My Fave Books I Reckon You Should Read Too

Moonrat and Josephine have both published their lists of books you should read. Here’s mine. These lists are always highly subjective, so I’m not going to pretend it’s anything other than my own faves. I’m afraid the variation in quality and literary pretension gyrates wildly from ultra-highbrow to stuff an editor would be worried to find in her slush.

1. The complete plays of Aristophanes. Don’t panic, it’s not all this highbrow. But actually Aristophanes is lowbrow…very lowbrow…and still hilarious to this day. If you don’t believe me, start by reading Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens go on a sex-strike until the men stop making war.

2. Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny. The best of his work. If you like this, read the first series of Amber stories too, starting with Nine Princes In Amber.

3. Starship Troopers – Robert Heinlein. Some might not appreciate his point of view, but the writing is smooth, effortless, brilliant.

4. The English Assassin – Michael Moorcock. The first in the Jerry Cornelius series of stories. Deeply experimental, which normally would make me run away screaming, but these books really work. Also try his stories of Oswald Bastable.

5. The Void Captain’s Tale – Norman Spinrad. Highly creative use of language, merging English, French and German (mostly) into a future Sprach.

6. All the Greek stories of Mary Renault. Simply the best Greek historical novels of all time (except, of course, for my own forthcoming series…). She does have a thing about gay guys though.

7. Master And Commander – Patrick O’Brien. And all the other Aubrey-Maturin novels too. Since there are 20 of these they should take 20 places, but I’m going to list only one and expect you to read the others anyway.

8. Hamlet, MacBeth, Twelfth Night – William Shakespeare. The guy couldn’t even spell his own name consistently, but he did write rather good plays. Don’t read them; instead, travel to Stratford and watch them played by the Royal Shakespearean Company. That’s the right way to appreciate Shakespeare.

9. The complete Sherlock Holmes stories – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes, every one of them. It’s necessary for the good of your soul.

10. A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. The first three of the Earthsea novels by Ursula K. LeGuin. Much better than Rowling’s stories, which are in the same vein. Long after she wrote these three, LeGuin returned to Earthsea to write some politically correct extensions that can be safely ignored. Stick with the first three.

11. Green Eggs And Ham – Dr Seuss. And everything else he did too, but Green Eggs and Ham is my fave.

12. Dune – Frank Herbert. Only read this first book in the series! After this, it’s all downhill.

13. The Gordianus the Finder stories of Steven Saylor. Tales of an honest, sensitive, new age guy, who finds himself mired in the vicious politics of late Republican Rome.

14. The SPQR stories of John Maddox Roberts. Tales of an aristocratic young trouble-maker, enjoying every moment of the vicious politics of late Republican Rome. It’s a wonder Decius Metellus and Gordianus never met.

15. The Marcus Didius Falco stories of Lindsey Davis. Tales of the most hard done by gumshoe in Imperial Rome.

16. The Flanders Panel – Arturo Perez-Reverte. Also The Dumas Club.

17. The Flashman Papers, edited by George MacDonald Fraser. Brigadier-General Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC KCB KCIE…a hero for our times.

18. The Histories – Herodotus. Step into an unbelievable world, all the more amazing because it’s true.

19. History Of The Peloponnesian War – Thucydides. The best book ever written on power politics. Beats any thriller I know of.

20. The Richard Sharpe stories of Bernard Cornwell. Watch in awe as Sharpe and Harper cut swathes through 30,000 French per battle.

21. The Adam Dalgleish stories of PD James. I can’t for the life of me work out why all her characters don’t just kill themselves in various orgies of self-indulgent depression, but by God she writes well.

22. The Roderick Alleyn stories of Ngaio Marsh. Forget Christie and Allingham; for my money Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn is the best of the Golden Age detectives. Start with the second in the series, Enter A Murderer. Alleyn is very shaky in the first book, but by the second he has a solid voice and Marsh has him under control.

23. The Epic of Gilgamesh. An epic poem from bronze age Mesopotamia, it’s one of the oldest stories known; it might be the oldest surviving narrative in the world, certainly much older than both Homer and the Bible. It tells the story of Gilgamesh, King of Ur, and his quest for immortality (plus lots of sex and violence). The Epic of Gilgamesh has the original version of the biblical Flood story, a variant of Eden, a serpent who steals the tree of life, and other features that clearly show at least some of the Bible’s early books are retellings of Mesopotamian myths. But before you get to all these pre-biblical references, in the first sections of the epic you have to read piles of erotica and adventure. Bummer.

24. The Cthulhu Mythos stories of HP Lovecraft. I find Lovecraft’s stories hard to read these days because of their extreme style, but you can’t go to your grave without having read them, especially not if you’re likely to be buried anywhere near Arkham, in which case your corpse may be eaten, reanimated, or parts re-used by some insane scholar who’s glimpsed the darkness behind reality.

25. The Crying Of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow is his really famous book, but I think The Crying Of Lot 49 is more fun. I love the conspiracy to subvert the US Postal Service.

26. Doctor Mirabilis - James Blish. How do you write a for-real genius as a believable character? Blish shows us how with his fictionalized bio of mediaeval scientist Roger Bacon.

27. Tik Tok - John Sladek. When nice robots go bad.

NaNoWriMo

Uh oh...I'm about to express an opinion.

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel starting 1st November and finishing by 30th November.

50,000 words divided by 30 days = 1,666 words a day, and that's just for the first draft! I don't know how it works in your world, but in mine, the ms doesn't even begin to look like a readable book until revision number 7 or so. Is anyone up for 10,000 words a day? No, I thought not.

The best you could hope for from NaNoWriMo is a rough first draft. Even the NaNoWriMo web site agrees quality prose is not the objective. The objective is sheer volume.

I just don't get this. Doesn't the world already have enough unfinished first drafts?

A number of people whose opinion I respect a great deal, a number of serious publishing professionals even, who know more about writing than I ever will, think NaNoWriMo is a great idea. Obviously they're right and and I'm wrong, but I still don't get it.

The logic goes that people who otherwise don't have the time or the self-motivation to write a book will do it in November, because NaNoWriMo delivers seering embarrassment to anyone who misses their publicly avowed target.

Alright, I get that.

But what happens on 1st December? Does the writing stop dead because the whipping stopped? Does the urgent need to buy Christmas presents make the writer put the ms away for just a few days?

You bet it does.

Worst of all, my guess is an awful lot of those unfinished drafts are not going to be recoverable with revision even if someone takes the time, because the plotting has been rushed and bad habits have probably been reinforced.

I'm going to delve into self-help guidance...something for which I am entirely unsuited. Here is Gary's Guide To Finishing The Damned Book, and you don't need NaNoWriMo to do it; this system works every month of the year.

Step 1: Write a thousand words a day. Every day. Without fail. No excuses.

You are not permitted to go to bed until you do. This probably means you're going to be up very late, but that's your problem for not being efficient. You can write any rubbish you like to make your wordcount, but eventually you're going to get sick of writing The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog and write something useful instead.

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to hit your daily target.

Step 2: Repeat Step 1 until you've finished the draft.

If you want to stop and change bits on the way that's fine. See step 3 for the rules for revision.

Step 3: Same target applies for revision. A thousand words a day.

You think this is too easy a target? You poor fool! A thousand words of revision takes longer than writing them fresh. At least, it does if you're me. Note that revising a thousand words is not the same as reading them.

The good news is, as revisions iterate, they go faster because scenes stabilize and are locked in.

Step 4: Repeat Step 3 until you are certifiably insane and/or sell the book.


That's it! This is the system I use, and it has caused me to finish three novels. One rotten, one with some good bits, and one that's actually quite good. I should be writing number four instead of doing this blog, but that merely means I'll be up until later to make my target.

Getting behind the scenes at the British Museum

Hidden deep inside the British Museum are staff with PhDs in history, archeology etc. They're the ones who put the things in the public display cases.

The professionals who know what they're talking about lurk within rooms behind locked doors. If you'd like to meet them, do what I did: walk up to the information desk at the front of the atrium and say something like, "Could you please direct me to everything you have from the Aegean island of Samos, dated 520 B.C. plus or minus ten years?" (Choose your own exotic question here, but mine worked.)

The nice lady at the information desk smiled and did her best with what for her probably amounted to Mission Impossible, though as she put it, my request was more interesting than telling people where to find the toilets. After ten minutes she gave up and said, "You need to talk to the Study Group." The capital S and G were clear in her tone. She picked up the phone and arranged an appointment for me to see the duty officer in Greek and Roman Antiquities.

She directed me to an obscure, anonymous, locked door at the end of a long wing. There isn't a secret knock, but it feels like there should be. Instead, I rang the bell, and after explaining the purpose of my existence was let inside.

I had some fun trying to explain why I was there. "I'm writing the second book in a series of historical mysteries, and my hero, who happens to be the elder brother of Socrates...yes, I know he had no known siblings, that's why it's called fiction...is on a mission for Pericles when he discovers..." Eyes glaze over as I disclose the devious plot. I won't tell you what Nicolaos discovers, 'cause that would be spoiler city, but the nice man at the BM knows. "...so for historical accuracy I need to look at anything you might have from Samos circa 520 B.C. or thereabouts."

Here's how the system works. The BM holds an awful lot of stuff in storage. If you have a decent reason for wanting to see something, and if a responsible adult from a recognized university or museum is willing to write a note certifying you're not prone to dropping delicate 2,500 year old ceramics, then with a week's written notice they will (for free!) have someone pull what you want out of storage and send it to one of their three study rooms deep within the inner bowels. There you get to study whatever it is you requested, in person, without any glass cabinet in the way. Very cool, and a phenomenal service.

Gary finds The Horse!

I went to the British Museum today, with the express purpose of absorbing every item in there dated between 480B.C. and 440B.C. in the Greek section.

Why the tight restriction? Because my first novel of detective Nicolaos in Classical Athens opens in 460B.C.

You'd think that'd narrow the scope to a managable level, wouldn't you? But I left with only 223 photos because I couldn't fit more in the camera at high resolution, and there are still things I haven't seen properly.

After I gave up trying to squeeze more bits into the camera, I wandered through the nearby section on the Hellenistic Period, which can't help my stories but is fun. That's a time from about 320B.C. onwards, long after the fall of the Athenian Empire, when greek culture had spread everywhere. The Hellenistic Period is all very interesting, but by then my characters have been shades in Hades for at least eighty years.

So there I am wandering about, when I come to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (as you do). I pass by most of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus until I stop dead at the sight of The Horse.

Only the forepart has survived, but this thing is huge. I'm 6' 3", and I wouldn't make it halfway up the neck. The statue is about four times larger than a real horse.

What got me so excited is that a super-sized marble statue of a horse plays a prominent part in one of my scenes, and this beastie is precisely like the one I imagined for the book. Even the size is right for what I wanted.

Now the question I'm asking myself is, did I invent my horse statue from whole cloth, or did I subconsciously insert this one from my memory? I've been through the BM plenty of times before. I know I've seen this statue before, but I don't remember it!

Gary meets Andrew Grant!

You may not have heard of UK thriller author Andrew Grant, but that's only because his first book has yet to appear in stores. Next year, when it does, you'll know it.

Here's how good he is: when he sent round queries looking for a literary agent, an amazing 80% offered to represent him. Most unrepresented writers would kill for a 1% yes rate. When his agent went out with his ms, six publishers wanted his book.

To top it off, he's an extremely nice guy. It's just not fair.

That's Andrew on the left...the good looking one.

Andrew and I met for dinner while I was in London. The topics of conversation were writing, writing, and writing: the joys of writing a second novel, self-promotion, the care and feeding of one's agent, and our mutual writing histories, which have some remarkable similarities despite our different backgrounds. We both reached a point (I will forbear from the term midlife crisis) where we both decided that this was it, rearranged our lives, and wrote a book. Where we differ is that he has a publication date, and a deadline for his second ms.

Stay tuned for EVEN, the first of the David Trevellyan books by Andrew Gant.