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A book everyone should read at least once.

Oh, man. I thought for a moment this would be a hard call, but it really isn’t. The book I think everyone should read at least once is The Gift of Fear. I picked it partly because it’s got lots of good self-defense type tips (like, how to listen to your fear to best make use of its warning signals), but mostly because it does more to explain to people how different our culture is for men and women. I blogged about it with a huge quote here.

There’s one sentence in the book I always quote that talks about this: “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.”

Wow, that’s way heavier than the tone I usually aim for here, sorry ’bout that. Add the book to your mental reading queue, and put on some good rock’n’roll. Have a great weekend!

Least favorite plot device employed by way too many books you actually enjoyed otherwise.

For me, I think it’s probably the artificially-constrained superpowerful character. Like, say, Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. Or Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books. Or Elric of Melniboné. It’s like the author wants to have a total badass but can’t figure out how to make the bad guy strong enough to create conflict. If the book is awesome, I don’t mind (and in some cases will actively argue that it’s okay) but when I look at it as a pure trope, it pisses me off. Like, a lot.

Favorite book of your favorite series.

Hah, I actually already mentioned that! It’s Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett. The book is a marvelous fantasy, both using and mocking familiar tropes (the heroic orphan who turns out to be of noble birth, the stalwart good guy who won’t bend the rules even a bit, the villainous fellow who wears all black and has a small furry pet [usually a cat, but in Lord Vetinari’s case it’s a small, elderly dog], etc). This is the first of the Night Watch of Ankh-Morpork books and the first time we meet Sam Vimes, who starts out as an alcoholic loser and winds up repeatedly saving the city and rising to become one of its most prominent citizens over the course of a handful of books.

There is a secret society, dragons (both the big noble ones and cute little ones who ride on rich folks’ shoulders… and sometimes explode), mysterious goings-on, politicking, and heaps and heaps of awesome. I usually refer people to Guards! Guards! when they ask me which Discworld book to read first, that’s how awesome it is.

Your favorite book or series ever.

This one sprang to my mind immediately: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Those books have everything — satire, tragedy, comedy, drama, romance, religion, philosophy… it’s not surprising, considering how many books there are in the series (something like 38 books total as of this writing, if you include the five young adult novels. Plus there are all the related books, like The Science of Discworld!).

I first stumbled across Equal Rites, the third book in the series, when I was fairly young. I found it at the library, read it, liked it, but totally failed to see if there were any other books. I rediscovered the series when I was in England as an exchange student in college, starting with Guards! Guards!, and devoured the books, purchasing all the ones that were out at the time (24) in their surreal UK covers. I fell in love with Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of the city where many of the novels take place, and found the other characters either endearing or fascinatingly horrible.

I continue to be grateful that the first books I read were Equal Rites and Guards! Guards! because boy howdy, the first two books are a poor representation of what the rest of the series is like. They’re basically straightforward parodies of the fantasy genre, and packed with bad jokes and so-so writing. As the series has gone on, however, Pratchett’s writing has gained considerable skill and depth. His latest books are even starting to leave comedy behind and seem to prioritize looking seriously at their central themes over simple entertainment.

Every time a new book comes out, I almost always wind up rereading the entire series. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read Guards! Guards!, which continues to be my favorite of them all.

It’s impossible to do justice to the series in a single, brief blog post, so I won’t try. I’ll just say, if you enjoy comedy, fantasy, and intelligent writing and haven’t read any Discworld novels, you are missing out. They’re not everyone’s cup of tea (I know some perfectly wonderful people who don’t like them), but if they are your sort of thing, you will adore them.