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What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton
Published by Corsair, January 2014.
ISBN: 9781472111609
448 pages
Review by Mark Yon
The subtitle of this book is ‘Re-reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy’, which could be where we leave this review as it summarises Jo’s book nicely. In short, What Makes This Book So Great is a selected collection (about a fifth of her total output) of Jo’s blog posts on the Tor.com website. As such, they are an interesting take on the genre from the perspective of the 21st century.
The posts are here in chronological order, from July 15 2008 to February 25 2011, 129 reviews in total. The 130th essay is written for this book, an examination of the conversation of the term ‘literary criticism’ and whether Jo classes herself as a ‘critic’. There is also an introduction especially written in July 2011 for this book version.
Most of the comments are fairly short, three pages or so. The style is, as Jo says in her Introduction, ‘inherently conversational and interactive – they were written in dialogue with each other and also with the people reading and commenting’. So sometimes they do connect with each other, or mention ideas already mentioned in earlier posts.
It’s not a bad selection. I have a feeling that readers will want to go read more on the website once they’ve finished here.
Of the selection here, there’s a lot of fun to be had. The first essay sets out the stall with the title ‘Why I Re-read’. It makes a good case for re-reading, and I found myself pretty much agreeing with what was said. The idea of the joy and perils of re-reading pops up in a couple of places elsewhere in the collection, as Jo explains ‘The Suck Fairy’ (what happens when you re-read an old favourite and it doesn’t quite match what you remembered) and the re-readability factor, when sometimes you just have to reread an old favourite, as a guilty pleasure, despite the wealth of riches out there.
The book is peppered with such ideas throughout: whether you should skim books, whether swearing in genre books is a good idea or not, why the anticipation of an unfinished series is sometimes a joy, or indeed why you should enjoy the feeling you can get when you start the first of what will be a long series, or the first of an author’s lengthy body of works. There’s even a case put forward to re-read books you didn’t like.
Whilst not all the reviews here are re-reads, many of the reviews made me want to go and read the books again: from Issac Asimov’s The End of Eternity to Arthur C Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night, from Heinlein’s dystopic juveniles (which I’m in the process of re-reading through) to John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting.
It’s also a highly personal selection. It’s obvious Jo has favourites – much of Robert Heinlein’s work, the Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan books, Steven Brust’s series all appear repeatedly here. However, what makes these essays work is that the comments are not the gushing, totally awestruck ramblings of a fangirl – indeed, at times, they are quite cutting – but they are always thoughtful, generally insightful and usually well considered. They are, in summary, the sort of comments that you can only make when you’ve been reading this stuff for years.
Whilst Jo is clear on her personal likes and dislikes, she is quite happy to disclose the relative randomness of her likes and dislikes – she loves George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series (or at least up to book four), but hasn’t read past the first book of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, for example, all of which add to the fun of the book. There’s even the odd non-genre book – George Eliot’s fictional Middlemarch, (although its relevance to SF and Fantasy here is explained) and Francis Spufford’s non-fictional Backroom Boys, about the clandestine development of Atomic Age aircraft in the 1950’s, which were, no doubt, the inspiration for many a space rocket in the 1950’s and 60’s.
There’s much to enjoy here, but what I think I enjoyed most were the books that I haven’t read, but am going to now, based on these recommendations – Constantine Fitzgibbon’s When the Kissing Had to Stop, John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless. Neither of these I had heard of before this book, but both of which I will now search out (when I’ve finished re-reading these other books first…)
On the negative side, an index of some sort would have been useful for referencing, something which would have made writing this review easier! There are also parts of Jo’s blog I’d have like to have seen here – her critical summary of each year’s Hugo Awards nominees and winners, for example, even when I haven’t always agreed with her choices – but I guess there’s room here for another later edition – a What Makes These Books Also Great, if you like.
And they are still all online (for the moment, at least).
In summary, this is a nicely eclectic, well considered essay collection that a reader can spend a few hours dipping into and following up on. It’s a great primer for someone who wants to know why we like SF & Fantasy, as well as provide books to try. It should lead the reader to many happy discoveries, or at least return to old favourites.
Mark Yon, January 2014
I’m reading this and I really enjoy Jo Walton’s writing. She loves reading so much and has always something interesting to say about the books she reads… She is such a fast reader that reading all the books I would like to read after seeing these essays would be impossible for me.