Comfort Books

The top shelf of one of the many bookcases in my bedroom back home is crammed to bursting with some of my all-time favorite novels.  Sometimes, when I’m mopey or just bored I’ll take one down to re-read part or all of it.  The following books are some of the most frequently re-read from that shelf.*  They all have some measure of fantasy (you may have noticed a trend in my media habits) and are also all rather dark.

 

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

A story about several werewolf packs/gangs in Los Angeles and the people caught in between.  Mostly it focuses on the people (including the werewolves) as their loyalties shift and their worlds collapse.  The take on werewolves is fairly fresh and well-considered.  Oh, and did I mention it’s written entirely in absolutely gorgeous free verse?  Yeah.

 

Maledicte by Lane Robins**

This is a tale of love and revenge.  There are also lost gods, nasty politics, lots of intrigue and gratuitous violence delivered with hauntingly beautiful prose.  The characters and their problems are frighteningly believable, despite the fantastic nature of the story.  Bonus points for an interesting pantheon and continuously sending chills down your spine.

 

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Possibly my first real introduction to urban fantasy as a genre, certainly the first time I read an urban fantasy that had something more than vampires in it.  Granted, there are vampires, but there’s plenty of other stuff, too.  It’s been a while since I read it, but I recommend it whole-heartedly.  I mean, it’s Robin McKinley, for crying out loud!

 

Tithe:  A Modern Faerie Tale by Holly Black (YA)

Like Sunshine in that it was a milestone in my consumption of urban fantasy.  The first book that had faeries in a modern setting.  Take some old-school scary faeries and drop them in the middle of New Jersey.  Now toss in an outcast teenage girl who’s far too clever for her own good.  There’s beautiful imagery, fascinating (and terrifying) faeries and a quest for self-discovery (with a detour toward romance).  I also heartily recommend the author’s graphic novel series The Good Neighbors.

 

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr (YA)

Another book with teenage girls and really scary faeries.  I found this one when it first came out (working in a book store at the time) and I ate it up.  Awesome imagery, interesting use of relatively obscure folklore and throughout all the magic and politics you never lose sight of the characters.  I particularly appreciate that Melissa Marr’s characters have some fairly unique problems in the rapidly-expanding arena of faerie-related YA.

 

Happy reading!
Phantastic Student

*Not included, but also freqently re-read is Vivian Vande Velde’s The Book of Mordred which I adore.  However, being Arthurian in nature it didn’t seem to fit with dark urban fantasy cast of the rest of the list (Maledicte maybe be set in a period similar to the Regency/Victorian eras but you can’t tell me it’s not urban fantasy).  So I’ll talk about it another day.

** When I recommend a book from a series I am recommending the whole series unless I specifically say otherwise.

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Fringe Binge & the New Semester

Sorry about that last, extremely disorganized post.  I’m even more sorry that this post isn’t going to be much better.  So are you ready?  Here we go.

Fringe premiered in Fall of 2008, the same time I started college.  I didn’t have a television set, or any real interest because the commercials didn’t make it sound like my sort of show.  So I didn’t watch it.  Mom and Brother the Second started watching the show towards the end of season 1 and when I was home on break, I watched it, too (the first episode I saw was the season 1 finale). It was okay, but I didn’t really know what was going on and I didn’t bother to keep up with it after the break.

When season 2 started up in 2009, Mom and Brother the Second watched it and, as usual, I watched it when I was home.  I liked it okay, but since I was unfamiliar with the characters and story, I wasn’t that attached.  Then, over this past summer, I worked in a video rental store that happened to have season 1.  So I rented it and watched it with Mom and Brother the Second.   Suddenly everything made way more sense and I was in love with/addicted to the show.  When the rental place I was working at went out of business, I bought the boxed set.

Season 2 was released on DVD, I think, a week before season 3 aired.  I didn’t have the money to buy it at the time (damned textbook prices), so squirmed in agony because I was going to get behind.  In Novemberish, I manage to buy season 2.  Then we got into the whole end of semester crunch and I couldn’t watch any of it.  Over the winter break, I watched it with the family and finished it quite quickly.  Then I went into withdrawal because it’s amazing and I couldn’t watch season 3; we don’t have the channel, or a fast enough internet connection at home and, anyway, the first episode available to watch online was episode 5 and I couldn’t start there.

(not yet released, can be watched at http://www.fox.com/fringe/)

Earlier this week I broke down and watched all the excerpts and clips of episodes 1-4, because I couldn’t get more behind than I was.   Last night (read, very early to not-so-early this morning) I caught up.  Now I’m waiting rather impatiently for the show to start up again on Friday.

So what is Fringe and why is it so great?

Summary: Weird stuff happens and the Fringe Division investigates. Right now, that means FBI agent Olivia Dunham; mad scientist and former mental patient Dr. Walter Bishop; Dr. Bishop’s ex-con son, Peter Bishop; and Agent-turned-babysitter Astrid Farnsworth.

Fringe is great because, like Primeval, it gives me my horror/moster/mad-sci fix. It gives me my sci-fi fix and my previous unmentioned crime-show fix. It has awesome characters and the plot keeps twisting in new and unexpected directions. The effects are good and often gross. Each consecutive seasons gets more badass. But Fringe isn’t just a show that seems to fulfill all my entertainment needs.

Fringe is about making the seemingly impossible possible. It’s about seeing things that are weird or wrong or just don’t mesh with what we’re all taught to believe is reality and then exploring that. Not just the science-fiction elements, but the human elements. I’m not going to go into too much detail, as it’s far too easy to accidentally let slip a some severe spoilers, but Fringe is about the relativity of reality. It’s about the unknown and the undiscovered being just as important to our reality as the things we take for granted as fact (which are often later eclipsed by new truths).  More importantly, it’s about the people who witness these apparent incongruities and how they cope.  It’s about learning that the only things you can rely on are your loved ones and that even they aren’t exactly what they seem.

How does Fringe relate to the new semester?

This juxtaposition of truths and falsehoods is something that’s fascinated me for a long time. If you look at early posts on this blog, you’ll see what I’m talking about. I study folklore, which is built around finding out why people keeping telling stories they don’t believe in, why they do things and build things that seem to have lost their purpose. I built an entire literature class around the truths urban fantasy authors build out of falsehood.  I was raised on a steady diet of sci-fi, fantasy and non-fiction and I’ve spent my whole life looking at how those things intersect.

This semester everything seems to be coming together, if you consider that my entire education has been built around the roles of truths and “lies more real than the truth.”  I’m studying mythography, the study of the truths that make people believe the things they do. I’m studying Chaucer, who’s all about dual meanings and the exploration of the truth of people. I’m studying creativity and why people think they way they do and how they make things and where they get their ideas. It’s all coming together.

So I’m excited, because in addition to the usual realization that every class I take every single semester is related to all the others, I’ve realized that this semester (and my current-favorite television show) are all related to my lifelong interest.  That everything I want to learn and analyze and create are all tied together and that my Liberal Arts degree is actually doing something because I’m actually seeing things critically without losing the wonder of it all.  That I’m able to see what I’m learning and, more importantly, what I’m not learning and that I’ll be able to figure out how to fill in those blanks one day.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with this knowledge.  I don’t know how I’m going to use it.  I just know that I’m going to learn and I’m going to create and I’m going somewhere, because I can see all the loose ends knitting themselves together into something bigger.  I’m figuring things out and I’m enjoying the process and, really, isn’t that what we all want?

An epiphanic day to you all,

Phantastic Student

P.S. Watch Fringe. Seriously.

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