Top Ten Favorite Books, #7: The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s dreamlike prose has lured me into a thousand strange scenarios and brought me home with sensitivity and a truly excellent use of suspense and fulfillment. He’s done it through short story collection after short story collection, and again in novel fixups of short stories, and again with the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. My favorite of them all is the meditative story of the colonization of a planet, a very nearby planet, a planet of very, very different persons.

Earth doesn’t understand what its intrepid astronauts are exploring, and the Martians don’t see what makes humans tick. Onto this thread are strung beads, one after another, of people coming to coexist, or not. The final wrench of thought doesn’t come from Mars at all, though it will leave its marks everywhere.

There Will Come Soft Rains, a title from a lovely poem by Sara Teasdale, is easily in my top ten favorite short stories. It’s the chapter involving making breakfast. And it is as striking and haunting as the entire leadup to it.

Bradbury is an artisan of both suspense and melancholy beauty, and this is some of his best work. (I like The Illustrated Man, The October Country is a yearly reread, Something Wicked This Way Comes likewise, Dandelion Wine is balm for the soul, but The Martian Chronicles has my heart.)

Download: Canon in T, by Ruth Bowens

Exile Tarina Karth’s arcane malady has proved lethal once. Her only hope is the knowledge of the men of the Blue City. But their wizardly order proves brutally divided—and if she is to stay, she must learn which blocks she can overpower, and which are too dangerous to touch.

Phinean Draconis, a Speaker of the Blue City and ringleader of its Red Hall, has dedicated his life to science and living down certain rumors. When Tarina stumbles into his domain, he knows that she could become his greatest student. She just has to want it enough.

Canon in T: This is the story of their lessons.

Canon-in-T-Ruth-Bowens

Top Ten Favorite Books, #8: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

A meditative cycle of points of view in a Southern Gothic style? Not my usual fare. But the mute Mr. Singer, who stands at the center without getting to pour out his heart like people keep doing to him, fascinates. The souls around him read what they want into him, and they are haunting and beautiful even when they’re wrong. It’s emotionally difficult but absolutely worth the cost of admission.

Top Ten Favorite Books, #9: Notes from Underground

Top Ten Favorite Books, #9: Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man.” It rolls off the tongue like a Tale of Two Cities (It was the best of times, it was the worst of times) if Dickens weren’t being paid by the word. The neurotic narrator, prone to hyperbole and outbursts of bitterness, is weirdly relatable. I’m not sure who did the translation I own, but “There I stood, crushed and annihilated” is a byword in this household.

Top Ten Favorite Books, #10: This is How You Lose the Time War

Top Ten Favorite Books, #10: This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Maxwell Gladstone

Here’s where I confirm that I love a good epistolary novel. (I just finished Dracula in real time based on the dated documents; it was great.)

Letters are a communication medium unlike any other: the physicality of a slip of paper or cardboard, the fact that the writer will not see the reader, the additional element in this story of placing the letter where it will be seen, one tense sci-fi mission to another.

I enjoy the fact that the technology of time-traveling history-tweaking agents isn’t really the focus of the story. It’s interesting and thought out, but not the point. The focus is two people finding each other and holding onto that link. The writing is beautiful, playful, thought-provoking, characterization purely through what the writers choose to disclose to one another. It’s gorgeous.

Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #1: Hamlet

Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #1: Hamlet

 

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought…

If Othello is about reputation and Macbeth is about ambition, Hamlet is about the pain of living in an unjust world and the agony of trying to fix it using only the crude instrument of revenge. The world that Laertes cannot cleanse, that Ophelia cannot fit into an intact mind. The one that Hamlet stares at and cannot make sense of. And that’s amazing.

It’s Shakespeare. How do I say more than that? Hamlet is the character I most relate to in all of fiction. Is he crazy? Is he faking it? Can any of us say, moment to moment, which aspect is ascendant? Actually, probably most people can. But I really sympathize with Hamlet’s loneliness and frustration with the world’s sordidness.

I’ve read the soliloquies about a zillion times, me and my book and the monster in my head. (Check out this completely amazing vlogger rendition of To Be Or Not To Be.)

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!

He gets it. He gets it. The young prince dispatched on an errand of vengeance by his murdered father’s ghost is one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters and I love him. Funny, biting, possessed of my own demons, he narrates a shockingly relatable experience for a 400-year-old story.