this story by itself is worth the price of admission. It even makes up for having read (some of) The Death of the Heart.

Go and read it.

The next book(s) in my reading challenge are C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, which I will hopefully be able to finish this week. From what I recall of Lewis, his prose is a fairly easy read.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield – a review

November 18, 2024 / MS Manz / 0 Comments

Having just finished Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, I really wish I hadn’t bothered.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t a terrible book, it just that, much like Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, it isn’t a particularly good one either. And I had such high hopes for it, as well. Everything I’ve ever read about this book has been overwhelmingly positive. Also, I found Sun Tzu’s Art of War to be incredibly thought provoking and valuable and logically, and a book whose title is a play on that books title should be chock-full of wisdom. Right?

Well, there are some good ideas in The War of Art, but they are, all of them, other people’s ideas collected and presented by Mr. Pressfield. There are no original ideas, no world changing revelations, no fresh ways of seeing the world that are staggering in both their power and simplicity. Hmm, maybe I was expecting too much. Most of the ideas are useful, after a fashion. I will list them here to save you the time and trouble of reading the thing (which isn’t much, as it’s effectively a long blog post worth of text).

everything that pushes you away from doing a creative thing is called “resistance”
the more resistance you feel, the more important the thing is to do
focus on the work, not the result
show up every day and do the work
angels are real
all of the creative things exist already (in potentia) and we don’t actually create them but rather discover them
Do or do not, there is no try

And that’s the book in a nutshell.

I mean, maybe the thing that bothered me the most about it was the way he spent the final third of the book raw-dogging a sort of watered-down new age mysticism. Maybe it was the relative lack of substance in the other things he was saying. Overall it’s a fairly well-written and at times amusing rehash of standard writing advice, I suppose. I just resented the loss of the time I spent reading it. I was hoping to learn something new.

Next up for writing books to review is Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. The subtitle says it’s the last book on novel writing I’ll ever need. Hope so.

Creating Strong, Memorable Characters (and why you should)

November 17, 2024 / MS Manz / 0 Comments

This hasn’t always been the case, but when it comes to modern fiction it’s an inviolable truth that its your characters who make or break your story. Readers are happy to forgive any number of unforgivable plot sins and will cheerfully overlook absurd consistency errors and even *gasp* second rate prose – just so long as you can get them to care about your characters.

If you can create characters that feel real and complex, characters that drive the story rather than characters that are driven, characters that resonate with your readers and allow them to form an emotional connection (be it love or hate), you are most of the way to a successful story.

To that end, here are 7 tips to help ensure that your characters jump off the page and into the hearts and minds of your readers.

1. Understand Your Character’s Core

There are three foundational elements to any character and, before you start faffing about deciding what sort of socks they wear, how they style their hair, or what their favorite hot dog toppings are, it’s pretty important that you figure these three elements out. They are, of course, what the character wants, what the character needs, and what stands in the way of the character achieving either or both of those things.

If you’ve read any of the approximately 1.7 buh-jillion books out there on character development you’ll likely be familiar with these things already, but that’s because they are so fundamental to the topic that you can’t discuss it without talking about them.

These three elements are so foundational in fact, that the very first thing you should do when starting a new story is to jot something down for each of them. For both your protagonist and your antagonist. You can change things later if necessary (i.e. if the story requires it) but just having something in mind for your main characters’ wants, needs, and obstacles will really help you hone in on what the story is about (and what it isn’t about).

2. Create a Multi-dimensional Personality

The goal in any story is to have characters who feel like real people, and real people are usually defined not by their consistencies but rather by their contradictions. A kind old man putting out food for the neighborhood cats doesn’t stand out. He’s a kind old man, of course he feeds the cats. Meh. A grumpy old man who seems to hate everyone but is seen putting out food for stray animals, though… now that is interesting.

A three dimensional character’s personality doesn’t point in one single direction. In the real world, personality is less compass needle and more tangled ball of yarn. By simply making sure that some of your character’s traits are inconsistent, bent back on themselves, or even tangled up a bit, you’ll be much more likely to write interesting and memorable characters.

I wanted to provide a counterexample – a story where the writer didn’t follow this advice and wrote about boring, one-dimensional characters – but I can’t. I’m certain that I’ve read hundreds such stories, but I can’t for the life of me remember any of them. Funny that.

3. Develop Their Backstory and History

In many ways, people are the sum of all their experiences. Who we are today is the direct result of all of the things that we have done and that have happened to us. Who your characters are and what they say and do in response to the events in your story is largely dependent on what they’ve already been through, so it’s important to understand what pivotal moments in their lives have shaped them into the people they are today.

Keep in mind that these events don’t have to be of cosmic importance to the world at large. They just have to have been important to your character at the time – positively or negatively. Being rejected by a romantic prospect, working hard towards a goal and achieving it (or failing to achieve it), being too afraid to take a chance and try something new, or being brave enough to try – all of these are good examples of the sorts of events that can really shape who a person (or a character) becomes.

One other thing to remember when it comes to character backstory… it’s important that you know what has shaped your characters, it isn’t necessarily important that your readers know. If it is important that they know, then it is almost always the case that this information should be provided naturally through dialogue or (maybe) a flashback. Avoid the temptation to info-dump on your readers with a whole bunch of exposition about where your characters have come from and what they’ve gone through. You want to tell a story, not explain a story.

4. Build Emotional Depth and Complexity

A character’s strengths should be aspirational for your readers – the sorts of things that most people want to be themselves. Their weaknesses should be relatable – the sorts of things that we all fall prey to from time to time. A good character has both strengths and weaknesses. That means that a strong character should stumble from time to time and screw things up. A weak character needs to have moments of strength, moments when they stop being a punching bag and start punching back. Or at least try to.

Not only that, but their strengths and weaknesses should change somewhat over the course of the story. That’s not to say then need to be completely different people at the end of the story than they were at the start, but they do need to grow and change (more on that in tip 7) or at least have their strengths and weaknesses re-contextualized in light of the events of the story. What initially seemed to be a weakness turns out to be a strength in the right situation, for example.

One of the best ways to show the complexity of your character’s personality is to make sure that they face a combination of internal and external conflicts. An example of this in action would be a character who finds that the man she loves is exactly what is standing in the way of her biggest goal. Having the characters want (from tip 1) interfere with their need (also from tip 1) is a great way to set up a very natural sort of complexity. What we want in life (chocolate cake) is frequently not what we need (to lose weight). What we want, more often than not, gets in the way of what we need (stupid cake). These are the kinds of conflicts that most readers can relate to and sympathize with and they make your characters feel more real.

5. Make Their Relationships Matter

So far we’ve discussed characters in isolation, but isolation is not a character’s natural habitat. When we present our characters to our readers it’s in the context of a story, where they are bumping into and interacting with all sorts of other characters. The way your characters interact with other people is the most powerful way of showing your readers who those characters are and what they value. What does your character want out of their relationships? How do they go about getting it? How successful or unsuccessful are they?

It’s also worth pointing out that relationships aren’t always smooth and uncomplicated. In fact, in a story they should really not be. A story without conflict isn’t a story at all. Story is conflict. This should be reflected (to a certain extent) in your characters relationships with the people around them.

6. Give Them a Distinct Voice and Mannerisms

Your characters should have their own unique voices. The way they express themselves, from word choice to pronunciation to when they do and don’t say something at all is a big part of who they are and should derive naturally from their personality, their background, and their emotional state in the moment. Do they speak formally, casually, or colloquially? Are they terse or long-winded? Do they have any little quirks, mannerisms, or particular phrases they use that are noteworthy? Do they have an accent?

All of these elements can help your character to stand out and feel more real, but use them judiciously and go light on the gas when depicting them to your reader – especially with accents. The more you lean into a dialect or accent in your text, the harder it will be for your reader to actually read your story. Think of it like seasoning for a dish you’re cooking. You should use as little as you can in order to get the effect you want.

One very important aspect to this that I don’t see written about nearly enough is that your character’s voice should be distinct not just from the other characters in the story, but also from your own. It is very common for beginning writers to treat their characters as mouthpieces for their own views and ideas. The things your characters say and do should be true to who they are, not to who you are.

7. Allow for Growth and Change

As mentioned briefly before, compelling characters (with some notable exceptions**) need to change in some meaningful way from the beginning of the story to the end. If the events of the story are important than they should have some impact on the people who experienced them. If there’s no impact then how meaningful can the events really be? If nothing else, the climax of the story should involve some resolution, either positive or negative, of the character’s quest to achieve their want and/or need (tip 1). If they achieve or permanently fail to achieve that goal, they can’t help but be changed, if only in that they must now have a new goal.

More interesting, though, is to have your characters confront their flaws, fears, and desires more consciously. If you re-contextualize their strengths or weaknesses, how does that change how they see and interact with the world around them? If they have some trait that holds them back (internal conflict), do they manage to overcome it or does it cause their downfall in the end? As readers we find meaning in a story by how it changes the people who live the story. Characters who never change render a story meaningless.

** the exceptions to this are almost exclusively recurring characters in episodic stories – Sherlock Holmes for example. Sherlock never really changes as a result of his adventures, but the people around him do (Watson, for example). Detective fiction is one of the few examples of a modern story form that is largely plot driven rather than character driven and what works there is unlikely to work elsewhere.

Conclusion

Strong, memorable characters are multi-dimensional, emotionally complex, and have a clear arc that drives the story forward. Don’t be afraid to experiment and revise. Character development is an ongoing process that can, and should evolve as you write. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and compelling, three-dimensional characters are seldom born in the first draft.

As with everything else in your story, try things out and don’t be afraid to try something else if the first thing isn’t working. The tips above should give you a good start towards finding something that works for you.

If you found this useful or interesting, don’t forget to subscribe. You’ll get a weekly email digest of whatever I’ve posted that week so you don’t miss any other entertainingly useful stuff. In the meantime, happy writing, may the words flow freely, and may some of them be the right ones.

A note on Worldbuilding

October 28, 2024 / MS Manz / 0 Comments

So I’ve been spending an awful lot of time lately building a world, and it turns out building a whole world is a pretty ginormous job. Who knew?

I entered into this project, as I always do, bright-eyed and bushy-faced, and full of grand and grandiose ideas, and almost immediately (as I also always do) got bogged down by the reality of it all. Progress has been slow. Steady, but slow. At the moment I’ve got the shape of the thing sketched in, but I’m still nowhere near where I thought I needed to be to start actually writing stories in the thing.

Which brings me to the big thing I’ve learned about worldbuilding – I can’t do it in a vaccuum.

You see, my idea was that I would build out this world, flesh out all the details of the people and the neighborhoods and the commerce and the culture and the everything and then, when I had a fully realized and vibrant world ready to go, I could begin with the stories.

Turns out that’s not how it works. Or at least, that’s not how I work.

What I’ve come to, through some trial and error, is what I think is a more workable process. I’ve sketched in the bones of the world, and will set up placeholders for where all the details will be( when there are details), and then I will write my stories – fleshing out the world as I go and filling in those details as my stories require them. Because it’s the stories that make the world and not the world that makes the stories. At least for me, anyway.

So expect to see some stories in the not so distant future, and a more organic approach to the building of my world (which you can see being built here). I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to it.

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (an almost review)

October 4, 2024 / MS Manz / 3 Comments

You know, for the past week or two I’ve been walking around thinking I’d fallen at the first hurdle with this reading project. In a way I have – in that it’s taken me three weeks or so and I still haven’t finished the first book on the list – but the truth is, I don’t intend to finish it. So there.

I take this as a sign of growth, actually.

I really struggled with this book. I couldn’t force myself to be interested in any of the characters. None of them seem to actually do anything, and it felt very much like work to make myself pick the thing up and read it. Every time I did pick it up, half of my mind was occupied with thinking of things I’d rather be reading.

So I stopped.

I read about a third of the book before I put it down permanently. I’m sure I was probably only a few pages away from something interesting – some fascinating little character quirk or wrinkle of conversation – but I just couldn’t bear the thought of forcing myself past any more boring to get there.

And that’s a real step forward for me.

I used to be of the mind that if I started reading a book, no matter how much I disliked it, I would finish the damned thing. In fact, this is only the second novel in my life that I’ve started and not finished. The first was the fourth book in Jean M. Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear series which was so poorly written that I have to suspect it was published as a practical joke (on readers) or that Ms. Auel had some sort of ‘leverage’ on someone high up over at Random House.

The Death of the Heart is not nearly as bad as that. Bowen’s prose is competent if not terribly interesting and the book isn’t bad per se, it’s just that it isn’t very good, and I have a whole list of very good books ahead of me. So many of them, in fact, that it really accentuates my lack of interest in this one.

And life’s too short to spend it reading books you don’t like.

If you are interested in unsympathetic characters that talk in vague circles about uninteresting things and where nothing much happens, this book is very much for you. As for me, I’m moving on to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad which I’ve already started, and which I’m very excited to continue.

My Dirty Little Reading Habit (book reviews incoming)

August 16, 2024 / MS Manz / 1 Comment

A while back I had begun working on a series of non-fiction books I called the Book Club Companion series. The idea was to read and review current popular fiction, and then write some pop-literary analysis with an eye towards helping folks who might want to discuss said books with others, but who don’t have the literary background to feel comfortable doing so.

The secondary goal, of course, was to give me an excuse to read more, and in particular read outside of my normal wheelhouse (Science Fiction and Epic Fantasy mostly).

That project has been mothballed indefinitely, mostly because Amazon doesn’t seem to understand what literary analysis is. They allowed me to publish and to offer the books for sale, but then disabled them in all of the stores and made it impossible to actually buy it. They say “our customers generally find this type of book to be unsatisfying”. Oh, well. I only wasted a couple of weeks in writing the first book, designing the cover templates and covers, editing, formatting, and publishing. We’ll just add this to the pile of reasons why Amazon makes me hope Hell is a real place.

In the meantime, I’ve come up with a clever plan to fill the gap. I’m just going to read a shitload of books and then review them here.

But what books to read?

Well, to get the ball rolling, I Googled up a few of those “Top 100 Novels of All Time”-style lists and consolidated a handful of them into one ginormous list. I included a couple of lists from Goodreads that looked interesting, as well as the Reader’s Digest Best Books of All Time list, a list of newer books, and a Sci-Fi and Fantasy themed one from NPR. Then I made a combined ranking to generate a list from best to least-best. Now that I have the master list, I can read them in least-best to best order.

Make sense?

Here’s the list:

The Death of the Heart – Bowen, Elizabeth
A Visit From the Goon Squad – Egan, Jennifer
The Space Trilogy – Lewis, C.S.
The Xanth Series – Anthony, Piers
Falconer – Cheever, John
The Kite Runner – Hosseini, Khaled
An American Tragedy – Dreiser, Theodore
Perdido Street Station – Mieville, China
A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement – Powell, Anthony
Doomsday Book – Willis, Connie
Americanah – Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi
Under the Net – Murdoch, Iris
Lucifer’s Hammer – Niven, Larry & Pournelle, Jerry
Loving – Green, Henry
The Mars Trilogy – Robinson, Kim Stanley
The Caves of Steel – Asimov, Isaac
Wuthering Heights – Bronte, Emily
The Assistant – Malamud, Bernard
The Sportswriter – Ford, Richard
A Fire Upon the Deep – Vinge, Vernor
Sunshine – McKinley, Robin
Dog Soldiers – Stone, Robert
The Color Purple – Walker, Alice
The Illustrated Man – Bradbury, Ray
The Recognitions – Gaddis, William
A Death in the Family – Agee, James
Little Women – Alcott, Louisa May
The Elric Saga – Moorcock, Michael
The Outlander Series – Gabaldan, Diana
The Berlin Stories – Isherwood, Christopher
A Handful fo Dust – Waugh, Evelyn
The Thrawn triogy – Zahn, Timothy
The Sheltering Sky – Bowles, Paul
The Year of Magical Thinking – Didion, Joan
The Book of the New Sun – Wolfe, Gene
The Codex Alera series – Butcher, Jim
Call It Sleep – Roth, Henry
Hamlet – Shakespeare, William
The World According to Garp – Irving, John
At Swim-Two-Birds – O’Brien, Flann
Anathem – Stephenson, Neal
Herzog – Bellow, Saul
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Murakami, Haruki
The Crystal Cave – Stewart, Mary
The Culture Series – Banks, Iian M.
The Adventures of Augie March – Bellow, Saul
The Sot-Weed Factor – Barth, John
Between the World and Me – Coates, Ta-Nehisi
The Eyre Affair – Fforde, Jasper
The Malazan Book of the Fallen series – Erikson, Steven
The Man Who Loved Children – Stead, Christina
The Stranger – Camus, Albert
Wicked – Maguire, Gregory
Housekeeping – Robinson, Marilynne
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Bradbury, Ray
The Day of the Locust – West, Nathaniel
Deliverance – Dickey, James
The Dispossessed – LeGuin, Ursula K.
Money – Amis, Martin
The Kushiel’s Legacy series – Carey, Jacqueline
The Right Stuff – Wolfe, Tom
Rendezvous With Rama – Clarke, Arthur C.
Appointment in Samarra – O’Hara, John
Tropic of Cancer – Miller, Henry
The Diamond Age – Stephenson, Neal
Old Man’s War – Scalzi, John
The Confessions of Nat Turner – Styron, William
The Moviegoer – Percy, Walker
The Legend of Drizzt Series – Salvatore, R.A.
Pale Fire – Nabokov, Vladimir
A Journey to the Center of the Earth – Verne, Jules
The Heart of the Matter – Greene, Graham
The Way of Kings – Sanderson, Brandon
The Golden Notebook – Lessing, Doris
The Time Traveller’s Wife – Niffenegger, Audrey
The Farseer Trilogy – Hobb, Robin
The Conan The Barbarian Series – Howard, R.E.
Rabbit, Run – Updike, John
The Shannara Trilogy – Brooks, Terry
Ubik – Dick, Philip K.
The Golden Compass – Pullman, Philip
Lucky Jim – Amis, Kingsley
The Night Watchmen – Erdrich, Louise
The Riftwar Saga – Feist, Raymond E.
Play It As It Lays – Didion, Joan
The Giver – Lowry, Lois
I Am Legend – Matheson, Richard
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – Clarke, Susanna
A House for Mr Biswas – Naipaul, V.S.
The Sword of Truth – Goodkind, Terry
The Painted Bird – Kosinski, Jerry
The Joy Luck Club – Tan, Amy
Under the Volcano – Lowry, Malcolm
The Mote in God’s Eye – Niven, Larry & Pournelle, Jerry
Going Postal – Pratchett, Terry
Gravity’s Rainbow – Pynchon, Thomas
The Vorkosigan Saga – Bujold, Lois McMaster
The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao – Diaz, Junot
White Teeth – Smith, Zadie
Rubyfruit Jungle – Brown, Rita Mae
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever – Donaldson, Stephen R.
Red Harvest – Hammett, Dashiell
Small Gods – Pratchett, Terry
The Book Thief – Zusak, Markus
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Chabon, Michael
The Forever War – Haldeman, Joe
Wide Sargasso Sea – Rhys, Jean
The Last Unicorn – Beagle, Peter S.
The Age of Innocence – Warton, Edith
World War Z – Brooks, Max
Homegoing – Gyasi, Yaa
The Crying of Lot 49 – Pynchon, Thomas
The Power and the Glory – Greene, Graham
Cryptonomicon – Stephenson, Neal
Stardust – Gaimen, Neil
American Pastoral – Roth, Philip
The Hyperion Cantos – Simmons, Dan
The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Wilder, Thornton
Death Comes for the Archbishop – Cather, Willa
And Then There Were None – Christie, Agatha
Contact – Sagan, Carl
Childhood’s End – Clarke, Arthur C.
Out of Africa – Dinesen, Isak
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Spark, Muriel
Neverwhere – Gaimen, Neil
Of Human Bondage – Maugham, W. Somerset
The Once and Future King – White, T.H.
The Silmarillion – Tolkien, J.R.R.
Revolutionary Road – Yates, Richard
The Left Hand of Darkness – LeGuin, Ursula K.
East of Eden – Steinbeck, John
Infinite Jest – Wallace, David Foster
White Noise – DeLillo, Don
Ringworld – Niven, Larry
Middlesex – Eugenides, Jeffrey
The Mistborn Series – Sanderson, Brandon
Brideshead Revisited – Waugh, Evelyn
The Mists of Avalon – Bradley, Marion Zimmer
Naked Lunch – Burroughs, William S.
The Belgariad – Eddings, David
Love Medicine – Erdrich, Louise
The Road – McCarth, Cormac
Blood Meridian – McCarthy, Cormac
Go Tell It on the Mountain – Baldwin, James
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – McCullers, Carson
The Chronicles of Amber – Zelazny, Roger
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold – le Carre, John
The War of the Worlds – Wells, H.G.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman – Fowles, John
Flowers for Algernon – Keys, Daniel
Interpreter of Maladies – Lahiri, Jhumpa
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Thompson, Hunter S.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Verne, Jules
To the Lighthouse – Woolf, Virginia
Light in August – Faulkner, William
The Time Machine – Wells, H.G.
Ragtime – Doctorow, E.L.
A Canticle for Leibowitz – Miller, Walter M.
Cutting For Stone – Verghese, Abraham
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – Heinlein, Robert
Native Son – Wright, Richard
The Blind Assassin – Atwood, Margaret
Dragonflight – McCaffrey, Anne
Charlotte’s Web – White, E.B.
Watership Down – Adams, Richard
All the King’s Men – Warren, Robert Penn
The Sound and the Fury – Faulkner, William
Starship Troopers – Heinlein, Robert
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Marquez, Gabriel Garcia
The Sandman Series – Gaimen, Neil
I, Claudius – Graves, Robert
A Passage to India – Forster, E.M.
Cat’s Cradle – Vonnegut, Kurt
The Martian Chronicles – Bradbury, Ray
Possession – Byatt, A.S.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass – Carroll, Lewis
The Fault in Our Stars – Green, John
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Hurston, Zora Neale
The Stand – King, Stephen
Selected Stories – Munro, Alice
2001: A Space Odyssey – Clarke, Arthur C.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – Rowling, J.K.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Eggers, Dave
The Dark Tower Series – King, Stephen
Mrs. Dalloway – Woolf, Virginia
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Dick, Philip K.
The Corrections – Franzen, Jonathan
Angela’s Ashes – McCourt, Frank
Frankenstein – Shelley, Mary
The Kingkiller Chronicles – Rothfuss, Patrick
Great Expectations – Dickens, Charles
Stranger in a Strange Land – Heinlein, Robert
I, Robot – Asimov, Isaac
In Cold Blood – Capote, Truman
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Kesey, Ken
The Wheel of Time Series – Jordan, Robert & Sanderson, Brandon
The Princess Bride – Goldman, William
Gone With the Wind – Mitchell, Margaret
Pride and Prejudice – Austen, Jane
American Gods – Gaimen, Neil
Atonement – McEwan, Ian
The Grapes of Wrath – Steinbeck, John
A Wrinkle in Time – L’Engle, Madeleine
The Foundation Trilogy – Asimov, Isaac
Lord of the Flies – Golding, William
Things Fall Apart – Achebe, Chinua
Brave New World – Huxley, Aldous
The Sun Also Rises – Hemingway, Ernest
The Shining – King, Stephen
A Song of Ice and Fire – Martin, George R.R.
Portnoy’s Complaint – Roth, Philip
Valley of the Dolls – Susann, Jacqueline
Ender’s Game – Card, Orson Scott
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Adams, Douglas
Anna Karenina – Tolstoy, Leo
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – Lewis, C.S.
The Big Sleep/The Long Goodbye – Chandler, Raymond
Midnight’s Children – Rushdie, Salman
Never Let Me Go – Ishiguro, Kazuo
The Great Gatsby – Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Snow Crash – Stephenson, Neal
On the Road – Kerouac, Jack
Neuromancer – Gibson, William
The Catcher in the Rye – Salinger, J.D.
Lolita – Nabokov, Vladimir
Invisible Man – Ellison, Ralph
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. – Blume, Judy
A Clockwork Orange – Burgess, Anthony
Catch-22 – Heller, Joseph
Beloved – Morrison, Toni
The Handmaid’s Tale – Atwood, Margaret
Farenheit 451 – Bradbury, Ray
Animal Farm – Orwell, George
Dune – Herbert, Frank
To Kill A Mockingbird – Lee, Harper
Slaughterhouse Five – Vonnegut, Kurt
1984 – Orwell, George
The Lord of the Rings – Tolkien, J.R.R.

I’m looking forward to reading quite a few of these – some for the first time, more than a few for the second or third. In many cases I’ve read other books by an author on this list, but not the specific book listed. There are a few of these books I am very much *not* looking forward to reading. I remember loving A Wrinkle in Time when I read it as a child (I was probably 5 or 6 years old at the time). I tried reading it again a few years ago and found it unreadable. I’ll do my best to give it another shot. I have never liked The Giver. I taught it once to an ESL class of teenagers. They seemed to like it. Every page was like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. Again, I’ll see what I can do.

There are a few books on the list that I haven’t read, and that I suspect I will not enjoy. I will do my best to finish all of the books on this list, but I’m not going to punish myself by forcing myself to read a book I actively hate. I may bail on one or two of the books on the list. Maybe even three.

As always, you are cordially invited to read alongside me as I make my way through the list. I will be going through in the order listed above, so you’ll be able to figure out what I’m working on at any given time. Hopefully, there will be some lively discussion in the comments of each review. And speaking of comments, let me know what you think of my list in the comments below.

Happy reading!

Map News

August 7, 2024 / MS Manz / 0 Comments

Just a quick update today on the progress of my little world building adventure – the one I mentioned in this post.

I have just finished setting up the initial structure of my world’s map, a job which I suspect will feel the most like work of all the worldbuilding things I have to do, and now all that’s left is to put all the things that go on the map on the map, and to start writing all the articles that will explain all those things.

Initially I’d decided to use a fairly basic (but pretty) map of London published in about 1815. This was, of course, 70 years before my world is set, but I was willing to accept the inaccuracies this caused. I couldn’t find a better map that I could use legally, and I felt I could explain it away with the idea that my world is an alternate version of the real one and is under no obligation to be historically accurate in any but the most passing of ways.

So that was the map I was using, and I’d gotten quite a ways along in the process. I’d laid out the Metropolitan Police districts, located and pinned most of the police stations, marked out several of the neighborhoods and gang territories (some authentically, and some.. creatively), and I had each section of the main map linked to a more detailed, higher resolution map of just that part of it.

It was pretty nifty.

And then I discovered that there actually were downloadable images of Charles Booth’s Poverty maps of London (1898-9) which were both far more detailed and informative than the map I’d been using, and also within a few years of when Lunden is set.

You see, dear reader, early on I’d found on online version of the poverty maps overlaid upon the very shiny Google map of the same area that allows one to phase back and forth between antiquity and modernity. It is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anywhere on the site to download the original map images. Not until, on a whim, I decided to Google for a downloadable version and found myself in a very odd section of the LSE website, behind a sign that read “Beware of Leopard”, where the original images were just sitting there, waiting for me to grab them. And grab them I did.

That’s where I encountered an even bigger problem with using the Booth maps. It’s maps. Plural.

So I spent the next three solid days in Krita, cropping, stretching, layering, adjusting, and attempting to get all 12 separate pieces of what I hoped I could turn into one map to line up nicely. I almost succeeded, and in the end I decided that almost was probably good enough. There are a few places on the map where you can see (if you zoom in closely enough) that things don’t quite line up, but on World Anvil I’ve used a lower resolution version of the whole map (the full res version is more than 360MB) where you can’t really zoom in that far anyway, and clicking on that map links you to the appropriate panel which, of course, looks perfectly fine.

If you’d like to check it out for yourself, head to https://www.worldanvil.com/w/lunden-ophania/map/349848d9-cda8-49e4-8f71-fce2ad4957d1 and see what all the fuss is about. It’s been an enormous amount of work so far, but entirely worth it in my opinion. Oh, and if you want access to all the material this map represents for roleplaying , writing, or just reading purposes, pop by my Patreon and sign up. You’ll be supporting my work, and getting early (or exclusive) access to a whole plethora of awesome stuff.

I Think I’ve Finally Set Up Subscriptions Properly

August 5, 2024 / MS Manz / 0 Comments

The title says it all, really.

Some of you might be aware that once upon a time I was using Feedburner to run an RSS feed so that people could subscribe to the blog. Google, of course, has now yeeted their support for Feedburner (several years ago, actually, but I haven’t exactly been maintaining the blog properly these past few years so it took me a while to catch on) which left me not only with no way to let people subscribe to the blog, but also with no one who was previously subscribed to the blog still subscribed to the blog.

Annoying!

So then I did some Google-fu and discovered that WordPress includes a built-in email subscription thinger, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I hadn’t just used that in the first place. So I set that up. And then I found out why I hadn’t used it in the first place (and why no one uses it, as it happens).

It doesn’t work.

Oh sure, you can set up the form. You can put it in a widget on the sidebar of every page. You can enter an email address in it. It will even send you a confirmation email asking if you meant to subscribe. That’s as far as it goes, unfortunately. It doesn’t record your email in a list anywhere, and it never sends you another email to let you know I’ve posted a new post. Which is sort of its only job.

I also didn’t realise it wasn’t working until a few people told me they’d subscribed to the blog but weren’t getting any posts delivered to them.

Now, if you’re reading this, you’ll notice that there’s a form in the top right of the page that lets you enter your email and subscribe. It looks different to how it used to look. That’s because it is different. This one works. (I think)

In order to get this new subscription thing up and running I had to sign up for a service, edit the DNS information on my web host, create forms, create lists, create email templates… it was an awful lot of work for what you’d think should be a pretty simple thing. It wasn’t at all a simple thing, and so I hope you’ll consider making use of it and subscribing to the blog.

I’ve set it up to send out one email a week (on Thursday) with all the new posts from that week. The way I see it, more often might get annoying and less often won’t give me the attention I so desperately crave.

Author: MS Manz (Page 1 of 5)

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