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