December meme

nathskywalker asked: If you read, then what are your favorite books? Are your tastes in reading similar to your tastes in other media or not at all? If you don't read, then why is that so?

Ooh. Well now. To be short here, the answer is "fantasy" but there's a bit more to it than that.

My reading as a kid was mostly animal stories. Particularly ones where the animals talked and were characters in their own right - I remember having a few horse/pony stories, but those didn't engage me as much as Watership Down, which I probably read at a way younger age than I was supposed to. That's still one of the books I re-read frequently. From there, I moved onto Redwall after a classmate recced it, and that got me into straight up fantasy. I don't read Redwall anymore, but those books were my childhood and were filled with so many things to love. I think they were one of the things that got me into fantasy mapping, too.

So I read a lot of that, but the weird thing is, despite the fact that fantasy is my genre of choice, I don't read an awful lot of it anymore. So much of it just... bored me. I used to think it was the same-y settings, and in a way it was. I wanted beautiful, otherworldly places, not mud and medieval Europe. But I think a lot of it is that most fantasy protagonists just don't do anything for me. So many of them seemed to be the sort of guy you're meant to root for because he's the main character, and beyond that there isn't much to say about them. It's something I've tried to avoid in Manifestations - I want you to know and love the characters, and if you do, that's my job done. I admit to a lot of mud and (very)pseudo-medieval European settings, but that ended up being a conscious choice - I tried more fantastical settings and people complained that they were too complicated, so this time I'm starting generic and moving up to something a bit more interesting.

Well, that's my excuse, anyway.

So I think overall I'm the sort of person who likes to read, but I've been turned off by so many crap novels that I don't read as much as I'd like to admit. Most of my reading these days is Pratchett because I know I'll get a good story and characters I can enjoy out of his work - with anyone else I won't normally touch it unless I have a good rec from somewhere. Which is sad, because I miss the days of poking around bookshops and looking at the fantasy/sci-fi section thinking how cool they all look. Thankfully there's always the internet, and I've diverged a lot thanks to fic and places like runaway_tales - the latter has actually gotten me reading some modern day, non-fantasy work, which I wouldn't have thought of until a few years ago.

I must admit my tastes are still firmly rooted in fantasy, and failing that anything with a non-everyday setting, but to be honest, I think the deciding factor is strong, likable characters you can take with you after the book's closed. And, I think, a dab of humour. The story doesn't have to be a full-blown comedy, but I find that stories where nothing funny ever happens, even characters exchanging amusing one-liners, falls flat. When I write MFS, for example, the storyline is serious, but the characters have senses of humour because they feel more real to me that way. I think if I've made you laugh, that's half my job done.

As for my favourite book in the whole world, it's a three way tie between Watership Down, Good Omens (the one book that I re-read religiously each year), and the entire Discworld series because I can't pick just one and there's never been a Discworld book I didn't like.

Ask me a question! I have plenty of dates left.