RECENT READING: The Five Book Catch-Up

I am probably offline when you read this. Of late, I’ve been programming Freedom to block my internet access for eight or nine hours a day. No social media, no checking sales numbers, no logging into this blog to check stats. The net result is a lot of writing, and a whole lot of reading.

Right now, this series is running several books behind my actual reading. I’m starting to forget things and get the order all mixed up in my head. So here we go, a quick-and-dirty catch-up of books I heartily recommend.

Go and read Mary Robinette Kowal’s THE CALCULATING STARS. Obviously, you don’t need me to tell you this, given that it just won a Hugo and seems poised to win all the other awards in short order.

Short version: It’s great. It’s really, really great. I gave a copy to my partner, and it largely sparked off a week of good book noises and momentary pauses to tell me about a new bit she really loved. So I read it, and spent about twenty-four hours making good book noises, because once I’d started this book I didn’t put it down until the whole thing was read.

It’s a smart alternate history about asteroids wiping out Washington and the sudden realisation that it’s time to get off this damn planet before the human race is extinct. The research that’s gone into the science and astronaut side of things is palpable and well-deployed.

But the stuff that will sucker you in is the diversity of the cast, the considered narrative around anxiety and mental health, and just the general awesomeness of Kowal’s writing as she lives up to this particular promise:

It’s not about adding diversity for the sake of diversity, it’s about subtracting homogeneity for the sake of realism.

— Mary Robinette Kowal (@MaryRobinette) December 18, 2014

THE CALCULATING STARS, MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Amazon (AUS | UK | USA) | KOBO | BOOKTOPIA

While it’s written by the same author, Mary Robinette Kowal’s SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY is one of those books that I’d recommend in a more targeted and considered way.

Shades is an excellent book, but it’s also Kowal’s first and your enjoyment will largely depend on how much you’re likely to enjoy the riff of Jane Austen, but in a universe where young ladies of quality learn the arts of glamour and magical illusion. This makes it a touch more of an acquired taste than the Calculating Stars, but I expect the folks who love will really, really love it.

Fortunately, I’m an inveterate Austen fan and part of of Georgette Heyer book club in addition to being a fantasy fan, so I’m pretty much the target market for this book and all of its sequels. If it sounds like your kind of thing from the pitch, it’s almost certainly going to deliver, up-to and including a pretty awesome Darcy riff that quietly comes into his own as the book goes on.

SHADES OF MILK & HONEY, MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL: Amazon (AUS | UK | USA) | KOBO | BOOKTOPIA

Anne Lamott’s BIRD BY BIRD is one of those classics in the writer’s guide space, following in the tales-from-the-trenches approach which I enjoy far more than any other. The kind of book that’s immensely helpful if you’re just starting out, and something of a curiosity if you’ve been writing for a while and you’re just poking about to see how other people do it.

What’s interesting to me is the way this book tends to lag behind Stephen King’s On Writing in terms of being a book people recommend to new writers. Having read them both now, I’m inclined to suggest that Lamott’s book is the superior choice.

BIRD BY BIRD, ANNE LAMOTT: Amazon (AUS | UK | USA) | KOBO | BOOKTOPIA

There’s a lot of talk about indie writers treating books (and series) like episodes of TV, building towards an eventual boxed set where you get a complete narrative. Having read a bunch of indie series for my thesis, there’s relatively few that seem to match the product to the rhetoric in a way that feels meaningful.

Lindsay Buroker’s FLASH GOLD is one of the series starters that seems to get it right. It’s a short, fast novella that reads like the pilot episode of a Joss Whedon Steampunk Western, featuring a sword-carrying mysterious stranger and a plucky young inventor desperate to get the hell out of the small town she’s been stuck in since her father died.

Together, they beat up some bad guys and make the decision to team up as bounty hunters…and chase after a whole suite of goals that promise a pretty interesting season arc. The upside of this one is that you can download the ebook free, and it’s good enough that I’ll be following along for another book or two at least.

FLASH GOLD, LINDSAY BUROKER: Amazon (AUS | UK | USA) | KOBO

Libbie Hawker’s TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS is an interesting one in the how-to-outline-a-book-space. Ostensibly, it’s a focused distillation of the ideas in John Truby’s screenwriting book The Anatomy of Story, which is itself one of the two books on plotting that legitimately rocked my world after twenty-odd years of reading guides built upon the Heroes Journey and the three-act structure.

This meant I went into Hawker’s book with a certain amount of trepidation, as I figured the last thing I wanted was a more stripped down version of Truby’s process. Turns out, I was kinda wrong about that; Hawker does a great job of winnowing down the messier aspects of Truby’s system and streamlining it for fiction use, while frequently directing readers back to The Anatomy of Story if they want to see more examples and detailed unpacking of the ideas she’s talking about.

I may be getting my milage out of this book by using Hawker’s system for a first-run, broad-detail sketch, then dialling back to Truby’s book to get a more detailed and nuanced vision of what I’m doing, but I’m a geek who likes to get technical and detailed with my work. If you’re just after a quick-and-dirty planning system that doesn’t involve cleaving to the three act structure, then Hawker is going to have plenty to add to your process on her own.

TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS: OUTLINE YOUR BOOK FOR FASTER, BETTER WRITING, LIBBIE HAWKER: Amazon (AUS | UK | USA) | KOBO | BOOKTOPIA