Phoenix Comicon 2014: Patrick Rothfuss Spotlight

Plenty of the especially big-name authors attending PHXCC had their very own spotlight panels, in addition to the appearances they made on group panels geared toward various book-nerdy topics (such as “Magic Systems: Urban Fantasy vs. Epic Fantasy” and “Magic and Power in Young Adult Fiction,” two that I wanted to attend but couldn’t make play nice with the rest of my schedule). There were so many spotlights I wanted to attend—Charlaine Harris! Jim Butcher! Laini Taylor! Naomi Novik!—but the two that occupied non-negotiable positions in my schedule were those of Pat Rothfuss and John Scalzi, both very entertaining individuals (and, y’know, not too shabby in the writing department, either). Pat Rothfuss’ was at noon on Saturday, and after a 5 minute walk down the street from the convention center to the Sheraton where the panel was being held (you’d be surprised how long five minutes can feel when it’s 108° F out), we collapsed in the lovely air conditioned ballroom and listened to The Beard share big secrets and the ending for The Doors of Stone. (Don’t freak out. I was kidding about that last bit.)

Patrick Rothfuss Spotlight Panel

Pat’s deep voice and the acoustics of the ballroom did funny things to my recording device (er, iPhone). Additionally, it appears that when you try to take a photo while voice recording on said device, it stops the recording, but makes it look like it’s still doing so, until you end the recording and only however many minutes you got before photographing show up saved in your memos. (Not that that bugged me.) (Or that it took me 3 days to figure out why so few of my recordings were of the entire panel.) So…I don’t have too much of the Rothfuss panel available to transcribe, but that actually turned out okay since he spent about half of it reading to us. Yay story time!

Uproarious applause greeted him when he walked on stage, and after a mike check he greeted us and told us the plan. “I don’t know how these normally go, but I tend to enjoy a little Q&A,” he said, and then added that reading of some things he has written could follow. “I used to write a humor column back in the day. I’ve got some of those that you’ll probably never see anywhere…the dark secrets from my misspent youth. I’ve got an advanced copy of the Rogues anthology. I could read you Neil Gaiman’s story,” he suggested. (Everyone laughed, but he actually did read us the opening paragraphs of Gaiman’s story at his event at a local bookstore the Wednesday before the con!)

Before the Q&A portion began, he had to get the attention of a techie to make a few adjustments to the stage lighting. “I kinda feel like I’m in an interrogation room,” he joked. “‘Where were you on the night of the 27th? Why weren’t you writing book three?!’” (It’s cool that he has a sense of humor about it, since there are some real big jerks online, whining/harassing him about why the third book isn’t done yet.) The first audience question followed neatly on the coattails of that, asking how the progress is on book three. “That’s a good one to deal with right away,” Pat said. “Things are going fairly well. They’re not going as fast as I would like, but it’s going well. I start to get real antsy, like I really wish I had book three to give people, and then I remember what Tim Powers said to me ages ago. When I missed my deadline for book two, I was really sick to my stomach over it, and I called him like, ‘Tim, I’m screwing up my whole career with this…I did 30 interviews and promised to have book two out in a year…but the problem is I was doing 30 interviews and so I didn’t have any time to write.’ And he goes, ‘I’ve never made a deadline in my life. And you know what? So-and-so told me,’ like a person he got advice from back in the day, ‘It’s late once, but it sucks forever.’ And I’m like, ohhh, you’re right—I’d much rather be late once and write a good book than to rush it, get it out on time, and have it be crap. I mean, we really don’t want a Matrix Revolutions.”

He expanded on that idea a bit as he discussed his process of revisions and making the books as excellent as they can be. “The thing people have is really kind of flattering…they’re like, ‘It’s great, we’re sure it’s great!’ I know that you’re sure it’s great, but what happened is you saw the end result of 14 years of revision in book form. You did not see the 400 other versions of that book. All of which were not good enough to get published. Well…some of them were good enough to get published, but they weren’t a book that was really worthy of love. They weren’t as perfect as I could make them. Those early versions…the very first didn’t have a frame story. There was no inn, there was no Chronicler, there was no Bast. Later versions, there was no Devi. No loan sharking. No Auri. A book with no Auri. That’s not a book I would really like to write. So yeah, it’s coming along well, it’s just not coming as quickly as I’d like. There’s a lot of things I need to get absolutely right.”

The next question asked about other things he may write after he’s done with Kvothe’s story. “It’s a little far out in the future, because I kind of have to always keep one eye on book three no matter what, but I had an idea for an urban fantasy for about ten years that I didn’t pursue. I think that’d be fun,” he said. He continued, “There’s another story…a story that happens in Modeg. It’s the story of a different hero—the beginning of that hero, Laniel. I started that, thinking it’d be a novella, about 15,000 words…because I owed somebody a novella, I thought I’d write it, fulfill this obligation…and when it hit about 60,000 words…[bad muzzy audio here, sorry]. It was a really great experience writing that because it wasn’t first person. I was learning a lot about how to do third person, and it’s really interesting for me writing a story that’s what I think of as a short little simple story, which means it’s, like, 120,000 words. [much laughter] It’s not part of this great metafictional framed story narrative like The Kingkiller Chronicle. So you’ll probably see that reasonably soon as well.”

Next up was a question about his writing process. “Boy, what’s my process…” he mused. The girl started to amend her question and he joked, “See, yeah, that’s the better question—‘Do you have a process?’ I don’t think I have a process.” She amended further to ask if he bases his characters off people he knows, and he replied, “That I can answer—I do not model characters after people I know.” He asked for a show of hands of aspiring writers, and then explained why he’d advise against creating characters that way. Following that, he continued, “I would steal pieces of people. And pieces of people, like for example, Kvothe eats an apple, and he eats all the way around it, and eats the core. I had somebody come up to me and say, ‘I know where you got that. That’s the way Sarah eats an apple.’ He was so smug. I was like, ‘You got me. Now you know how I wrote my book.’” He explained further, saying, “It’s like a little true thing. A little true thing that adds a little texture.”

He looked like he was going to leave it at that, but then he continued: “Okay, now, saying that, because I’m kind of a scrupulously honest person…I did kind of base one character in the book off someone. But I don’t know if you want to hear about that. Do you want to hear about that?” The answer was an obvious and unanimous YES, and he began telling the story. “There’s nobody here from Madison, is there? Have you guys heard about Tunnel Bob? There’s somebody in Madison that people know of as Tunnel Bob. Tunnel Bob, he’s one of our local crazy people, not to put too fine a point on it. Every city of a certain size has crazy people. And if they’re sufficiently colorful, they become characters in the city. There’ve been a couple write-ups about Tunnel Bob in the local papers. I came to know Tunnel Bob because my dad had run into him at work. Under Madison there are steam tunnels, and access tunnels to the university, for all the pipes and everything…and my dad worked at one of the major hospitals.” He continued, explaining how Tunnel Bob, though there was no harm in him, would continually get arrested for hanging around in these tunnels. So Pat’s dad set up a volunteer shift for him at the hospital once a week, where it would be okay for him to be down in the tunnels under the hospital. After 3 hours in the tunnels he would come out of them and talk with Pat’s dad for a bit, and then Pat’s dad would share stories with his son about Tunnel Bob. “Apparently once he was in the university’s tunnels and he got arrested, put in jail, and for his phone call, he called my dad because he was going to have to miss his volunteer shift. He’s like, ‘This is the one place that lets me go in their tunnels,’ and he didn’t want to jeopardize that. Dad’s a very clever guy—that’s the secret here: you give him a time where he can be in there, and that’s acceptable. And he’ll do whatever he can to not jeopardize that. He’s not going to be knocking around when he shouldn’t be. So my dad would tell me these stories about Tunnel Bob. He’d say, ‘So, Tunnel Bob, we’ve got Christmas coming up. Are you doing anything for Christmas?’ [deep voice] ‘Nope.’ ‘Get any presents for Christmas?’ [deep voice] ‘…Nope. Just coal.’ Dad’s like, is he…making a joke?”

In another conversation with Tunnel Bob, Pat’s dad tried to find out what was up with the tunnel thing, anyway. “He said, ‘What do you do in the tunnels?’ [deep voice] ‘Well, the first hour I kind of cleans up a bit. And the second hour, I kinda rolls around. And the third hour, well…that’s just for me.’” [so sorry, that’s the closest I could come to deciphering what the first and second hour were from the recording, and I don’t know if it’s right!] Pat went on, “And I hear this story, and all he wants to do is be in these tunnels. Of course, when I’m working on the book, which is kind of always, something happens and I’m like, ‘Ohhh yes, I’ll take this, thank you.’ I learn something in anthropology class and I’m like, ‘Oh, thank you, yes. I will have this for later.’ Oh, so Constantine in the Roman Empire married a prostitute? I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s awesome, I’m going to bring that in.’ Once a week they put her up on a stage, naked, scattered grain over her, and let geese eat it off her. And this was, like, quality entertainment. And Constantine, he saw this and went, ‘That’s the woman who will be my empress.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, thank you. I could not have made that up. I’ll save that for later.’ Tunnel Bob…of course he doesn’t fit [in my story]. He fits in Madison, Wisconsin—even then not very well. He’s like something someone would make up if you were writing a story about Madison. And so what I did was I just put one piece of him, and then a character kind of accreted around that seed crystal. You know who that character has to be, right? It’s Auri. And Auri really has nothing to do with Tunnel Bob, so I did not take Tunnel Bob and put him in the story, but that’s where Auri started. And I think that when you do that, when you build a character around a tiny little kernel of something true, they end up being a different sort of character.”

And on that sweet note about Auri’s emergence from a guy in Madison who likes tunnels and the stories Pat’s dad told about him, I tried to take a photo of Pat up on the stage and cheated myself out of further recording of the panel. It’s not even a good photo! In it, Mr. Rothfuss has somehow morphed into a glowing blue blob…

After the Q&A finished up, Pat read us one of his humor columns from college (about keeping pets in dorms illegally, and whether a guinea pig can be considered a fish), and it was really very funny. I don’t know if you can track those down on the internet anywhere, but if you can, you should do it. After that, he read us the second in his series of not-for-children children’s books, The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Dark of Deep Below. [EDIT: While Pat did read us some things after the Q&A, apparently my brain had reached saturation point and, lacking a memory or audio recording of what was actually read to us at this panel, filled in the guinea pig story, which had actually been read to us the previous night at the Paul & Storm concert. So while I can’t tell you what reading(s?) came before, I can confirm that he did in fact finish off the panel with a reading of Princess/Mr. Whiffle 2. Sorry for the confusion!]

To our chagrin, the panel ended before we could finish the book, and of course we were left at a very cliffhang-y moment. Such a tease! But it was a good, albeit unplanned (I think?), marketing technique—the next time I found myself in the vicinity of Mysterious Galaxy’s booth in the dealer hall, all the Princess/Mr. Whiffle books were sold out. And now that I know what they’re about, I’ll probably buy them for myself someday. Overall, it was a surprisingly spoiler-free panel (for a panel related to a fantasy series this beloved with two massive books in stores, I figured there would be at least a few minor spoiler-type-things coming up!), and it was a lot of fun. I tried to find a YouTube video of it to link you to for interested parties, but I’m not sure there is one to be found! If you ever hear Pat Rothfuss is in your neck of the woods (or weeds, as I first typed), make a point to get to that event—you’re pretty much guaranteed a good time.

Have you read The Kingkiller Chronicle series yet? How about the Princess/Mr. Whiffle books? Do you know Tunnel Bob? Hit the comments and let us know!

Phoenix Comicon is coming!

Hot on the heels of Susan’s exciting BEA adventures (over 100 books hunted down?! Day-yum, girl! You show ‘em how it’s done!), I will be heading to Phoenix Comicon this Thursday through Sunday. I’m really impressed with their books and author track this year—lots of authors from across all the subgenres of SFF, many of them super highly acclaimed, and more publishers in attendance than last year! To say I’m excited would be an understatement. You can find the full run-down of guests and programming here, but here are some of the people and events I’m most looking forward to:

Patrick Rothfuss!!! Arguably one of the most famous names in the pantheon of modern fantasy writers, I was jaw-drop shocked to see he would be coming to Phoenix. So amazing!!! I’ve been hearing about him since The Name of the Wind first came out, but I didn’t get around to reading his books until fairly recently. He made it onto my list of early 2014 favorites, and I hauled ass to finish up the second (and most recent) book in the Kingkiller series last week, because I wanted to be able to attend his panels spoiler-free. Mission accomplished! I’m interested in hearing him talk about Kvothe and his world, and also about upcoming projects like the Bast short story coming out in the Rogues anthology later this month and the Auri novella dropping in the fall.

Scott Lynch!!! As if Pat Rothfuss alone wasn’t reason enough to attend to PHXCC, yet another of the most popular fantasy authors of our age will be there! Again, I’d been hearing about how great he is pretty much since The Lies of Locke Lamora first came out, and, again, I was slow to get around to reading it. When I saw he’d be at the convention I tracked down a copy to read in preparation, and it was AWESOME. Clever con artists pulling off the heist of a lifetime in a Venice-flavored setting? Yes, please! The book is seriously non-stop action and crackling writing—I pretty much read for two days straight because I couldn’t put it down. I haven’t read the sequels yet (it took all my strength of will to read a book by another convention guest rather than diving straight into Red Seas Under Red Skies), but I am so so SO excited to meet the guy whose brain produced this series! Richer and cleverer than everyone else!!!

In the realm of awesome YA authors, Laini Taylor will be attending! The WordNerds book club read Daughter of Smoke and Bone a couple years ago, and I think I was the one who enjoyed it most out of our group. I love lyrical writing and vivid imagery, and those are both things Laini Taylor excels at. I saw her at my local indie bookstore when the second book in the trilogy, Days of Blood and Starlight, came out, and she was very personable and a lot of fun. Though I haven’t gotten to that one or the final installment of the trilogy (out a couple months ago), it’s going to be interesting to hear about her thoughts on YA and writing during panels like “Improbable Dystopias?” and “True Natures, Hidden Identities in YA Fiction.” I know I’m probably courting spoilers by going to those without having finished the series, but I’m feeling BOLD, I tell you!

And a big hooray for Seanan McGuire!!! Yet another awesome, awesome author. I nommed all seven books in her Toby Daye series in about two weeks. Slightly shameful on my part, but that just goes to show how completely addictive they are! I’ve been describing that series to friends as “Holly Black for grown-ups!” By which I just mean they’re well-written and engaging urban fantasy about the fae. Holly Black’s and Seanan McGuire’s writing styles and narrative voices are very different, but their books are similar in that a) they involve faeries, b) their writing is very evocative, and c) they’re FANTASTIC. Seanan McGuire also writes horror under the name Mira Grant, but I haven’t made it that far through her back catalogue yet. It’s only a matter of time, though! It’s always so nice to a find a new-to-you author you really enjoy, and even better when they have a ton of books for you to work your way through.

Catherynne Valente, another lyrical writer I adore, is coming back to Phoenix as well! Her writing is so poetic and deeply rooted in myth and folklore, and I absolutely love it (her first Fairyland book was my #1 read of 2013!). She’s another one I’ve caught on tour at my local indie book shop, and I remember she had all kinds of interesting thoughts and opinions to share with the audience (though she did not manage to diminish my affection for A Wrinkle in Time). It’s going to be fun to see her during the live recording of SF Squeecast (a great nerdy SFF podcast, if you haven’t checked it out) and at a panel with female authors talking about Doctor Who.

There are plenty of other famous, up-and-coming, and otherwise popular authors on the PHXCC guest list as well. Any of these books look familiar?

I was super into Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse books for awhile (y’know, the ones they adapted into the TV show True Blood). Jim Butcher is hugely popular and famous, though I’ve somehow never tried out the Dresden Files (just grabbed the first one with my credit at a used bookstore, though!). I’m currently trying to read Pierce Brown’s debut novel, Red Rising, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish it by the time the con rolls around. Can you believe there are going to be even MORE authors in attendance beyond those represented here? Like I said, the books-and-authors track is truly impressive this year.

Oh, and Paul & Storm will be playing a concert there with guest appearances by John Scalzi, Pat Rothfuss, and Seanan McGuire. You may know them from this hilarious song exhorting George R. R. Martin to speed it up on the Song of Ice and Fire front:

All in all, it’s shaping up to be an epic weekend. I’ll be reporting on panels and such like I did last year, so keep an eye out for that. Who would you be most interested in seeing/hearing about at Phoenix Comicon this year? Are you a fan of any of the authors attending? Hit the comments and let us know!

All author photos are from the Phoenix Comicon website, and all book cover images are from Goodreads.

Blogoversary Fun: 2014 Favorites

In the vein of continuing blogoversary fun, we thought we’d celebrate our blog birthday with a few of our favorite things—favorite reads for the year so far, that is! We’ve been working hard trying to keep up to pace in the Girls in Capes 2014 Reading Challenge, and happily we’ve come across quite a few keepers along the way. Since we’re only drawing near to the quarter mark of the year, we thought five would be a good number to share with you. So without further ado, here are each of our top reads for the first three months of 2014!

A’s Top 5 Books of 2014 (So Far)

1. A Curse Dark As Gold, by Elizabeth C. Bunce

You may recognize this book as my Morris Award winner from reading bingo, and WOW, am I glad I picked this one. It was damn near perfection.

The book takes place in a setting much like that of England on the cusp of the industrial revolution, in a small town centered around a wool mill. Charlotte Miller has to take charge of the mill with her sister after their father’s death, and though she refuses to believe that it’s cursed, as people claim, bad luck is visited upon them again and again. Just when it appears that everything is going to fall apart, a man called Jack Spinner shows up, and offers to spin straw into gold thread for a small price. Starting to sound familiar yet? Every time bad luck threatens to shut the mill down, Jack Spinner reappears to save it, always with a different, strange price. But as the bad luck and bargaining continue, Charlotte will have to get to the bottom of the curse if she hopes to save the mill and the town along with it.

I just. It was SO good. The writing is exceptional, with fun period-appropriate spellings here and there. All the characters are fully realized, complicated people. The mystery surrounding the curse is genuinely mysterious, and kept me guessing at what was really going on with each new clue that surfaced. The atmosphere was pitch perfect, with the spookiness and suspense executed flawlessly. In fact, it ended up being a lot creepier than I would’ve expected from reading the blurb, and it really worked. I was completely engaged and engrossed—as Charlotte was making decisions and trying to save the mill, I found myself wondering at the strangeness of events along with her, or covering my eyes and howling nonoNO don’t do it!!!, or having some other completely crazy reaction. The only thing I was initially unsure about was the protagonist marrying the love interest not even halfway through the book, but I should never have worried—the romance lost none of its interest (in fact, I’d say it GAINED interest) and it had a huge emotional payoff. Not an approach to romance you see everyday, and it was pretty brilliant. SO GOOD.

Seriously, you should read this book.

2. The Tiffany Aching Quartet, by Terry Pratchett

Okay, I guess this is kind of cheating because it’s a series. But I couldn’t pick just one of the two I’ve read!!! These books take place within Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, but you don’t have to have read all, or any, of the Discworld books to understand these ones. They were actually my first trip into the world of Terry Pratchett, and I absolutely loved them.

Tiffany Aching is a young girl living in the Chalk, a region of fields and sheep, who finds out that she is a witch. In the first book, The Wee Free Men, Tiffany has to go to Fairyland to save her kidnapped baby brother, and in the second, she leaves the Chalk to study with another witch. Always with her, however, are the Nac Mac Feegle (also known as Wee Free Men), tiny Scottish-ish Pictsies who love drinking and fighting, and who never fail to show up and help the wee hag face whatever challenges come. I mean, they’re called Pictsies! That’s hilarious!!!

Terry Pratchett is a funny man, and his wit is on display in full force in these books. Reading them makes me laugh, but it also makes me feel like I’ve learned something about life and the universe. The books have an impressive depth and resonance that commingle with the humor, creating something that feels both meaningful and entertaining. These books are fantasy, but like all good fantasies, they are completely real in all the important things. They may be labeled as YA, but they’re ones that everyone should read. I can’t wait to read the second half of the quartet!

3. Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard

I effing love this play. I've seen a couple amateur productions of it before, but I’d never actually sat down and read it until this month. It's wonderful to watch and I can’t recommend that experience enough, but it’s also amazing how full the play is, how there was so much more I picked up on in the reading that flew right by me in the watching. Though I spent quite a while lingering over it, I suspect there is yet more that has gone over my head, and I hope to grasp it in future readings and viewings.

The play has two parallel storylines, one unfolding at an English country estate in the nineteenth century, and the other taking place at the same estate in the 1990s, with scenes switching back and forth between the two. The modern day story involves academics who are investigating or tangentially related to a mystery involving Lord Byron’s possible presence at the estate in, you guessed it, the timeline of the earlier storyline. While the academics debate the truth of what really happened all those years ago, we learn more about it through the nineteenth century storyline involving a young girl who is brilliant at mathematics, her tutor, and the rest of her family and the guests they host at the estate. The contrast between the conclusions the modern people draw about the earlier days and what we see actually happening in that time is completely absorbing, and two storylines’ convergence as the end of the play draws near is powerful.

It’s just…it’s perfection, and I don’t have any words to properly convey its brilliance. It’s full of scintillating wit and intelligence, and it perfectly captures the exhilaration of literary/academia nerding. It covers ideas of truth (both its objectivity and subjectivity), the effects of passing time, science, math, poetry, the nature of existence and the universe, lust, love… It’s laugh-out-loud funny, and joyful, and witty, and quirky (there are pet tortoises!), and very moving, and sad. I don’t know how all that can be contained in 97 pages, but Stoppard achieves it masterfully. Please read it. Please watch it. Experience it for yourself, since nothing I say here can do it justice.

4. The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, by Isabel Greenberg

I’ve already talked about this one recently here, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much. I went into reading this graphic novel not really knowing what to expect, and ended up thoroughly enjoying it. It was easy to get caught up in the stories within stories narrative style, and the mix of old myths in new clothes and unfamiliar ones is addictive. Since it’s a story about storytelling, there are some funny meta moments, and the humor is a nice contrast to some of the intensity that myths can have—y’know, vengeful gods, murders, those kinda things. You can tell that the author just gets it, with regards to the nature of myth and legend. I hope there are more graphic novels about Early Earth to come in the future!

5. The Civil War in Color, by John C. Guntzelman

I’ve had my eye on this one since I first saw it on a Barnes and Noble Civil War 150th anniversary themed display table sometime last year. I recently checked it out from the library, and liked it enough that when I heard through the grapevine that it had made its way to the bargain books section of many B&Ns, I bought a copy for the low price of thirteen dollars. And well worth it, I say! The basic idea behind the book is to take images from the Civil War, the first conflict in US History that was widely photographed, and after much research about the appearances of the people involved, the popular clothing colors of the day, etc., colorize the photos in hopes of giving readers a new perspective on the war.

It is completely successful in that aim. I love black and white photography, but when I look at photos taken long ago, there is something undeniably historical about them. On the one hand I feel connected with the past by seeing actual images of the way things looked back then, but on the other it still feels distant in many ways. It was astonishing to me how the addition of color to the photos contained in this book makes them feel so much closer. It makes them seem more real, more alive, and more relatable. So many more details become noticeable in color (there are the original B&W versions included for some of the photos, for comparison purposes), and I found myself poring over every inch of each photograph, wondering about the lives of the people immortalized in them. (The similarities between the appearance of men from this era and modern hipsters are also surprising. Photoshop in a smartphone and some sort of organic craft beverage, and you could be at Coachella.) Lots of text to help elucidate what you’re looking at makes this an educational, eye-opening coffee table book. Check it out if you can.

*Honorable Mention* The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

I finally got around to reading this much-loved epic fantasy novel, and really enjoyed it. Though I worried that the main character, Kvothe, was wandering into Mary Sue territory at times, he is a fascinating, resourceful dude and it is thoroughly awesome to live vicariously through his experiences. There were a few tricksy twists by the author that pleased me greatly, and a cast of well-developed characters that I can’t wait to visit again when I get my hands on book two. I liked the book’s unique take on magic and solid world-building. The way the story is structured, with an adult, fallen-from-grace Kvothe telling the story of his life up to that point, inevitably creates a sense of foreshadowing where you’re kept wondering how things went so wrong for a guy who from childhood seems to be heading in the direction of becoming an epic hero.

Overall I rated the book a 4 out of 5, since I try to be stingy with fives and reserve them for ones with that certain indescribable, jaw-dropping, knock-me-on-my-ass quality. For me it hovered between the two for most of its over-700 pages, but there were definitely a lot of full-on 5 moments, like when Kvothe plays for his pipes at the Eolian. That was probably my favorite scene in the entire book—the way the words make you hear music is pure magic. (If you haven’t read the book that probably sounds like gibberish, but when you read it will make sense. Promise!)

S’s Top 5 Books of 2014 (So Far)

1. Where’d You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple

Bea, a young teenager, is trying to piece together what happened before her mother, Bernadette, disappeared on the eve of a family trip to Antarctica. With notes between members of the PTA at Bea’s school, memos between Bernadette and her remote personal assistant, magazine clippings about her Bernadette’s illustrious career as an architect before Bea’s birth, Bea tells a gripping and often hilarious account of her mother’s eccentricity and the absurdity of the school parent community.

I knew I loved Bernadette as I was reading it in January, but I couldn’t put my feelings into words before I read another book in March that seemed to be approaching similar themes in a far less appealing way.

Basically the success of this rests in the decision of the author, Maria Semple, to structure the book as a project Bea is doing to find her mother, both in the “getting to know who she really is” sense, and in the action later in the story. First, Bea is a charming narrator. She’s a cusp-of-high-school girl who is mature and sheltered, allowing her to make observations on the people who surround her with well-considered judgments but some level of innocent miscalculation. In a story that uses petty PTA mom gossip, Bea’s voice serves as a palate cleanser and as reality check.

Next, the double sense of finding Bernadette is doubly interesting. Exploring the paper trail of what seems to be a crazy Bernadette is a solid enough basis for a funny satire about stay-at-home mothers. Having Bea propose to travel to Antarctica to try to find a missing mother follows the absurdity of the earlier part of the novel, but adds an extremely somber element of a girl struggling to find peace with grief. And once the grief is there, it’s easy to see the darker side to Bernadette’s problems in the first half of the book, even as it’s impossible to keep from laughing at some of them.

I don’t want to limit my praise to these elements. Bernadette herself is a great character, the writing style is so controlled and yet seemingly effortless, the send-up of tech culture in Seattle is funny too.

2. The Beginning of Everything, by Robyn Schneider

Witty teen boy narrators idolizing troubled girls who wear cool clothes and plan cooler pranks seem to be a mainstay in young adult literature these days (at least on this week’s NY Times YA Best Sellers List, where 3-4 titles essentially fit that description), and this February I got angry at Looking for Alaska for being an inferior version of Paper Towns, and I started to wonder if I had just exhausted my ability to like witty teen boys yearning for manic pixie dream girls. Turn the calendar to March, when I read The Beginning of Everything, and found within the first chapter that I could possibly forgive the book for anything it did in the remaining 90% of the plot (decapitation on roller coasters is an amazing way to start a book).

But the rest of the book was just as good as the beginning! Ezra Faulkner, finishing his junior year of high school as captain of the varsity tennis team and soon-to-be-elected president of the senior class, discovers his girlfriend cheating on him at a party, and gets into a car accident bad enough to ruin his tennis ambitions. When he withdraws from his popular and athletic friends, an old childhood friend brings him into the world of debate club, where transfer student Cassidy catches Ezra’s eye. Everything about this book worked for me. The depiction of social circles in high school seemed spot-on, and Ezra’s voice is funny, mostly mature, but still youthfully insecure.

3. The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

A brilliant shortstop, Henry Skrimshander, is on track to realizing his dream of playing professional baseball when he enters a debilitating slump in his junior year. At the same time his mentor and best friend, Mike Schwartz, has also seen his dream of living up to expectations of entering a top-tier law school shatter. Though Henry cannot escape his panic on the field, Mike starts to date the college president’s daughter, Pella Affenlight, who is recovering from a too-early marriage and debilitating depression. The book could be a grim portrait of lost confidence and dreams deferred in the early twenties of life, but Henry’s roommate, Owen Dunne, has fallen in love with the late middle-aged college president, whose path to accepting his love for Owen suggests that dreams and identity can fail or change at any point of life.

If you haven’t guessed already, this is a book to shelve with The Emperor’s Children (Claire Messud) and The Marriage Plot (Jeffrey Eugenides), which also deal with interia-laden, depressed young people trying to find a place in the world. I really disliked both of those books, but for some reason I really enjoyed The Art of Fielding. I can’t say I liked any of the main characters all of the time, but I felt for them, and genuinely hoped they could solve their problems and regain their happiness. Chad Harbach uses Henry’s book of meditations on how to be a shortstop as a focus, and also weaves in Herman Melville and Moby Dick as models for the characters.

In all, an incredibly solid book, and a compulsive read.

4. A Venetian Affair, by Andrea Di Robilant

This is one of the juiciest nonfiction books you can imagine, with a premise so incredible that reviewers on Goodreads have labeled it fiction. The author’s father found in his Venetian palazzo a trunk of 18th century love letters, detailing the passionate relationship between Andrea Memmo, a young nobleman, and Giustiniana Wynne, a younger and less noble woman. The book is di Robilant’s effort to tie together the letters that so fascinated his family, with a story that I know see could be described as How I Met Your Ancestor in mid-1700s Venice.

Andrea is a twenty-something romantic who, despite his love of art and sentimentality, is quite an experienced man. Giustiniana is a young, somewhat foreign, girl, who has ambitions beyond marriage. The two of them spend a decade trying to figure out their mixed-up relationship, which involves proposals, engagements to others, separation, secret meetings, and a correspondence that works because Giustiniana addresses Andrea as her “dear brother.” Several of the chapters read very much like the 18th Century Venetian version of How I Met Your Mother plots. Seriously, Casanova turns out to be Giustiniana’s best friend in Paris, and his “cure” for unwanted pregnancy is so ludicrous to our modern ears that not even Barney Stinson would dare to use it as a play. And for those of you who have seen the finale of How I Met Your Mother, the last chapter of this story reads almost the same. Instead of the leisurely pace of the rest of the book, there are summaries of the directions everyone’s lives turned, and the limited personal interaction they had with people who were so important to their raucous social lives in their youth.

5. The Last Dragonslayer, by Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde, famous for his Thursday Next series of book-hopping action and word play, started a young adult series a few years ago that I never quite got around to reading. FOOLISH ME. This book was an absolute delight. It’s as zany as you’d expect from a Fforde book, and at a shorter length, more tightly focused than any other Fforde book. Plus the characters are all fun, and the pet Quarkbeast has surpassed Thursday’s pet dodo, Pickwick, as the coolest pet ever.

Jennifer Strange, indentured orphan at Kazam Mystical Arts Management, has her hands full just trying to run company of eccentric magicians without raising suspicions that the owner has disappeared, but premonitions of the death of the last dragon in the land bring her life into chaos as she tries to protect the interests of the dragon, avoid committing treason against King Snood, and prevent a war over the Dragonlands. Oh, and it seems that the death of the dragon could result in a mystical arts management industry change due to wild flux of magic available.

The Haul: VNSA Book Sale, Part the Second

Ah, used books. Having already gleefully shown off my myriad discoveries in the Children’s Books section of Ye Olde VNSA Book Sale, it may surprise you to find out that that wasn’t even half of my overall take. Or maybe not. You may know me, and know I have a book problem.

A very big problem indeed.

After a thorough combing of the kids' section, I headed a couple tables over to the science fiction and fantasy area, where I scrounged up most of the contents of that there box. I think some old-school SFF geek must’ve cleaned out their stash this year, because there was a lot of really cool stuff—WAY more than I remember from my brief perusal of the section last year. Among all the books and authors I was unfamiliar with, I found quite a few keepers, such as this lovely collection of Douglas Adams books:

The Docket: The Name of the Wind

Hello, dear readers! We are so sorry for the long drought of post-less days and weeks. WE ARE DESOLATE WITHOUT YOU!!! But, holidays. You know how it is. Book club waits for no season, however, and our WordNerds pick for December, and in all likelihood January, and due to the 700+ page count, maybe even February too, is the much-loved first entry in Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles, The Name of the Wind. (Alyssa has an unfortunate tendency to mix its title up with that of Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, despite the completely different subject matter.) People love love LOVE this book (maybe you are one of these people?), and fantasy-enthusiast Alyssa doesn’t know how she has managed to not read it yet. Susan has lately been expanding her forays into the realms of fantasy fiction for grown-ups and has started this one already. Have you read it? Do you love it? Here’s what Amazon has to say about the plot:

The riveting first-person narrative of a young man who grows to be the most notorious magician his world has ever seen. From his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, to years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-ridden city, to his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a legendary school of magic, The Name of the Wind is a masterpiece that transports readers into the body and mind of a wizard. It is a high-action novel written with a poet's hand, a powerful coming-of-age story of a magically gifted young man, told through his eyes: to read this book is to be the hero.

Based on what friends have had to say and the smattering of pages we’ve progressed through, this seems to be a book that defies blurbing and has the weight of the praise of highly regarded authors and publications behind it. Think Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Robin Hobb, Locus…all give it glowing reviews. We hope to add ours to theirs in the coming weeks, so please join us as we get into it! Pick up a copy at the library, purchase it from your local bookstore, borrow one from a friend…or if you’re not as late to the Rothfuss party as we are, just join us in chatting about it when we finish. Allons-y!