#blackprose

*waves*Hey there - thanks so much for this ask, it’s something I relish being asked because there’s nothing I like more than talking about my favourite books ;)

First off I’m still super flattered you enjoy my writing so much! I have a long way to go before reaching the calibre of those I look up to, but with more practice, and wider reading, there’s always the chance, haha.

Blasphemy? Never!

So: books and authors I adore.

Right up at the top we have to have Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Mantel’s prose is absolutely exquisite, and she’s one of the most enjoyable authors around. Wolf Hall is the first in a fantastic trilogy covering the rise of Thomas Cromwell to power in Tudor England, but honestly, Mantel could write about de-greasing a kitchen sink and the prose would be so damn delightful I’d read it and weep. Here, we have a hefty tome that is, essentially, a history book, and the most stunning thing is that she’s reconstructed as much as possible of the events and scenery as was at the time of the Tudors. She really got inside Cromwell’s head to write this book, and he’s such an interesting character. We often hear of the Henry VIII story from either Henry’s point of view, or those of his wives (particularly Anne Boleyn). But this, now, this comes from the unexpected track. Born to commonfolk in a small London suburb, Cromwell was never meant to gain entry into the inner circles of the English Court, and yet he ended up influencing the political and religious direction of an entire nation. This is a fantastic character study of a shrewd, down-to-earth, ambitious man, who is at once a man of the people and yet so hard to fathom. Damn, just talking about it makes me want to read it again.

Filth, by Irvine Welsh, is a mainstay of mine. It’s written entirely in Scots dialect, so if you’ve not the background, you may need a translator. But Filth, like all Welsh’s novels, is amazing in its characterisation. It deals with an ordinary policeman in Edinburgh, Bruce Robertson, who, we slowly come to realise over the course of the novel, is completely morally corrupt. And it starts out with little things. Little, ‘oh, he’s probably being a bit of a jerk’ things. Little redeemable things. And since it’s all from his point of view, you’re along with him for the ride. Having a villain as the main character, first-person, and having the rabbit hole be such a subtle slip, does interesting things to your brain, to the point where, as a reader, you almost start waving away some of his actions, and part of it’s due to the sort of language Welsh employs. I love this fact, because you see how easy it is for people who do terrible things to get away with it. To make you want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Just in case they can be redeemed. There is also a hefty dose of psychological horror and existentialism, with a side order of magical realism as the tapeworm that lives in Bruce Robertson’s gut starts talking to him. The further he gets down the rabbit hole, the worse his mental health becomes. And, of course, this is Irvine Welsh we’re talking about, and I don’t think there’s even enough tags on AO3 to warn you of all the horrors this book contains within.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, has been one of the biggest influences on my writing style. McCarthy has an incredibly unique style. It’s bare-bones writing - he need not spell out anything for the reader, and this goes to the point where he doesn’t even use speech marks to delineate conversation. The structure of the writing alone is so flawless that you don’t even need it. It’s an exercise in creating a stark, vivid post-apocalyptic world with the bare minimum of ingredients. Word choice, sentence structure, emotion. His style really isn’t for everyone, but it is so clever and utterly delicious. I read the entire thing on the verge of tears, I was so worried for the kid in the story.

Amrita, by Banana Yoshimoto, is actually not Yoshimoto’s best work in terms of style (her short story collections Sleep and Kitchen are better), but it’s such a work of art that it stands as my favourite of hers. It’s about a young woman who wakes up after being in a coma, having lost certain parts of her memory. There’s a sister who died, a younger brother with problems of the parapsychological variety, and a healthy dose of magical realism. It’s all washed over with this serene sense of nostalgia and anticipation, and on every page I felt like I was on the brink of an entirely other world, that I could just look at the world slightly differently, and it would shift.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami, is an experimental masterpiece. I love the fact that I basically read the entire thing and it was so well-written I didn’t even question the fact that nobody in the novel has names. That’s right, nobody’s name is mentioned even once. And there’s at least a dozen characters. This is an outstanding book that influenced anime creator Yoshitoshi ABe (creator of Serial Experiments Lain, and Haibane Renmei), and it’s utterly fantastical and out there and thought-provoking, which is not what one might necessarily think for a novel that opens with a man musing at great length about what sort of sofa is best to sit upon.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell (no, not the comedian, the other one), is also experimental in nature, and is sublime in the way it packages up its stories. Mitchell has an immense amount of talent; there are multiple plotlines that spans centuries and he is somehow able to write convincingly well in each genre style, from nineteenth-century colonial memoirs to ‘70′s crime drama to futuristic post-apocalyptic fiction. I read a lot of ship logs from century-old expeditions, and the segment The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing is absolutely spot-on. There’s real beauty in this book, and please, for the love of god, read the book rather than watch the film, because beautiful as the film is, it does not come close to capturing that sense of wonder that the book does.

Dune, by Frank Herbert, has to be up here because not only is Dune a fantastic example of eco-fiction, but Herbert breaks the cardinal rule of not having more than one point of view in a paragraph and somehow I still love him. Conventionally, I prefer sticking to a single point of view in an entire scene, because otherwise the narrative is messy, and not in a fun way, more in a kind of sticks-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth-like-mashed-potato kind of way. Bleh. However, Herbert routinely switches perspective in the same scene, sometimes during the same paragraph, and occasionally during the same sentence. He’s pretty much the only writer I can stand who does this (barring Stephen King on the odd occasion) and it’s mainly because one of the principal themes in Dune is the use of Bene Gesserit magic, which is a glorified way of saying ‘using psychological warfare on others’. Words are a weapon, and it’s imperative to the plot of the story that the reader sees the effect of these words on the characters’ mental states. So yeah, it’s meant to be a sci-fi eco-warrior novel, but it ends up immensely psychological. And that is a very worthwhile read.

@pansexualtrash ‘s fics! I just, fell HARD for this ship! Then I read everything I could about them. I hadn’t even finished all of the routes in the game, and knew very little about Unknown/Saeran. But, I just haven’t looked back since! After I finished the secret endings, my brain just burst with ideas and I had to write them. Now, it’s pretty much all I write! LOL

Day 4/April Challenge