Star Wars Extended Universe (Books, Only)

I have got some unresolved completionist issues. I was going to link some of the words in that last sentence to specific posts in this blog, but then I realised, actually, that I'd have to link to everything I'd written so far, as well as every one of a potentially infinite number of future posts (if you take a many worlds* theory to heart, which says that every time I write a post a (possibly infinite) number of possible worlds branch off, each containing a possible post that I didn't write that time) that I haven't yet written. I suppose I could have made every letter a separate hyperlink, but that would have been unwieldy, ugly, and still wouldn't have taken future posts into account.

Grunts

If any of my ten or so regular readers are wondering, this isn't the post that paints me in a good light either. I'm still working on that.

I have written before about orcs, although not for this blog, and when I did so I mentioned that Grunts was a disappointing book. However, having thought about it some more I think that I was being unfair on Mary Gentle, and in fact I should probably try to read something else of hers again.

The Conan Cronicles

Like most fantasy fans I have been through my Robert E Howard phase. It is a lot like the cider phase that a lot of teenagers go through; you get really into it, until the one night when you drink too much, vomit everywhere and then can never quite bring yourself to touch the stuff again. I never had that cider phase myself though - I still like to drink cider, but I only drink the beardy stuff that tastes like it's been smashed repeatedly in the face and gone home to try to sleep off the broken nose, and looks like diseased piss. I did have a Smirnoff Ice phase - which ended similarly after I opened a bottle outside a kebab shop in Tooting with my teeth, drank most of it, vomited all over the pavement and then proceeded to drank the rest, because it would be a shame to waste it.

Anyway, reading Robert E Howard is nothing like that, but you get the idea.

Snake Agent: A Detective Inspector Chen Mystery/Wicca

For a quick overview of my relationship to books and why not finishing reading them might be a failure you should check out this post. Also, just to be clear, I didn't finish the book, so I don't intend this to be a review - it is rather my personal response to not reading it.

I wanted to like Liz Williams, I really did. She comes recommended by a number of other authors who I really rate and respect for a start and seems to offer a distinct female British voice to the field of fantasy fiction and I'd been meaning to get hold of a copy of Snake Agent for a long time before I managed to track one down. She also represents a life that I used to think I wanted, and as such I still held in the warm regard of faintly yearning nostalgia; academia, an intellectual approach to spirituality, a few years slumming it making money in interesting, offbeat jobs (a Tarot reader in Brighton!) and a career as a fantasy novelist. I had already let this vision fuck up a large section of my life before I'd even heard of Williams, but finally reading her allowed me to let go of any latent affection that was still holding me back.

Dead Air

Part of my reason for writing this blog is that I think it might be interesting to explore what failure is and what it means to people (or rather to me, and maybe to the culture I live in a bit as well). I want to explore how things which can be defined as failure may not always amount to the negative concept that the word itself, taken alone, tends to signify.

Another part of my reason for writing this blog is that I like to beat myself up over all of the things that I've fucked up or given up on or let go of or generally not been good or devoted or forward-thinking enough to finish. (Do I like doing this or am I compelled to do so? The latter is probably just as accurate a description as it's a large part of the intrusive thought patterns that blight my depressed periods; it's rather annoying when a sentence that was supposed to be flippant turns out being uncomfortably revealing.)

The Black Swan

Yesterday, after going to see Black Swan - a feverishly intense depiction of obsession with process in art and the completeness of perfection - I went home, went to bed and completed another day in which I failed to do anything toward finishing any of my current set of projects. Some of those projects are getting pretty overdue now too, and I can't say I thought they were a load of rubbish when I started them, although at the moment they do look pretty dubious. Regardless, in honour of Black Swan I did briefly consider writing up a post about my own time as a ballet dancer, but swiftly rejected it on the grounds that it was too big a post to start right now and instead decided to talk about The Black Swan instead. the fact that this has turned into a really long post itself is neither here nor there, for this is a blog about failure.

The Black Swan is a book by Mercedes Lackey, an author who I usually have a lot of time for, although sometimes I'm not entirely sure why. I think that it's similar to the way that you might let someone who you spent a lot of intense time with as a child get away with a lot more bullshit than you might, say, someone you just met at a party. For me, it was reading The Oathbound when I was about 12. I'd just finished Lord of the Rings and this was an amazing change of pace and focus, from doomy epic where women were at best an irrelevance to a much less portentous journey where the female characters were not just rounded out, but actually in the lead roles. Revelation!

It may seem odd that I'm putting a book of which, obviously, I was not in any way involved in the creation into a list of projects which I have not finished; for a great many people I imagine that starting a book and then never finishing it is a frequent experience. I am not a great many people, however, and I am a very meticulous reader. For me, once I start reading something the urge to finish it is huge - I want to be able to put it down, to file it away as 'done'. I'll read, compulsively, all of the little blurbs and copyright notices, the frontispiece and the publication dates. (Once I started reading 'classics' I had to train myself not to read the foreword before starting the main text, because I didn't realise that they weren't supposed to be read in that order and often give away the main plot points and subtexts and sometimes even spoil the ending for you.)

With secondary world fantasy the link is more apparent, too, in that the work required to build a whole new world in your imagination is a project, and it is a huge investment of mental energy. It's one of the reasons that I don't read as much fantasy as I used to, and conversely it's one of the reasons that when I do get round to reading fantasy I'll keep going to the end of a trilogy even if I got bored halfway through the first book - once I've peopled a world (however generic it is) I want to at least see it out to the conclusion of it's sub-Wagnerian heldenzeit.

And so, I put up with Lackey, even when she seems incapable of not writing trilogies (no matter how little the books may hang together - her standard seems to be an epic struggle that concludes in the first book; a vaguely related sequel where the peace won in the first is threatened by a new foe; and a completely un-related final book, usually starring the children of the previous set of characters proving themselves against a set of problems that have nothing to do with anything.) Well, I suppose at least someone hasn't been reading their Joseph Campbell.

I even put up with her when she creates wilful slave races using the sort of subservience tropes not seen since Hollywood's racist heyday.

But, apparently I can't put up with her when she writes Tchaikovsky fan-fiction. So the book rests on my desk, along with Eragon (which I did finish, god help me), as part of a pile created to raise my monitor to the correct height, staring at me. It taunts my inability to cope with tedious descriptions of spoilt fantasy-land rich-kids and the terrible, but ultimately excused behaviours of their fathers.

And yes, it is part of a trilogy.