In response to
my last book review, Josh Warren made an interesting comment:
I've got a question for ya. I have a long flight coming up soon, and I'm wanting to buy a book for it. I'm a total newb when it comes to fiction(I typically read how-to books and biographies), and since you seem to have a lot of knowledge in this department, I'd like a recommendation. What's your favorite book?
I've been a reader of your blog since about '02, and I typically share your opinions(and I love the fiction you've written), so I'm confindent I'll enjoy whatever book you recommend.
I've been interested in getting into fiction for a while, but I have no idea where to even start. I don't share the mainstream taste in movies/music/etc, so I'm sure I can safely assume it will be the same for fiction.
My favorite book is a different question (and answer) than which book I'd recommend. And which book I'd recommend depends a lot on who I'm recommending it to. Ordinarily I know something about the person asking, or can at least ask which genres they enjoy, or which authors they like. In this case the recomendee is almost a tabula rasa. Not only doesn't Josh have a favorite author, he doesn't read fiction at all, so he doesn't know what type of book he likes. He doesn't even know what type of book he doesn't like!
I'd say, to Josh or anyone in his situation, to pick a book in a genre you like. What type of movies do you enjoy? If you like spy thrillers, or romantic comedies, or horror movies, or historical drams... try a book from one of those fields. You can probably find any number of novels that were made into movies you've seen, and since novels are usually better (and always more complicated) than their movie versions, that's a good place to start.
In Josh's case, he says he enjoys various types of nonfiction, including how-to books and biographies, so that's another area to look at. I don't know how good a parallel there is to how-to books; some novels are very step by step in their descriptions of things; lots of historical novels make very clear their author's research into the field. Just to throw out one example, Jean M. Auel's
Clan of the Cave Bear novels are almost anthropological in many sections, with detailed descriptions of the cave people technology, cultures, formation of languages, domestication of animals, etc. I'm not recommending those since they're basically romance fiction set in like, 20,000 BCE. Besides, the last book in the series is the only one I've ever reviewed, and while I didn't give it a score, it would have probably been a negative number, since I only made it through 30 pages. And was still offended enough
to write a lengthy denunciation.
Biographies have some nice parallels to fiction as well, and you can certainly find fictional biographies, but that seems more likely to indicate an interest in detailed, realistic, three-dimensional characters. Which is a good thing in all types of books.
So, finally getting to it... I don't have a favorite book. I'm not even sure I have a top five or ten. I like different books for different reasons, and almost none of my favorites are in the reviews section, since I've primarily posted reviews of works I've freshly consumed in the 7 or 8 years this website has been online. (And
my reviews section hasn't been updated in 2 or 3 years, since Blogger added category tags to this blogging script, and I've just been tagging the
movie reviews and
book reviews as I post them, pending some future remodeling of this outdated website.) Most of my favorites, books or movies, are older than that, and are films/books I've seen many times in the past. I should still review them, though. It's dumb to have reviews of hundreds of random, disposable, forgettable films/books with my name on them, and almost no reviews of the work I actually recommend.
Oh yeah, recommend. That was the point here, initially.
I don't have a favorite book, but if I must recommend just one title, it's Clive Barker's
Imajica. It's not my favorite book, but it's probably the best written, most intriguing, most complicated, philosophically and metaphysically brilliant novels I've ever read. It's also hugely long, upwards of 1000 pages in paperback (it's often sold in volume 1 and 2, though I'd recommend looking in a used book store for an older paperback or hardcover, for less money). Technically Imajica is horror, but it's got as much fantasy as horror, even though it's set in the modern day, and much of it takes place in the real world (more or less). I recently reread Imajica for the first time in 6 or 8 years, and was happy to see that it held up; in fact a number of elements, especially on the father/son dynamic and the religious elements, worked very well for me now when they hadn't resonated for me in my early/angry 20s.
I'll also say, fairly unreservedly, that Clive Barker is my favorite author. Although looking at
his bibliography, I should really amend that. Or find a new favorite author. Barker's first decade of published works was pretty much unrelieved brilliance, but
Galilee was dreadful maudlin fauxmance paup,
Coldheard Canyon was celeb-studded crap with flashes of brilliance, and everything since then has been a children's story or some sort of concept/novelty book.
If you want more conventional horror, it's hard to go wrong with
anything Stephen King wrote in the 70s or 80s. I've not cared for much of his production over the past two decades (Christ, has it been that long?), but YMMV.
Looking over
my reviews page for a memory prompt: The various Jeffrey Deaver mysteries are pretty good and fairly intellectually rigorous. I scored them fairly critically, but that's in comparison to each other; they're all good, if fairly formulaic, crime thrillers. Terry Pratchert's
Disc World series is excellent, lively, amusing, creative semi-SciFi, but it's very British humor and certainly not to everyone's liking. The
Harry Potter series is an enjoyable journey, though the first 2 or 3 books are fairly simplistic since they were written as (smart) children's books. The first 4 or 5 books in Orson Scott Card's
Ender's series are all excellent, with
Ender's Game standing out as my favorite SciFi novel of all time, perhaps closely followed by it's sequel/continuation,
Speaker for the Dead. (And this is despite the author having more or less
lost his mind to fanatical, religiously-motivated bigotry over the past half decade.)
My strongest series recommendation though, goes to George R. R. Martin's ongoing
Song of Ice and Fire series. It's high fantasy with a vast cast and a sprawling, multi, multi-PoV narrative, but it's written with such intelligence and gritty detail and realism that it stands well above any other fantasy series I've ever read. Unfortunately, Jordan's about 2 years late with book 5 in the 7 or 8 volume series, he's in his 60s, and it's looking entirely possible that he might pull a Robert Jordan and croak before he finishes writing it. And that would be a hell of a shame, since while Jordan's
Wheel of Time series had lost its focus and he'd wandered aimlessly through the last few books (before his
untimely demise), books 2 and 3 in Martin's series are both in the top 10 books I've ever read, and book 4 wasn't bad, though it mostly existed to advance some plot threads and set up the great pending action in book 5. If we ever get to see it. Not to mention the ones after it.
So, lots of words, lots of books, and a few that I recommend almost without reservation. You'll seldom see higher praise from me; I'm too nuanced and conflicted and consumed with all that tortured
artist reviewer stuff.
Labels: books
