Oh, wow.  This book deals with the Matter of Christ (or more accurately, the Matter of Satan), and death quite more deeply than any other book I have read, and Faust.  It is beautifully and riveting, sinister, and so evocative of Floating Dragon that I initially suspected that the authors were one and the same.  Like Territory, the historical authenticity makes this story pop.

I had been on the fence about reading this book, but I am so glad I did.  It is on many Top 100 Lists, but other reviewers had found it stuffy and dry.  Were those naysayers even reading the same book?  The ending wasn’t quite where it should have been, but unlike reviewers who chalk it up to postmodernist mystery, I would almost say the author wearied of writing.  It lost spirit.  But it’s still a wonderful book.

Peter Ackroyd has written many biographies on writers – Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Dickens, Poe – histories on London and England, and quite a bit of fiction – and I am very tempted to read all of his work, especially his interpretation of La Morte d’Arthur, which was just published this last month.

Lessons: Themes are carried through in repetition and echoes, and motifs or totems are very powerful.  My other thought is that literature is a form of life, it is analogous, and studying it is not so much the work of a writer, but of a biologist.  Literary Biology? 

I must also add an aside: I’m going to have to read some classics.  Everything is pointing that way.  And doesn’t Gone with The Wind lend itself to a zombie or vampire interpretation?  Lots of books: Moby Dick, Faust, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Blake, Poe, Dickens, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Stendahl, Camus.

And aside from classics, I am on a King Arthur kick.  He’s tied to Wales, there are so many books on him.  I’m thinking of doing a book of King Arthur quotes from other King Arthur books.  I could get really wrapped up in this.  And it led me to A.A Attanasio. Al.

                                                                                         To further make my point, Peter Ackroyd said...

This was a curious book.  First, it’s The Matter of Christ – the story of Judas’s thirty pieces of silver.  Secondly, I didn’t like it at first: it seemed to be trying too hard to be funny in a nonsensical way a la Thomas Pinchon, or the wayward innkeeper of Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man.  But the story grew on me because that main character, Andrew, has a flow of consciousness that imitates actual life quite well.  After all, we don’t think in clear plots, and neither does this character – he came to the same realization I had only a few weeks ago: the devil is in the details, and in this book, literally.  This did get a little old in places – especially the Deus Ex Machina pigs, parrots, and cats – but I think I am now fond of this book.

And I did not realize the lesson of this book until I just now wrote the paragraph above: It is terribly clever to have a basic idea about reality driving your story, but doing an interpretation of it, not an explanation of it.  
 
                                                                                   The Last Coin by James P. Blaylock

I am waiting for more "A" authors to arrive in the mail, so I am skipping to "B" authors, and to an author whose books I really love, even though when I started this list I said I was going to make an effort to read authors who were new to me.  Oh, well.

This book came out four years ago, but I had not read it because I am not fond of Westerns (but maybe, now, I am). Oh, I wish I had read this book sooner – it’s now my next favorite book to her Bone Dance – and in a way I am glad I only found it now because it looks like the next in a series, and being the cautious writer that she is, Emma has yet to produce the next one, which, if all things were fair, would be called A Knowledgeable Man.  Here are the reasons I love this book:

She introduces this book as The Matter of Tombstone.  How cool is that?
Wyatt Earp is a sorcerer.
Emma traveled to Tombstone to get the historical details just right, and if she hadn’t, we probably wouldn’t have been delighted by China Town, nail guards, dance cards, and an entire cascade of other delicious and sometimes sordid details.
Jesse Fox can feel silver like blood in his veins.
Doc Holliday is kept alive by magic.
Mildred Benjamin misses romance and her dead husband, but not being a debutante.
All of the characters are doomed, not knowing what the hell is going on.  I love that.
The inescapable feeling ‘This is the kind of book I’ve been waiting for to read,” and the inescapable feeling that, like Bone Dance, I am going to read this book again and again.

The lessons for writers: Don’t write to market, but do write the story that readers crave.  Write the story that you, author, crave.


                                                                                Visit Emma Bull.








 

I read this book now because I had a copy in hand – instead of waiting for the “Ws” a few years from now, but White did write some stories under the pen name “John Ashton,” so I do feel a wee bit vindicated.

This is a book that, in spite of its tragic subject matter, was so good it felt as if real events were being described and that the truths uncovered were the cornerstones of reality.  There is no way there could have been this level of detail without the author channeling the actual goings on of Wart, Jenny, and the Ill-Made Knight.  I regret I have not read this book earlier, so I may have read it a few times more by now.  The writing was so deft and fine.  I loved it.

This man was an amazing, amazing writer.  When I read his biography, I felt so badly for him, I wished I could take him home and make tea and cookies for him, and tell him what a wonderful, wonderful person he was.  He was truly a miserable human being – and he wrote a story of extraordinary light and grace.  I will read more by him, including the last story of Merlin, (which I did in fact order and read).  In that next book it Merlin sagely reminds Arthur, “After all, we are the Matter of Britain.” 


Lessons learned: Your characters are real people.  Show it by knowing their innermost and smallest details.


                                                                                     The Once and Future King by T.H. White

But first an aside, on Dylan Thomas and Kinglsey Amis.

I am not going to be able to escape Dylan Thomas, now.  We went to Wales, I read some poetry, I read a biography on him, and now he is everywhere.  His signature poem “Fern Hill” was quoted in Watership Down, the cartoon “Get Fuzzy” riffs on “Do not go gentle” (and so does everyone else, I see), and Kingsley Amis wrote a book about a fictionalized Dylan and Caitlin returning to Wales: but I didn’t read that book.  For this list I had chosen Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man, had actually acquired it and truly read the whole damn thing, and then decided it was not going on the list in the end.  The book was kind of a dud.  The writing was competent, but the story was decidedly uninspiring, hard to finish, and certainly not as advertised: not amusing, not scary, and not particularly interesting, especially so the main character, Maurice Allington.  So onto …. Three Hearts and Three Swords by Poul Anderson...

This is a very talented author and a somewhat untalented book.  It is boilerplate fantasy – elves, dwarfs, unicorns, but with a talented hand drawing them, although I understand they were probably not boilerplate when this book was written in the 50s.  Cool thing: the eyes of the elves are so clear, it seems they are blind at first.  Characters are described so you can see them before you: jug handle ears.  The ending was more chill and perfect than perhaps this particular story deserved.  Interesting. 

During my Science Fiction Reading List, I learned that literature is the physics of those worlds – and in fantasy – another story often provides the rules, the gravity, for each tale – and in fantasy especially, it seems to be entire bodies of mythology are the keystones, and have been so in hundreds of years.  Three Hearts and Three Swords dealt with the “Matter of France,” the body of historical mythology attributed to Charlemagne.  

Writing lessons learned – don’t eat the scenery. Everyone knew that The Protagonist and The Girl would get together – waiting for it was just annoying and weird.  Listening to him worry and worry and worry just got old.  Hmmm.  Maybe that’s why I don’t really care for romances.


                                                                                         Three Hearts and Three Swords by Poul Anderson 

I never saw the movie.  I always heard it was sad.  And I wondered at the appeal of a 435 page book about bunnies.  But we had it in our library already, and it is considered a classic, and I had not read it.  So I did.

I liked this story a lot.  The rabbit-eye view of the world was beautifully and lovingly constructed.  I loved the stories the bunnies told one another, and how serious their little world was.  The ending is not sad: Hazel, the Chief Rabbit, saves his friends and creates a gentle new warren, and years afterward, he goes to bunny heaven with “the rabbit with stars for ears.”  It was just the way it should have been.

Writing Lessons Learned: The world was a character in the story.  I love that.
                                                                                         
                                                                                                            Watership Down by Richard Adams

A few years ago, it took me three and a half years to read 100 great science fiction books.  Now*, I’ve decided to do the same thing in Fantasy – roughly going through the alphabet, averaging 5 books per letter or so.  I think I will give a preference to classics, and authors I have not read before.  I truly enjoyed and was enriched by my other reading list: I am looking forward to the adventures this one has to offer.

*I started The Fantasy Reading List in the Spring of 2011.