A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

The original meme is a basic list, available here, which simply shows which writers you're familiar with.

My version: Drop the authors you’ve never read to the bottom. For the remainder, discuss or rec at least one of their books with at least one sentence of explanation about why you do or don’t like it. Ask your readers to tell you about the authors you’ve never read.

Cynthia Felice. I only read the book she co-authored with Connie Willis, Water Witch, which was enjoyable but not memorable.

Diana Wynne Jones. One of my favorite writers of all time. Click her tag for more reviews and discussion. My favorites of hers are The Homeward Bounders, Fire and Hemlock, Witch Week, and Charmed Life. The last two are in print in the USA in omnibuses, as The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 2: The Magicians of Caprona / Witch Week and The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1: Charmed Life / The Lives of Christopher Chant.

Gwyneth Jones. I’ve read some of her YA written as “Ann Halam.” It tends toward the awesomely depressing. (Dr. Franklin's Island (Readers Circle): Kids are utterly helpless prisoners as they are slowly mutated against their will; Taylor Five Everyone the teenage heroine loves dies horribly, and the orangutans whose survival they all died for go extinct anyway.) The only one I’d rec is her least depressing book, Siberia: A Novel, which has the wonderful idea of growing animals out of high-tech kits.

Leigh Kennedy. I only read her infamous short story, “Her Furry Face,” about chimpanzee bestiality. Okay, it’s really about how the main character is such a sexist pig that he’d rather have sex with a chimpanzee than a woman, because the former will look up to him adoringly and make no demands. But still. Kids! Grow animals from high-tech kits! Then have sex with them! No, I am not going to add a “chimpanzee cunnilingus” tag.

ETA: My bad. It was actually an orangutan. (No wonder they're in such desperate straits in Taylor Five.) I'm not making an "orangutan onanism" tag either.

Lee Killough. I only read her collection of linked short stories, Aventine, which are set on a high-tech artsy/bohemian planet, and are about new and alien technology turned to the service of art. The plots are predictable “biter bit” tales, but the ideas are quite cool. I especially liked the one in which actors take drugs to make themselves really get into character.

Nancy Kress. She’s famous for idea-driven sf, but my favorite of her books is the quirky fantasy The Prince of Morning Bells. It’s clearly influenced by The Last Unicorn in its mix of fairy-tale beauty and eeriness with clever metafictional references, but manages to carve out its own identity as well. I also enjoyed her classic sf novel Beggars in Spain, about the implications of what at first seem to be a small genetic alteration, to remove the need for sleep. But I like the original novella better. The novel is worth reading, though, and stands on its own. Don’t bother with the sequels. I also don’t rec her mainstream thrillers or anything involving reincarnation. But her short stories and novellas are often quite strong.

Authors I’ve never read, H-K: Monica Hughes, Katherine Kurtz. . If you’ve ever read anything by either of them, please discuss in comments.

While madly procrastinating on a developmental psychology paper I have to write by rearranging my bookshelves, I discovered that I have extra copies of two Diana Wynne Jones books, plus one I don't like enough to want to keep.

First commenter to offer $5 (includes postage) per book gets it. All are nice new editions, in near-perfect condition.

Charmed Life. Reviewed yesterday. Love this.

Deep Secret. Centaurs and the multiverse collide with an sf con. Not one of my favorites, but quite funny and many people love it very much.

A Sudden Wild Magic. Frankly, I think this is terrible, but I am sure someone out there loves it. I think it's a satire on gender roles, with witches and stuff.

Comments disabled on DW so that all bids will land in the same place.

Cat Chant is a quiet, passive boy whose selfish, bossy sister Gwendolyn is a witch. When they’re orphaned in a boating accident, Gwendolyn quickly arranges life to her satisfaction, getting magic lessons from locals and finally getting herself and Cat taken in by the great enchanter, Chrestomanci, an elegant man with an endless selection of exquisite outfits. To Gwendolyn’s fury, no one at Chrestomanci Castle appreciates her wonderfulness, so she sets about turning the place upside down. Cat, whose approach to life is mostly duck-and-cover, ducks and covers until suddenly he can’t any more, and is forced to take action.

That’s about all I can say about the plot without ruining the twists. (You can probably guess that there’s more to Cat than meets the eye. But you probably won’t guess the exact plot turn which forces Cat from his usual place as an onlooker into a mover and shaker.)

Diana Wynne Jones is great at hilariously animated inanimate objects, and the weakly waving gingerbread men and Julia’s cowardly tin soldiers are some of my favorites of those. The shift in Gwendolyn’s pranks from harmless and funny to disturbing and awful is mirrored in the tone of the book – one minute you’re laughing, and the next you don’t want to look over your shoulder. The careful set-up of a number of plot points gets a marvelous pay-off when Cat ends up with something like five awful fates hanging over his head, all set to occur sequentially over the course of a weekend.

But what makes this book special to me isn’t so much the comedy, though it’s very funny, or the plotting, which is very well-done, as the complicated relationship between Cat and Gwendolyn, and the emotional honesty of Cat’s slow growth from a boy who won’t or can’t understand most of what’s going on in his life, to a boy who begins to step up and take responsibility for things he’d rather not even think about, let alone deal with.

Feel free to put spoilers in comments.

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1: Charmed Life / The Lives of Christopher Chant

I just read that Diana Wynne Jones has died. She had been very ill with cancer for at least the last year.

I can't remember if my first Diana Wynne Jones book was Charmed Life or Fire and Hemlock; they're both still among my very favorites of hers. Or it might have been the odd, spooky Power of Three, which could be classified as a "psychic kids" book, but was not exactly a typical example of the genre.

After I read whichever one that was, I began to haunt used bookshops, libraries, thrift shops in search of her novels, until I slowly, slowly managed to obtain everything she'd ever written, even her very slight and hard-to-find first novel Wilkin's Tooth. I was thrilled when her books finally came back into print in the USA, but I got enough enjoyment from the search, not to mention the finds, that I don't regret the probable hundreds of hours I spent prowling dusty stacks.

She wrote at least five of my very favorite novels of all time: Witch Week, Fire and Hemlock, Charmed Life, The Homeward Bounders... The fifth is always difficult: Do I select Archer's Goon or Howl's Moving Castle for their perfect puzzle-box structures, with every element clicking into logical place at the end? The Ogre Downstairs for the living toffee bars undulating down the stairs? The Year of the Griffin for its all-too-recognizable portrait of college life, complete with curses and ninjas? The heartbreaking Dogsbody?

Everybody who likes Jones' work at all seems to have a completely different list of favorite Jones novels, which speaks to her versatility and quirkiness. I love Fire and Hemlock because it's so funny and numinous - a very unusual combination - but others find it unreadable or flat. I didn't think Dark Lord of Derkholm was funny at all, but it's on plenty of people's top three lists.

I read an essay of hers in which she discussed being neglected as a child, and noted that Time of the Ghost was directly autobiographical, except for the ghosts and curses and witches and split personalities and time travel. Her adults are often villainous, but nearly always have understandable motives, and just as often are complicated and sympathetic; her children are surprisingly unsentimentalized.

I can't read Fire and Hemlock without breaking my heart, but in the good kind of way (if you like that kind of thing); I can't read the "worms in custard" or "Simon Says" or "MY SPIRIT IS BEING DRAGGED TO UTTAR PRADESH TO UTTER DESTRUCTION I MEAN" scenes in Witch Week without weeping with laughter.

It seems like a good time to re-read and review her novels. Look for them here.

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1: Charmed Life / The Lives of Christopher Chant

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 2: The Magicians of Caprona / Witch Week

Howl's Moving Castle

Year of the Griffin

Dogsbody

Fire and Hemlock

The Homeward Bounders

Sponsored by jonquil.

Andrew Hope inherits his grandfather's peculiar house, recalcitrant gardener and housekeeper, magical responsibilities, and the care of a teenage boy, Aidan Cain, who has an inexhaustible wallet, a name no one seems able to remember, and a lot of mysterious pursuers. A farrago of magical counterparts, were-dogs, and giant vegetables, not to mention actual giants, ensues. I particularly enjoyed the climactic mingling of a Faerie battle with a rigged contest at the fair for various Best Bits of Garden Produce.

I wouldn't say this is one of my favorite Jones novels - the characters have bright surfaces but not a lot of depth, and the end is more one thing after another than an orchestrated and coherent climax - but it's very funny, with particularly good running jokes about extremely big vegetables and cauliflower cheese. It reminded me a bit of the underrated The Ogre Downstairs (the one with the magic chemistry set.)

Enchanted Glass

The Ogre Downstairs

Quite a bit of the best modern (and older) fantasy has been either written for or marketed to children and teenagers; it tends toward equally sophisticated themes and the prose is better, on average.

For a lengthy exploration of why that might be, see my essay “The Golden Age of Fantasy is Twelve,” which also has more in-depth discussions of The Darkangel and The Homeward Bounders than I will write here. However, it also has huge spoilers for both (and also for Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu and C. J. Cherryh’s Rider at the Gate.) I suggest reading the intro section of the essay, then stopping before you get to the clearly marked sections where I discuss any individual books which you haven’t yet read.

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2002/20020708/twelve.shtml

Many of the books I recommend here are available in lovely new paperback editions from Firebirds or Starscape.

http://www.firebirdbooks.com/

http://starscapebooks.com/

Cut for even more extreme length than the last one.

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Note: Susan Cooper, Tamora Pierce, Elizabeth Marie Pope, Francesca Lia Block, E. Nesbit, Diane Duane, Will Shetterly, William Sleator, and Margaret Mahy will appear on the final list, the one on “further reading.” Alan Garner will appear on the unclassifiable/other list, because the book I want to mention is Red Shift—surely a watermark in the annals of “unclassifiable/other.