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We always think what we want is the end of the story. We wait anxiously for the next installment, biting our nails and plaguing storytellers to let us know what happens next.

Sometimes we are given the end of the story. Maybe the budget is cut. Maybe the storyteller recognizes the end and has the discipline to finish it. Perhaps the ending was planned from the start. Whatever the reason, we find ourselves sliding through the denouement and gently deposited at the final page, the last paragraph, the happily (or not so) ever after.

There is a satisfaction in knowing the end of the story. All the truly great stories end.

When it comes to those great stories, the ones that capture our imaginations and hearts, there are two types of storytellers: the artists, and the merely talented. Where you discover what type you are dealing with is at the story’s end.

The talented storyteller ends the story in a timely fashion, draws all the threads together, and knots them. We smile as we leave the theater or close the book; at last, the final battle has been fought, the lovers united, the epilogue complete.

The artist, however, cheats. We reach the final page and discover that although the storyteller is finished, the story has not ended. Instead it lives on in our imaginations. The world or the characters – often both – haunt us. We take the story and play out possible futures in our heads; we make our own stories.

This is the difference between good and great, talented and true artist. Whatever we think we want, it isn’t for the story to end. It is for the storyteller to finish telling their part of the story in a way that encourages us to take up the story for ourselves and make it a part of our lives.

Harry Potter was an excellent story. It captured the imaginations of millions of people and led them on a journey spanning books and years. Yet at the end of the seventh book, J.K. Rowling revealed that while she is extremely talented, she is not an artist. All the threads were tied up. We were given a world in which the relationships have played out as we expected them to, and the future (the children) is merely a repetition of the story we just completed. The epilogue shuts down our imagination, closes off the imaginative space that existed while the ending was still in doubt, and leaves us with a really good story that is, unfortunately, not our story. Perhaps with time J.K. Rowling will become an artist (I hope so; with her talent and reach she could be great in ways most storytellers can’t even fantasize about), but the ending of her first story revealed her as merely talented.

In contrast, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (available on Amazon or Kindle) is the work of an artist. Like Harry Potter, The Graveyard Book is about a special boy who lives in a fantasy world hidden within our own, but where Rowling’s ending revealed that she had not reached her potential, Gaiman’s shows the artistry of a practiced master. When I finished The Graveyard Book I was delighted to find that it hadn’t actually ended; Gaiman had instead passed the story on to me and for several minutes I savored the feeling of Nobody Owens’ tale continuing to unfold in my imagination.

I wish that more storytellers aspired to tell stories like The Graveyard Book, that fewer people gave in to the temptation to extend their story indefinitely or end them so finally that the reader’s imaginative space is locked away. In my perfect world, all storytellers would both understand that the true magic of a story occurs when they let it free for their audience to take up and consciously strive to achieve such that level of artistry.

We don’t live in a perfect world. But fortunately, we do have Neil Gaiman and The Graveyard Book.

XKCD presents fantasy in a nutshell:

From the science fiction landing page in the Amazon Kindle store (this was right at the top):

I’m always so glad when I can spend $8.00 rather than $0.75.

Whoever at Amazon approved that section is an idiot. Plus at least one of those books is available from Feedbooks for free (always check for a free version before you buy a classic).

Sometimes I wonder why more publishers aren’t gunning to get their author’s books onto the Kindle. And sometimes I don’t.

Ever since I read Dragon Bones and Dragon Blood I’ve been slowly working my way through Patricia Briggs’ body of work. I’ve finally read everything that’s readily available on the Kindle (the first book in her first series is unfortunately not on Kindle, or anywhere else that I can find), and it’s safe to say that Patricia Briggs is one of my absolutely favorite authors. Here’s why:

• She writes excellent fantasy, every time. There’s lots of really bad fantasy out there. Ever since the runaway success of Harry Potter, publishers have been pouring money into making crappy fantasy look worth buying. Briggs is consistently excellent and sometimes edges into outstanding. I really value an author whose books I can buy without worrying whether I’m in for a disappointment.
• She writes realistic fantasy. Too many authors forget how fragile human bodies are. In Briggs’ novels, villains don’t waste time monologuing; they kill the people they want dead. Injuries matter. Heroes sometimes win simply by surviving long enough for the villain to bleed out. Sure, there’s magic and so forth, but Briggs keeps reality firmly out of Superman-ville where bullets can be shrugged aside and there’s no need to fear for the hero because you know in your gut that they’ll make it through unscathed.
• She writes fun, believable characters and moves beyond stereotypes. Briggs’ characters are quirky, believable, and no one is irredeemably evil or good. She also has a flair for capturing social interactions; her werewolf sub-culture is fascinating and feels utterly realistic (assuming there were a subset of people who could turn into wolves).
• The books in her series are self-contained and always a decent few hundred pages long. I am not impressed by people who write epics, to be perfectly honest. Granted, there are some amazingly good epics out there (I was recently captivated by Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy — Assassin’s Apprentice, etc.) but writing absolutely every detail is lazy in a lot of respects (aside from the challenge of keeping someone’s interest through every little detail). I am much more impressed by authors who can compress a worthwhile story into a digestible chunk without letting themselves go. Briggs does this without fail.

I really can’t recommend Patricia Briggs highly enough. This is definitely the kind of fantasy that I’d like to be able to write myself, and I greatly admire Briggs’ ability to write realistic fantasy that maintains the excitement and fun of more clichéd fantasy. But as much as I like blathering on about how great Briggs is, you probably are more interested in which book to pick up first. Here’s my thoughts on that:

• Moon Called is the first book in the Mercy Thompson series (currently three books long, a fourth on the way). This is urban fantasy of a sort (set in Kennewick, WA), and likely to have the broadest appeal of any of Briggs’ work. Although I love Dragon Bones, I think this might be my favorite group of Briggs books.
• Dragon Bones as I’ve noted before is an excellent book, and my recommendation if you’d like to try some of Briggs’ more traditional fantasy. Raven’s Shadow is her other traditional fantasy duology, but it isn’t as strong as the Hurog books.
• The Hob’s Bargain is a decent standalone traditional fantasy, but not really one to introduce you to Patricia Briggs. Read it after you’ve finished some of the other stuff and need your fix one way or another.
• Cry Wolf is Patricia Briggs’ newest novel set in the same world and with a number of the same characters as the Mercy Thompson novels, but it isn’t a good starting place for two reasons: first, you’ll want to have read at least the first Mercy Thompson book or the world won’t make enough sense to you; second, the book picks up after a novella and the beginning third or so throws you abruptly into a relationship between two people you don’t know all that well (unless you read the novella). Cry Wolf is excellent, of course, but it’s more geared toward people already loving Patricia Briggs.

So go read Briggs. I certainly am glad that I’ve discovered her, and I’m looking forward to her next books.

InterWorld (or the Kindle version, which is what I read) by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reeves was disappointing. It’s not bad; I’d characterize it as mediocre but harmed by my expectations for the authors. Gaiman and Reeves have imagined a very vivid world, but the pacing and characterization (particularly in the beginning) leave the whole thing a bit flat. The last half is actually a lot better than the first; this feels like the kind of book whose sequels (if there are any) will outshine the original because they won’t be burdened with exposition. I think the problem is that we don’t get eased into the action at all; if it were a graphic novel the abrupt shift from mundane reality into wild science-fantasy would probably work, but as a novel I was left wondering just why I was supposed to care about some of the characters (or believe the over-the-top settings).

Pretty disappointing for a Neil Gaiman novel (even if he was collaborating). I have not been impressed with much of Gaiman’s work since Anansi Boys, and even that wasn’t as good as its predecessors. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s one of those authors who has a brilliant early career but isn’t able to sustain it.

Almost exactly three weeks ago, I read MacInTouch’s fantastic Kindle review (thanks to Daring Fireball for linking to it) and it threw doubt on everything I had thought about the Kindle. When I first saw the device and read some other people’s opinions on it, my immediate impression was “eh, kind of cool but definitely not for me.” I simply love physical books too much; I’ve been collecting them since the first Scholastic ordering form was handed to me in grade school. I dream of someday living in a place where one room’s walls are nothing but bookshelves. I may not be a full-blown bibliophile haunting the local used bookstore with a crazed look in my eye, but I’m the next closest thing.

Aside from the MacInTouch review, there were two things that made me sit back and re-eavluate myself as a potential Kindle owner:

• After a mere seven months of living on my own with some expendable income, I am out of shelf space. Worse, I am out of space for new shelves. And since I need to move closer to the city center, my next apartment will likely be smaller rather than larger. Plus moving the shelves and books that I’ve amassed since I moved in is going to be a heinous bitch in and of itself.
• At the time, I had a four-day weekend in a cabin in the woods coming up, and for most of my life vacations have meant packing a bag full of books that I then have to lug around with me. I have never enjoyed this, but I read too quickly for one or two books slipped in my suitcase to suffice. Up to 200 books in a device that weighs 10.3 ounces was sounding pretty good (price notwithstanding).

Although it took some intense deliberation, Twittering, and Amazon review-reading, I ended up purchasing a Kindle in time to take it with me on my mini-vacation. I haven’t been that torn over an electronics purchase in years.

And having owned the device for about two and a half weeks now, including four days of hard-core stress-testing in a cabin in the mountains with no cell service or internet (reading inside, reading outside in the sun, reading in the car, reading in bed with few lights, reading for upwards of six hours straight), I have come to realize that buying a Kindle was a huge mistake.

In my first week of Kindle ownership, I read the equivalent of over 3,000 pages, to the detriment of sleep, work, and time with my girlfriend. I’ve been going to bed 1-2 hours later (and getting a corresponding 1-2 hours less sleep every night). I’ve spent in the neighborhood of $100-200 on ebooks (which, given how long I’ve owned it, means almost $100 a week). I’ve gone from checking email and RSS feeds regularly throughout the day to checking them once or twice every two days. Owning a Kindle has in short disrupted a wide range of my daily habits and routines by making it ludicrously easy to read anytime, anywhere, without effort.

Imagine handing a crack addict a $400 device that allows them to download cocaine directly into their brain. That is what owning a Kindle has been like. Although it does not provide the visceral pleasure of a well-designed hardback, it has allowed me to consummate my addiction to the written word in a way that nothing prior in my life has ever approached. Like MacInTouch I’ve found that what looked like a clumsy device in screenshots is actually a joy to use that has obviously received intense attention to its design.

In short, I’m hopelessly in love.

That isn’t to say that the Kindle is perfect, however. Although I’ve grown accustomed to it, the form factor is still something I’d love to see improved. Turning the page accidentally (particularly if I’ve briefly set the device down and am picking it up again) is all too easy. The refresh rate of the display, although fine for turning pages, is unwieldy and frustrating when it comes to looking up words, accessing the internet, or doing anything where only part of the screen needs to refresh. It is very difficult to, say, jump back ten “pages” to review what just happened.

I hope that these flaws are rectified in the next version of the Kindle (which likely isn’t on the immediate horizon), but even all of them combined aren’t enough to diminish my enjoyment of the device here and now. Partially this is because the Kindle is a fantastic and novel service rather than just a reading device. Partially it’s because the reading device is designed well enough that it fulfills its function with style and grace sufficient to outweigh its demerits.

But mostly it’s because my obsession with books is firmly grounded in a much stronger obsession with reading, and the Kindle makes obtaining and reading quality new material as easy as the turn of a page.

Voluminous, from developer Wooji Juice, is an interesting piece of software recently released for Mac OS 10.5. It has great things to say for itself:

The Internet is full of free books. But who has time to search for them? Let Voluminous bring the books to you. It finds, downloads and organises a vast library.

As best I can tell, this “vast library” is actually just Project Gutenberg (which is, admittedly, vast). In my opinion, this is a bit dishonest on Wooji Juice’s part (Project Gutenberg already has an easy search function, so the implication that Voluminous is doing loads of work the average citizen couldn’t by scouring a number of sources on the internet for books and consolidating them is suspect). It’s possible Voluminous is accessing more than just Project Gutenberg, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this; and that the help files and website don’t even mention Project Gutenberg smacks of dishonesty to me. I’d be a lot more impressed if the developers were upfront about what Voluminous is doing behind the scenes and played to its strengths: being more user-friendly and (this is a big one) not hideous. As it is, all the verbiage about saving you time is just marketing-speak shooting to take advantage of people who aren’t aware of the amazing resource that Project Gutenberg’s website represents. If all Voluminous is doing is downloading and parsing the GUTINDEX, shame on Wooji Juice.

Since the website was what I saw first, my first impression of the software was negative, but I downloaded it anyway for a closer look. I found that Wooji Juice may love the borderline marketing-speak, but they’ve still done some things extremely well:

Formatting the books. Project Gutenberg is a great project, but the actual book files are nothing you want to be reading because they are plain text and hideous. Voluminous’s greatest strength is that it makes the texts much more attractive. Sure, they aren’t like having a real book in your hands, but at least you don’t feel like clawing your eyes out while you try to read them. I would never consider downloading a book from Project Gutenberg to read (although I’ve used them for other things), but Voluminous helps make Gutenberg texts visually appealing and easier to read.

Attractive interface for searching and browsing. Voluminous has a great browsing interface. I love that while browsing, category headings (or authors, or whatever happens to be there) stick to the top of the screen, making it easy to keep track of what you’re looking at. Browsing by topic and the various searching capabilities are also very pleasant. This is a clear selling point of the software to my mind, because browsing and searching Project Gutenberg is not attractively designed at all (though entirely functional).

So at this point, despite the marketing-speak, Voluminous was looking pretty useful. Unfortunately, I then stumbled onto the program’s cons:

Text zoom is tied to window size. What the hell? I had thought there was no text zoom at all (bad enough), but then I tried to size the window down to get a more humane line length. I grabbed the resize dongle in the lower right corner, but the window wouldn’t move. Confused and alarmed, I dragged outwards, and as the window resized, the text zoomed in. This is a usability nightmare:

• Not only is it impossible to control line length (which is an important part of making it easy to scan along the lines), but users who need or want a larger font will have to have a correspondingly larger window/monitor.
• Two things that have no relationship to one another (the size of the window, and the size of the font) are now inextricably linked. Did I resize the window down because I wanted a smaller font? No, I resized it because I wanted to be able to cross-reference the book with a document next to it (or for any number of other reasons).
• Standard Mac UI conventions are completely ignored. For me, the behavior of windows is sacred ground. I take for granted that I can close, minimize, and resize any window (with occasional minimum restraints on window size). Not being allowed to do so in Voluminous is inordinately frustrating, even if figuring out what is going on is easy. Damn it, I want a shorter line length!

The user has no control over what font is used. Although there are some good fonts in the nine provided themes, the user is given no way to select their own font (or, for that matter, design their own themes that I’m aware of). I ask you: what’s the point in reformatting plain text so nicely if you can’t modify even the font? Being unable to modify line height and so forth just adds insult to injury.

Full screen, of course, is also completely non-configurable and suffers from the same weaknesses as the main window. I was hoping for either a single column in the middle of the screen or, even better, multiple columns with horizontal scrolling a la Tofu.

In the end Voluminous is a great idea marred by the overall inability to configure the program in the one area where it matters (the display of text on screen). Not to mention an overabundance of marketing-speak that shifts focus away from its strengths and towards trivial aspects of the program that are easily available for free. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Voluminous, since I love the idea of a beautiful interface for Project Gutenberg (which might actually encourage me to make use of the resource), but at the moment I don’t think it’s really worth the £15/$30.

I just finished the best pair of fantasy books that I have read since I polished off Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimeus Trilogy or Megan Whalen Turner’s The King of Attolia. They were called Dragon Bones and Dragon Blood by Patricia Briggs, and I am astonished that a fantasy author of this caliber has escaped my notice for so long.

Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles: from the classic list, the two books of the “Hurog duology” score an astonishing 10/10 (well, maybe 9/10; it isn’t fencing so much as swordplay). Add to that strong women characters (often sorely lacking in this Tolkien-inspired world), homosexual/bisexual relationships that are portrayed with the same depth of feeling as heterosexual relationships (although admittedly vilified slightly by the “young boys” predatory stereotype), and a world of realistic battles and fantastic heroics living side by side and you’ve got a winning formula if ever I’ve met one. I strongly recommend both Dragon Bones and Dragon Blood, and will be eagerly seeking out Patricia Briggs’ other novels.

Dragon Bones introduces us to a world of dragons long-dead, magic waning, and a problematic feudal system. After reading the blurb online and on the back cover, the story sounded pretty borderline, but Briggs successfully takes a plot that in other hands might have come across forced and hackneyed and deftly weaves it into a fascinating tale filled with memorably enjoyable characters. For whatever reason, I tend to enjoy children’s and young adult fantasy the most, and Dragon Bones successfully melds the pace and interest of young adult fantasy with some slightly more adult themes for an overall experience that should be appealing across a broad age span.

Dragon Blood is a bit darker than Dragon Bones (featuring, as it does, torture and political corruption), but every bit as good and leads the story in a more mature direction (appropriate, considering the aging of the characters). I found Dragon Bones more fun, while Dragon Blood was more gripping.

A big reason I enjoyed Dragon Bones and Blood is because Briggs successfully melds fantasy standbys in theme, plot, and setting with realistic-feeling world dynamics and characters. The heroics and magic are certainly larger than life, but they take place within the context of a world where violence is brutal and actions have consequences. It’s always a pleasant surprise for me to find an author who can write a complex fantasy world that utilizes fantasy tropes even as it moves beyond them, and Briggs does a good job of this.

Perhaps, though, the highest praise I can offer is this: when I laid down Dragon Blood, grinning like an idiot because I enjoyed it so much, the thought I came away with was “I want to write like this.”

Not only that, but she has a decent website, which is a pleasant change from some of my other favorite authors.

Judging by number of books owned, C.J. Cherryh is my favorite science fiction author. Although I had an early love affair with Orson Scott Card, he’s not consistent. Cherryh’s novels are consistently excellent and no one can build an alien culture the way she can.

I’ve recently been reading some of Cherryh’s older books, and as a result picked up Alliance Space which contains the novels Merchanter’s Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna.

Merchanter’s Luck is reason enough to buy the book. It’s a classic Cherryh novel (tense action from a close third person perspective in space), and has a nice dash of romance which isn’t something I usually expect from Cherryh. I highly recommend it.

Forty Thousand in Gehenna is unlike any other book that I’ve read. It takes place over 200 years, and in some ways almost feels like an exercise in world building and backstory rather than a traditional novel. It’s fascinating, but is unlikely to appeal to everyone (I’m not sure if I’ll reread it any time in the near future, either). It’s a shame that Cherryh hasn’t published anything using the unique culture that she builds in Gehenna; the two-page epilogue cried out for a sequel.

In any case, Alliance Space is an interesting collection, and certainly worth a read if you enjoy Cherryh (if you’ve never experienced Cherryh before then the Foreigner series might be a better place to start).

The Sight by David Clement-Davies is a bit of a let-down. I had picked it up at the same time I bought Fire Bringer, and while the plot and idea behind The Sight are interesting (who doesn’t like prescient wolves?), the quality of writing hasn’t improved any since Fire Bringer. Clement-Davies has a really bad habit of using exposition to describe every stupid thing in the book. If a wolf mentions a mystical city, then Clement-Davies instantly goes off into a tangent about how actually the Romans built it back in blah de blah de blah, which pretty much kills the momentum of the story. I like it when authors research their topics, but not when they beat me over the head with their findings.

Add to that the fact that he constantly tells about emotion rather than showing it, and you’ve got a book that feels much longer than it should. I was hoping that these tendencies in Fire Bringer were part of the first book syndrome, but I’m beginning to think that Clement-Davies is simply a mediocre writer. To add insult to injury, every dang myth in the book is a rip-off of some human myth, religion, or story (Little Red Riding-Hood as one of the earliest wolf stories? Shoot me now), making the whole wolf culture feel forced.

If you like anthropomorphic animal stories, then I recommend reading The Sight rather than Fire Bringer (evil psychic wolves are a bit more believable than fascist Hitler deer), but overall Clement-Davies’ work has left me feeling more frustrated than anything else. His creative approach to animal stories has a lot of potential that isn’t quite realized thanks to the quality of the storytelling.