Author Crush

I have a thing for not-so-great sci-fi/fantasy genre movies. I know that they're mostly not great -- in fact, I usually know before I watch them that they're not going to be super-great -- but I generally enjoy them*. I tend to Netflix anything that comes out in that genre, and about a year ago, I got Stardust. It wasn't spectacular, but it was okay, and it had a feel about it almost as if the movie had got in the way of the storytelling. Also, I had heard good things over the years about this Neil Gaiman fellow who wrote it, so I was really interested in seeing if the prose version was better than the movie version.

So I picked up a copy of the paperback, and it was pretty darn good. I went ahead and grabbed a copy of Neverwhere, another Gaiman novel, and it was even better. The third Gaiman novel I read was Anansi Boys, and after that, I was well and truly hooked (American Gods is phenomenal. If you read nothing else by Gaiman, you should read that.). The entire time I was reading Anansi Boys I felt like I was sitting in a pub with Gaiman and maybe two or three of our closest friends, and he was just telling us this story about this guy he knows. Which is a pretty amazing feeling to carry for an entire 400-plus page book.

Those of you who know me will know that I tend to go on jags: when I find an author/tv show/actor/food that I like, I binge on as much as I can get ahold of as quickly as I can. I couldn't figure out why I hadn't hit on Gaiman before: he writes in a genre I like to read; he's both prolific and famous; he writes quite long novels (this is important to me when I buy books, as I read quite quickly and like to get as much bang for my book-dollar as possible); and I was almost certain I'd read something by him before.

Turns out that for the past decade or so, I've avoided him because I confused him with another famous, prolific, long-winded genre writer named Neil (or rather, Neal**) who is also, in fact, quite a good author, but just not as much pure fun to read as Gaiman in my opinion.

And not only have I been enjoying Gaiman's prose, but he has thrown open the door to a type of literature which I've largely ignored most of my life: the comic book/graphic novel. I think mostly I ignored comics when I was a kid because they were short (see above re: reading quickly). I had read a few here and there and was familiar with the basic stories of the bigger names (Batman, Superman, Spider Man, etc.), but really had no interest in getting into comics at all.

Then a couple of years ago I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and that really made me want to read comics. Then I did read a few, and I didn't want to read them any more (okay, it was The Watchmen. I hated it. It was just...ugly. And, I think, not that interesting for someone not terrifically invested in the whole superhero paradigm. But I digress.). Kit brought home the Runaways books, and those were pretty good, but not enough to really make me want to go out and buy graphic novels for myself.

But once I got hooked on Gaiman, and made my way through all of his available prose, I needed a fix. I picked up The Facts in The Case of the Departure of Miss Finch which is both beautiful and well-written. After that I flipped through the first Sandman book, which I liked but didn't love because of the colors (the writing is pretty magnificent, though). Then I found out that the big collector's editions have been re-colored and are much prettier, so I'm picking up those as I get the really good (40% off) coupons from Barnes and Noble. And then there was Marvel 1602, which is absolutely gorgeous, incredibly creative, and lots of fun to read. Since then I've branched out into the Miller Dark Knight books (thanks, Kit, for getting me the first ones for Christmas) and have the Buffy Season Eight books ready to read, too.

Finally, Neil Gaiman writes this blog. He posts pretty frequently about his own stuff, other people's stuff, stuff that's happening around the world, answers to emails people send him and so on, and like the rest of his writing it's tremendously fun to read. And it turns out that not only is he pretty cool, but he seems to have this sort of ring of coolness around him, so that everything he touches generates other cool stuff. For instance, he didn't even know about these when they started going out. And seriously, how cool is that? But the other day I learned about something while reading his blog that means that even if everything else he ever writes is complete crap (unlikely), I will always love him a little bit: one of his early works is a biography of Duran Duran.

Duran Duran was my favorite band when I was a teenager, and remains to this day the only band I can name all of the members of off the top of my head. They were completely cheesy and I loved them so, so much. Copies of the Gaiman biography seem to be pretty dear, but some day when I have some disposable income again, I'm going to buy one for myself.

So anyway, that's what I've been reading lately.

*Two notable recent exceptions: Wanted, which is dumbfoundingly stupid, and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale which has been on cable every day for the past two months and is so awful I can't manage to sit through more than five minutes of it at a time.

**Stephenson

posted by Laura Y. @ 5:55 PM