The Mountain and the Tree

I've been wandering through a lot of discussions on the covers of SF&F books in the last few days - the old chestnut about "is this tacky or great?", "Will this put off new readers or will it keep the mundanes out of our genre?", and so on. I may work up a longer ramble on the subject, but I wanted to share my bogglement at one thing with you, O my readers.

Someone posted this image, showing the cover of his book, and asked for honest opinions.



Inexplicably, they didn't eviscerate him. There was not even any pointing and laughing. It's pretty good art, as fantasy art goes, but apparently that isn't a joke title or series name.

Thursday 8th May - keynote speaker, Symposium: Science Fiction as a Literary Genre.

Given the amazingness-density of The Baroque Cycle, and the intricte overlapping with history and mainstream fiction, this looks fascinating.

The other evening, I was wandering through Border's and got mugged by John O'Farrell's An Utterly Impartial History of Britain - or, 2000 years of Upper Class Idiots In Charge.

It's a wonderful book - the history of Britain from 55 BCE to 1945 CE, without assuming that you knew any of it in the first place. O'Farrell's not a Historian, and he's wonderful in his treatment of the normal pop-history subjects like kings and generals and battles. There's been a big movement in historical studies to get away from things like that, but most of them - being Historians rather than satirists, polemicists, or straight-talking socialists - concentrate on writing about social trends and changes rather than pointing out in detail just what a bunch of incompetent idiots we all get taught to look up to.

On the other hand, he's also good at this history business - his bibliography's quite impressive. Not incredibly extensive, but it's there and it's got the right names on.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.
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Wicked!, by Jilly Cooper (2006). Diagnosis: she's finally lost it. I first read Riders for the horses, then used to read her books for relaxation and light relief, something nice and long where the pages would just fly by. She could have been a really, really good author with some thought and care.

Found this one in the library this afternoon, now three-quarters of the way through. If you thought the earlier ones weren't full enough of Toryism, aristocracy, stereotype-bashing, histrionics, genuinely unpleasant protagonists, lubricious descriptions of underage girls, Mary Sue characters, and the nastier side of human nature, you will like this one.

I keep hearing, from one source or another, about how English teachers completely turned them off reading, or how English teachers sparked their lifelong love of $author(s). (If English isn't your first literary language, substitute. Or not, as you prefer. You know the drill.)

A lot of them have seemed a bit absolutist - don't like anything we read in school, usually. Oddly, it doesn't seem to go the other way, but then I don't think I've ever met anyone who liked everything.

My experience was always that I'd make up my own mind about each piece, and I don't think it was the teacher (or the fact that it was In School) that did it. Then again, that might be because I was lucky enough to grow up in a house full of books, with family that approved of my reading, so books were nothing special to me. Intellectually, I understand that there are people who don't have this experience, but it's not something I've ever discussed with people - are any of you in that position?

Of course, it probably helped that I enjoyed school - or at least most lessons - too. I was always enthusiastic and engaged, though occasionally over-snarky about something I'd decided I didn't like. My likes and dislikes never seemed to divide themselves along genre or form lines, at least, and I don't recall having to study anything I actually disliked.

I did manage to OD on Death of a Salesman, and I probably wouldn't have finished Jane Eyre if it hadn't been for A-level English, but then it would have been years before I discovered Jane Austen otherwise, too.

So am I that atypical? (This is probably a rhetorical question, given the skewed nature of LJ. I'd be interested to find out if any of you had the "classic" turned-off-by-teacher experience.)

This is a passing ramble inspired by a lemming I found. Here's the original, though I'm not going to name any of the N different places I've seen it now and again.
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Five books I fully intend to own Soon^TM.

• Weston Martyr, The Southseaman. Referenced from Gordon's The New Science of Strong Materials which I've adored for years. I know or have tracked down most of the rest of his quotations, but not that one.
  
• An English translation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses as recommended by elettaria in dracula1897.
  
• Liza Picard's Victorian London. Which reminds me, I don't own a copy of Elizabeth's London, but that doesn't count for the list since the library Provided.
  
• Sheri S. Tepper's True Game books. I have the Jinian trilogy, but not the others.
  
• A good textbook on Dissenting movements in post-Reformation England. Haven't found out what it is yet, and still making my way through The Stripping of the Altars, so possibly not all that soon.
  

Now that makes me think there should be a Church of the Subgenre. Though the term "subgenre" seems to me to imply a semi-exclusive category rather than an arbitrary slice through a continuum, which is a better term for the kind of books that sparked this particular idle, bootless reflection.
( rambling )

Courtesy of rillaith, a free online tool to store catalogues of your books and organise them by folksonomic tags. It has some very nifty features indeed, such as grabbing the Library of Congress data for the book you give it.

It gives you 200 books for free, and a small payment gets you a lifetime subscription for unlimited books whilst it's in beta. I've started putting my nonfiction and reference books in, the fiction can look after themselves for now.

http://www.librarything.com/ is the main URL, and http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=ravenmagic&sort=unique is my catalogue (or catalog, as they insist on calling it).