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.
Category: Top Tens
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.
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #2: Sir Lancelot
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters,#2: Sir Lancelot, The Once and Future King
The Once and Future King is one of those books that gives me something new in every phase of my life. Through it all, I have adored the Ill-Made Knight, the one who loathes himself and tries so hard to rise above it, who has impulses toward cruelty and swears never to let himself descend to it, who became the best knight and was cursed to uphold it, who did just two things wrong, and one made a son better than him and the other unmade his world. White makes him feel so real in his fractured beauty.
As the book notes, a dishonorable man might have just gone away with Gwenever, cut the knot that led to their ruin. Over time I’ve come to regard the Arthurian love triangle as a little bit tawdry, ignoble. But I understand, through the book, why it happened, and why he only ever loved three people (I allow for God) and together they ruined everything.
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #3: Prince Zuko
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters,#3: Prince Zuko, Avatar: The Last Airbender
I have to say either too little or too much. Suffice it to say that Zuko has my favorite redemption arc. His story is believable, enjoyable, full of moments of introspection and gorgeous competence. He’s such an angry kid, cast out by his father and still desperate to win back his love. (Rightly) proud, (tragically) driven, (understandably) furious, (in spite of everything) growing. ATLA is a very, very good show that holds up well for adults despite being a Nickelodeon cartoon. Zuko gets some of the best characterization in a stellar cast. Plus, Zuko time is Uncle Iroh time, and Uncle Iroh is his mentor/foil in the best way.
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #4: Samuel Vimes
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters,#4: Sam Vimes, Discworld
Captain Vimes was my introduction to Pratchett’s fantastic concept of militant decency: the anger that is not the problem, but is the fuel to fix the problem, on matters of basic [human]ity. Sam is witty, tactically astute, tough, and his contributions to the Discworld timeline are all about expanding the definition of people and what people are protected by the law, be they constructs, vampires, or foreign countries. Vimes is so good. Not because he bears righteous fury with all the answers, but because he bears righteous fury that continuously learns. That accepts nothing less than justice, even for people that don’t usually fall inside the rules.
Some of my favorites are my favorites because I identify with them. I don’t identify with Sam Vimes, I couldn’t. I admire from afar, and sneakily try to emulate the highlights.
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #5: Londo Mollari and G’Kar
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #5: Londo Mollari and G’Kar, Babylon 5
Bound together because they’re amazing individually and sublime together. The evolution of these two characters and their relationship is one of the greatest achievements in the television I’ve seen.
Londo, a brazen imperialist languishing in a joke of an assignment because nobody wants to bother with him, and G’Kar, a firebrand facing down a war with nothing but his voice and the loyalty he has bought with his own blood—this is the stuff of epics. The give and take, the push and pull, G’Kar insistently buying Londo a drink in giddy hopes of a cessation of hostilities as Londo sits there meditating on the backstabbing attack he had personally arranged scant hours ago…it never stops being good. Londo’s businesslike walk into perdition and G’Kar’s gradual transformation beat against one another over, and over again. Londo’s best moments are the ones where he realizes how far he’s let everything go against G’Kar’s people, and G’Kar’s best moments are spitting defiance, sometimes literally, at the chains of Londo’s empire.
There are days when Londo and G’Kar carry the show. In Babylon 5’s stately, intricate storytelling, they inject boatloads of personality, successfully shining as both people and icons. The elevator sequence is one of the greatest scenes in television, fight me.
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #6: Emma Woodhouse
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #6: Emma Woodhouse, Emma
I identify with Emma. The favored child of British gentry and the queen bee of her social circle, Emma spends her days beneficently improving the lives of everyone around her. Emma is so full of great resolutions about how she’s going to improve herself as a person and make her world better, and she messes it up so many times. Emma is, of course, a spoiled girl in a provincial neighborhood engaging in meaningless, small-minded intrigue, but I think she’s a mirror for a disturbing number of my personality traits. She ends up happy, loved, and wiser than she started, and isn’t that something to aspire to?
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #7: Huttslayer Leia Organa
Top Ten Favorite Fictional Characters, #7: Huttslayer Leia Organa, Star Wars IV-VI
She shoots. She snarks. She scores. From the moment she pokes fun at Luke’s physique you know she’s going to be bad at the damsel in distress gig. Leia always knows the score and she’s not afraid of a little blaster fire. And she’s a real live princess! I can think of no better role model, even before she strangles a Hutt with her own slave chain and helps save the day. Her meditative moments in the Ewok village are among the oldest sticking movie scenes in my heart.
I will always wonder how Episode 9 would have been if she had been around to play the central point. (7 = Han, 8 = Luke, 9 = ??) It probably would have been terrible because the writing of those movies was catastrophically bad, but still, I wonder.