Growing up in California, I was always told that my home state didn’t have seasons. I knew that wasn’t true. California, especially the Central Coast where I spent my childhood, has seasons that can largely be determined by the color of the hills. Roughly, the three seasons are when the hills are green, when they’re yellow-brown, and when they’re orange and smoking.
Still, here in a more northerly city, the changes in seasons are more dramatic, with flowers in spring, red leaves in fall, and even a scattering of snow in winter, on occasion. And autumn in Seattle is a special time. People claim that summer is the most beautiful season in my city. I admit that the clear blue skies, warm temperatures, and endless evenings have their charm. They certainly trick tourists who visit in July, all of whom are confused that they don’t need an umbrella or a rain jacket.
(Side note: carrying an umbrella, especially for only slight rains, is one of the most telling signs that you’re a tourist in Seattle. The only more obvious indicator that you’re not from here is calling it “Pike’s Place Market”.)
But in my opinion, Seattle is at its most beautiful in the rain. With the sharp edges of the world blurry and smeared by mist and rainfall, the streetlights reflected in puddles, the subdued colors… it may not be the sort of weather that gets put on the postcards, but it’s ours. And when the clouds crack and kindle the red and gold and green trees into bright fire… it’s enough to make you think this place is magical.
Autumn is the perfect time for spookums and spectres. It’s a time for leather jackets and big boots. It’s a season for sitting inside a cafe with a nice beverage and a book, staring out the window and thinking about death. Since all of these things are my favorite, it stands to reason that fall is as well.
Plus, this fall feels especially charged with meaning in Seattle. There’s a mayoral election, and to the shock and delight of many in the city, the Mariners are one game away from the World Series. They say autumn is the dying time of year, but somehow everything feels more alive than ever.
People like me keep on writing books, and the publishing industry still views fiction as a profitable enterprise (for now), so there’s an inexhaustible supply of reading material for us all. The amount of new stories means that I can literally never run out of books in my lifetime. Still, I’m the sort of person who rereads books. If there’s a story I enjoy, I love experiencing it again. Sometimes this exercise is nostalgic, like the comfort of coming home. Or, like Bilbo coming back to the Shire in The Hobbit, I come back to an old favorite to learn that I’m the one who has changed.
Currently, I’m rereading the entirety of the Elric series by Michael Moorcock, in the gorgeous Saga Press hardcover omnibuses that got put out a few years back. It’s perhaps impossible to exaggerate how important the Elric books were to me as an impressionable teenager. The saga of a sorcerous emperor, slayer of his kin and marked as an outcast by the fact of his albinism, utterly dependent on his demonic sword and controlled by a doomed destiny… let’s just say that the character was like crack for an angsty young man with Very Big Feelings™. I wasn’t alone. The Elric stories, and Moorcock’s work more generally, were so influential to sixty years of writers that it’s sometimes hard to tell in hindsight just how influential they were. I feel like they’re like the Amber books by Roger Zelazny in that regard. There are plenty of similarities between the Elric and Amber stories as well: the multiversal travel and the somewhat ironic tone is part of the appeal of both.
Someday I might want to do a series of blog posts about rereading the Elric books, like the reread blogs that Jo Walton had collected in Why This Book Is So Great. I’ve got a lot of plans for this website in general, though, so it might take a little while before I get to those.
At the same time, since I can never read just one book at once, I’ve been reading a lot of Haruki Murakami as well. I started by plowing through the entirety of 1Q84 over the course of a visit my best friend in Boston (another reread book that I hadn’t dipped into in over a decade), then picking up Novelist as a Vocation at the Kinokuniya in the International District, along with other works like Killing Commendatore,After Dark, and the short stories in First Person Singular. I really enjoyed the essays in Novelist as a Vocation, by the way.
I especially liked the story about how Murakami decided to become a writer. He was at a baseball game at Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, at the Yakult Swallows’ season opener. The leadoff batter in the bottom of the first hit a double into left field, and as it dropped, Murakami suddenly thought, I think I can write a novel. That night, he stopped at a bookstore in Shinjuku on the way home and bought a pad of notebook paper and a ¥2000 fountain pen, and over the course of the rest of the baseball season, he sat at his kitchen table and wrote Hear the Wind Sing.
That’s the secret. It really isn’t complicated to write a novel. You don’t need an MFA or divine inspiration or anything like that. You need an idea, the persistence to work consistently, and something to write on. It’s that simple, and that hard, at the same time.
Going back to the fantasy genre, I recently read R.R. Virdi’s The First Binding and really enjoyed it. I would basically pitch it as a South Asian Name of the Wind. And when I say it’s like Name of the Wind, I mean it’s really like Name of the Wind. It has a frame story, a talented, determined underdog hero, and more than that, many of the plot details follow Rothfuss’s work to the degree that it can’t be up to coincidence.
Still, even with all these parallels, I had a lot of fun with The First Binding. Talking of further blog posts, I want to write something about how originality in fiction is a vastly overrated virtue. The ability to come up with original ideas is far less valuable than being able to tell a story convincingly and compellingly. Besides, Shakespeare only came up with one original plot in his life, and people don’t talk shit about Shakespeare being unoriginal, do they?
Anyway, that’s a sampling of what books have been in my backpack in the last few weeks. Anyone else enjoying some stories? Anything you’d recommend?
~ Ian (listening to Cartoon Darkness by Amyl and the Sniffers)
