A Beginner's Guide to Science Fiction/Fantasy

2015 was not a good year for me, book-wise. It turns out, gainful employment is actually is lot of work. Which, really, it shouldn't have been a surprise but it still, you know, sucks. A lot. Mostly because I still buy a lot of books, but don't actually get around to reading them. Like. Ever.

It's a problem.

Luckily, however, even when I'm not reading a lot, I'm still reading more per month than most people read in a year. Which, I mean, it fucks with my sleep cycle a lot, but that's- Who cares about that, is what I'm saying.

So.

This is how we're tackling this problem.

The books have been collected into little sets, starting with the absolutely vital, touching upon the most important, digressing into some of my personal favourites and meandering through a couple of handy collections for when you need a very specific kind of book.

idk it's kind of mess? i make up a lot of words here, mostly because i've been reading vikram seth again. (note: the Capital Letters i forget are because of e. e. cummings)

let me live, guys.

 

These lists are not afraid of recommending you books that are aimed at eight-year-olds, okay? There is Dr. Seuss here, and that is important.

The Bare Minimums:

1. The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
2. Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
3. Star Wars (Adapted Screenplay) by George Lucas
4. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
5. Foundation by Isaac Asimov

The Staple Reads:

1. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
2. A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin 
3. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
4. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

The Quirksome:

1. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
3. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith
4. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
5. The Witches by Roald Dahl

The Dystopian Standard:

1. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
4. The Giver by Lois Lowry
5. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishigiro

Personal Favourites:

1. The Ellimist Chronicles by K. A. Applegate
2. A Wizard in Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
3. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
4. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
5. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
6. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
7. The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
8. Toys by James Patterson

The Modern Classics:

1. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
2. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
3. The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
4. Neuromancer by William Gibson
5. The Gunslinger by Stephen King

Non-terrible books aimed at 16-year-olds (and below):

1. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick RIordan
2. The Host by Stephenie Meyer
3. Gone by Michael Grant
4. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
5. The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Just read everything this author has written okay, ALL OF IT IS EXCELLENT:

1. Neil Gaiman, aka my entire religion
2. Rick Riordan
3. Stephen King
4. George Orwell
5. Roald Dahl

Enfin, the last list here, sorted with a weirdly obsessive sort of precision. The order here is how good the book has been so far, and how good I expect it to be. All these books are half-finished, and nearly all of them are scattered throughout my room in varying degrees of unreadness. Books are the full reason I'm broke, not even kidding.

What I'm saying is- the further down this list you go, the more exponentially the level of awesome of the book is. Ready Player One, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is Harry Potter, is like, a 14 right now.

Micro, on the other hand, is a negative 43.

So.

Here goes,

The Unfinished:

1. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
2. The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
3. The FIre Thief by Terry Deary
4. The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie
5. The 5th Wave by Rick Yancy
6. Interworld by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves
7. Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
8. Screwed by Eoin Colfer
9. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
10. Micro by Michael Crichton and Richard Preston

A couple of disclaimers:

A lot of these books are parts of series, in which case I have simply mentioned the first part of the series. In several other cases, I am only partly through the book, but it is popular and old and fucking incredibly brilliant enough that I just chucked it in in the other lists.

Except ASOIAF. I haven't read ASOIAF. I don't plan to either. Sue me, you dickless Crows.

K, you're welcome. I have to go figure out how to (legally) watch Sherlock tonight.

The Only Alt/Pop/Indie/Rock Playlist You Need

Hello. Remember when I did lists? And then I deleted everything, and like forty different people yelled at me over the span of eight months? Ah yes, good times. Forty people who give a fuck. #blessed

EITHER WAYS I DID A LIST, which is the first list in a series of lists that will be released over the course of the last week of 2015, and a little bit of 2016.

The list is all albums, not individual songs, and all of them came out in 2015*, okay, and I honestly probably have forgotten more good music this year than anything. Here's the plus side - I only recommend the album if I like almost the entire album, so you get like more than 250 non-sucky songs in one click. If you feel like I skipped something really good though, feel free to leave angry comments.

*Because let's face it, if I hadn't limited myself someway, somehow, this list would go on for years.

In no particular order of awesome (primarily because everything here is awesome, and also, if this matters to you, everything here is available on UAE iTunes):

1. Badlands by Halsey
2. The Gift EP by Pia Mia
3. Communion by Years & Years
4. Beauty Behind the Madness by The Weeknd
5. Empire (Original Soundtrack from Season 1) by Empire Cast
6. Handwritten by Shawn Mendes
7. Four Pink Walls EP by Alessia Cara
8. Purpose by Justin Bieber
9. Beneath the Skin by Of Monsters and Men
10. Blue Neighbourhood by Troye Sivan
11. Aftermath by Hillsong UNITED
12. Run by AWOLNATION
13. xx by The xx
14. American Beauty/American Psycho by Fall Out Boy
15. Urban Flora EP by Galimatias
16. Blurryface by twenty one pilots
17. Different Colors EP by WALK THE MOON
18. Kindred by Passion Pit
19. Smoke and Mirrors (Deluxe) by Imagine Dragons
20. Nothing But Thieves by Nothing But Theives
21. Made in the A.M. by One Direction
22. Ex's and Oh's by Elle King
23. Saint Raymond by Young Blood
24. Desire Lines by Fictonian
25. Art Angels by Grimes
26. Wiped Out! by The Neighbourhood
27. Light Up the Dark by Gabrielle Aplin
28. Sounds Good Feels Good by 5 Seconds of Summer
29. Jarryd James EP by Jarryd James
30. Wilder Minds by Mumford & Sons

Note how I have not included Adele's album in this list. This is because Adele did not release her album on Spotify or Apple Music. I do not have time for that kind of drama, thank you and goodnight.

Of Gaiman and Chesterton

I've had the sort of day that is only splendid for my kind of people - the ones who hopelessly crave new words. New phrases. New people caught in paper-thin slices of life. And above all else, new stories. All the afternoon I've whiled away, with fresh cups of vanilla tea and caramel cappuccinos, working through a tottering stack of half-read novels, Daughter and John Mayer and The Paper Kites filling up the endless rustle of paper and caffeine-laced swirls of rising steam.

There are the guilty pleasures - paperback copies of Lee Child and Tom Clancy, with worn, cracked spines, purchased secondhand from a town over. The plot is rich, tight in its lack of verbosity. The hero is always a redeemable cynic, the villains are always truly evil, the American western is reinvented, while holding true to its clearly demarcated camps of black and white.

There is a treasured, just found copy of Fragile Things, its jacket retaining its new-book-sheen; the paper, clean, crisp, untouched by that sweet rotting scent of old books. Neil Gaiman writes short stories with featherlight touches; jade brilliant and incisive in his prose. The memory-scent of incense and promise and wonderment rises tangibly from its pages, the mark of a fine author.

There are slim, hardback volumes of the old classics - G. K. Chesterton writes essays faintly reminiscent of Borges, of libraries and maps and possibilities. Orwell recounts the many tumultuous events at Animal Farm; the unrest and dissatisfaction and wrongness suffered at the whims of dictatorship don't let me read for very long. The book is snapped shut; tea - now cold - is sipped.

The setting light of the sun reflects against the steel-and-glass of a neighbouring building, and shines into my room. The air is tinted golden. I leave for another cup of tea.

When I return, with a lightly brewed coffee instead, the light is fast fading. The rug is soft under me. Sun Tzu's Art of War sits on the bottom shelf, incriminating, demanding to be read. Its voice is difficult to ignore, but Robert Jordan's is insistent, insidious. A copy of the first book in the Wheel of Time sits among younger, newer brothers, the dog-eared edition published well before I was around, its pages so worn and brown they seem to have stories to tell of their own.

The words are familiar - the medieval archaisms repeated in Tolkien and Paolini's sagas, in the Riders of Pern and the Westerosi, across the breadth of Narnia and the amongst the elders of the Seelie courts. There are mages and sorcerers and wizards; dragons are rode and great battles are fought. Empires topple, kingships exchange hands, and through it all, the war of good and evil fight in a blinding, bloodstained tapestry.

And then the coffee is drained, and the book is read. Not completed, not yet, but enough. Enough, I think, for the day. Tomorrow will bring another tale, and we will await, nestled in soft blankets and fading light, and hope for the honor to bear witness to many lives, many deaths, many in-betweens.

Transcripted: Hugh Laurie's monologue from Tommorowland

If you glimpsed the future and you were frightened by what you saw, what do you do with that information? 

Who would you go to? Politicians? Captains of industry? And how would you convince them? Data? Facts? Good luck. The only facts they won’t challenge are the ones that keep the wheels greased and the dollars rolling in.

But... What if there was a way of skipping the middle man, and putting the critical news directly into everyone’s head?

The probability of widespread annihilation kept going up and the only way to stop it was to show it, and to scare people straight.

Because what reasonable human being wouldn’t be galvanised by the potential destruction of everything we have known or loved?!

To save civilisation, I would show its collapse.

And how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up, like a chocolate eclair!

They didn’t fear their demise; they repackaged it!

It could be enjoyed as video games! As TV shows! Books! Movies! The entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon.

Meanwhile, your earth was crumbling all around you. You've got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one.

Bees and butterflies start to disappear. The glaciers melt; algae blooms. All around you, the coal mine canaries are dropping dead, and you won’t take the hint!

In every moment, there is the possibility of a better future, but you people won’t believe it! And because you won’t believe it, you won’t do what is necessary to make it a reality!

So you dwell on this terrible future; you resign yourselves to it. For one reason - because that future doesn’t ask anything of you today.

So, yes, you saw the iceberg, you warned the Titanic.

But you all steered for it anyway, full steam ahead.

Why? Because you want to sink.