Living In a Serial World (I Am a Serial Girl)

I love a good book series: when you’ve got a story that pans out across several books, you get so much more space to spread out in. Worlds are bigger and clearer; characters have wider story arcs, so we get to see more of them and how they work, and the resolution to storylines are more important because we, the readers, are that much more invested in them. If you imagine a book like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, standalone novels can seem like the fleeting glimpses into passing rooms, like the Fudge Mountain and the Oompa-Loompa village. On the other hand, serialised novels are more like the rooms we get to spend more time in, like the Inventing Room – a place we can get familiar with, that we’ll remember more clearly and for longer after we’ve left. With this in mind, I’d like to let you know a few of my favourite series and trilogies, ones that I’d thoroughly recommend to anyone. Fair warning: there’s a definite bias towards fantasy novels in this list, but I think there’ll be something for everyone here regardless. All images are of the first titles in each series, so you know where to start.

Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling (7 Books)

We’ll start with an obvious one, shall we? The infamous boy wizard and his battle with the dark wizard, Voldemort, is a story pretty much everyone is at least vaguely familiar with - but if you haven’t read the books, I really urge you to. The first couple do read like the age group they’re written for, but don’t be put off: it gets a lot darker, a lot more complex and a lot more adult as the series goes on, and before long you’ll be marvelling at how intricately-woven the story is. Rowling drops hints about characters and gives clues about important events sometimes several books ahead, which makes you appreciate just how much work and planning went into this series. It’s funny, heart-warming, frustrating and tear-jerking, but most of all Hogwarts is the best, most richly-imagined world I've ever visited. 

His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman (3 Books)

I wrote about this trilogy recently so I won’t go into too much detail (read the full post instead for the full recommendation, though there are spoilers in it), but this is one of the most important series of my life, and I’m not exaggerating. The third and final book, The Amber Spyglass, is the first book I remember truly, absolutely loving and, even if I don’t read it as often as I used to, that hasn’t changed. This is still a dangerously captivating series, with a fascinating cast of characters, several different worlds to explore and an awe-inspiring plot in which serious questions are asked on the natures of religion, politics, love, duty and fate. 

The PC Grant Mysteries by Ben Aaronovitch (6 Books and counting)

Peter Grant is your average bobbie-on-the-beat in London: living in station accommodation with his fellow graduate coppers, trying to impress the guv'nors and dealing with run-of-the-mill crimes in the city centre. Until one night, standing guard over a murder scene, a witness approaches him with some information about the case. This isn’t your normal witness though: he’s a ghost, dead over a hundred years. At first Peter doubts his discovery, until he gets word that there’s a peculiar arm of the Metropolitan Police dedicated to dealing in cases with paranormal circumstances - previously a one-man department but now, with Peter established as being sensitive to the paranormal world, it becomes two. He moves into The Folly on Russell Square (his new base) with his new boss, the enigmatic Nightingale, to begin his training as a wizard-cop. This is a crime series with a magic twist, a larger storyline tying all the books together, and a decent dash of humour and pop-culture. One of my favourite aspects is that a lot of the series is set around Soho and Camden, which is near where I work, adding an extra element of possibility for me – more than once I’ve walked around Russell Square trying to work out which building is The Folly.

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin (5 Books and counting)

The TV show based on these books is called – as you undoubtedly already know - Game of Thrones, after the first book in the series. But it’s actually really important to remember that this epic saga is called A Song of Ice and Fire, because we’re almost certainly getting a major clue about the ending of the series in that title. It’s as gruesome and ugly as the show has led you to expect; the cast is enormous (over a thousand named characters!) and the world is even bigger. It’s passed off as a fantasy series, but has some of its roots in the power-battle between Houses York and Lancaster, otherwise dubbed the War of the Roses, so you should expect a healthy dollop of politics – far more than you’ll get dragons and magic, anyway. It’s a definite investment series: the shortest book so far clocks in at 776 pages (not including the huge ‘Who’s Who’ appendix that appears in every book), but I promise you, it’s worthwhile.

Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood (3 Books)

I love Margaret Atwood’s work. Specifically, I love her speculative fiction and you don’t get much more speculative than this series, which covers the world just before and after an apocalypse called The Waterless Flood, when swathes of humanity are wiped out by a man-made plague. The scary parts of this series, however, are not in the apocalypse itself: it’s in the eerily familiar world the story is set in, where huge Corporations control every aspect of life, where if you live outside a Compound you basically don’t exist, where hardened criminals are sentenced to ‘Painball’ (essentially paintball but with real guns and no rules) instead of prison. Atwood has an uncanny knack of creating worlds we recognise twisted into darker versions of themselves, and they don’t get much creepier than the Maddaddam books.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman (3 Books)

Imagine if Harry Potter had the option to go to university, then afterwards spent a gap year in Narnia, and you’ve basically got the first book of The Magicians trilogy. Our anti-hero, Quentin Coldwater, is a disillusioned, socially-inept high school graduate who finds himself testing for Brakebills Academy, a college he never applied for, or indeed heard of – a secret school for magicians. As his academic career continues down this unexpected path, he discovers that the fantasy world of his favourite childhood books, Fillory, is in fact a real, tangible place. But, in the same way that Brakebills is darker and more menacing than Hogwarts, so Fillory is not as pastoral or perfect as the books written about them, or Narnia. Quentin’s not the nicest guy – he’s selfish and impetuous with it, which makes him a weirdly relatable character, and the arrogant way in which he accepts his magical skills is a nice contrast to the usual ‘oh-my-goodness-you’ve-picked-little-old-me?’ schtick we usually get in world-discovering novels. I’ll admit the similarities between Brakebills and Hogwarts (and Fillory and Narnia) was something that grated on me a little – even though it’s supposed to be a massive in-joke – though on the whole this is a dark, entertaining, violent series, and one that you can enjoy even if you haven’t read Narnia or Harry Potter.

The Farseer Trilogy and The Tawny Man Trilogy by Robin Hobb (6 Books)

These are two separate trilogies, but feature the same protagonists, so I’m lumping them together. The stories focus around Fitz, the bastard son of the erstwhile King-in-Waiting for the throne of the Six Duchies. Not formally recognised as a member of the royal family, he is nevertheless kept on and trained by the current King to become an assassin for the family, working with Chade, another assassin. The first trilogy follows Fitz’s attempts to find his way in a world of royalty where he is not royal, avoid his uncle, Prince Regal’s, vicious attempts to discredit him, and suppress his ability to communicate telepathically with animals, which is feared and reviled by many in the kingdom. There’s a lot here to recommend the story, much like His Dark Materials: questions about love, loyalty, shame, politics, fear, friendship and duty, plus the added allure of the mysterious, androgynous Fool, an ally of Fitz’s who proves to be far more than their name suggests. This is a commitment akin to A Song of Ice and Fire, though: these six books total over 4,000 pages, and Hobb has recently started a third trilogy set in the same world. The woman is a machine.
UPDATE: The third trilogy, Fitz and the Fool, was completed earlier this year, bringing this saga up to a whopping 9 books - if you don't include the companion novels, The Liveship Traders Trilogy or The Rainwild Chronicles quartet, which are set in the same world and frequently feature cameos or character crossovers.

Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas (6 Books, 4 Novellas and counting)

Caelena Sardothien is 17, beautiful and the deadliest assassin around – or, at least she was, until she was betrayed, arrested and sentenced to a life of hard labour in salt mines. She’s near breaking point when the Crown Prince, Dorian, turns up to recruit her as his champion for his tyrannical father’s tournament where, if she wins, she'll be pardoned for her previous crimes, granted relative freedom and employed as the King's personal assassin. Caelena must fight it out with thieves, rogue soldiers and murderers for this dubious honour – she has some beef with the King – and the stakes are raised even higher when other champions start to get killed off in grisly ways. This isn’t even the full story: the tournament is just the beginning of Caelena’s journey as she grows to accept who she really is and her place in the world. Caelena is a flighty upstart with a healthy appetite for food, fashion and books, but we’re left in no doubt over just how lethal her skills are and what she is capable of. The first book is probably the weakest of the series so far and that’s saying something, considering it’s nigh unputdownable, so if you like your heroines with a dark side then Caelena’s the girl for you.
UPDATE: A companion novel, Tower of Dawn, is out in September 2017 which will be from Chaol Westfall's point of view and will, essentially, explain what he was up to when missing from Empire of Storms.The series is set to complete in 2018.

Knife, Lights and Spyglass: His Dark Materials and Me

Northern Lights (or The Golden Compass to anyone Stateside), the first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, is twenty years old this year. TWENTY. That, to me, is incredible – firstly, that that much time has passed, and secondly, that I didn’t even realise it. I only clocked it because I saw a hashtag on Twitter about a month or so ago (#NorthernLights20), clicked the link and there it was… people discussing the 20^th anniversary of one of my most favourite books of all time, and I hadn’t even noticed. 

I could argue here that it’s because Northern Lights is a timeless, ageless book that transcends generations, and so applying an age to it is a meaningless number, blah blah blah – but that’s bollocks because you could say the same about Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which is thirty this year, and I was marvelling at that anniversary in February. No, the truth is, His Dark Materials no longer matters to me as much as it once did, and so the arrival of such an anniversary caught me completely off-guard. Yet I’m kind of glad – the shock has suddenly sent my mind whirring, remembering just what it is about this series that I fell in love with.  Fair warning: some spoilers to the series, including details about the ending, will come out in the course of this post.

I claimed both copies in the end, like Mrs Coulter claimed Lyra.

It’s not often that I remember how I acquired books – for example, To Kill a Mockingbird may as well have grown organically onto to my bookshelf one day, for all I remember about buying it. I don’t even remember reading it for the first time, not really. But I DO remember that I got Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife for Christmas 2000 (partly remembered because I quite clearly marked it in my copy, in naughties-tastic metallic pen, complete with circles over the i's). Actually, that’s not quite right – that year, my parents gave my sister Northern Lights and me The Subtle Knife, and when I sat down to start my book I had no idea that it was the second in a trilogy, or that my sister was in possession of the first. This meant that my first meeting with Lyra Silvertongue was the same as Will Parry’s – I was as unfamiliar with Pantalaimon, the Alethiometer, Dust and the many-worlds as he was, and I was utterly enthralled by it. Admittedly, Lee Scoresby’s storyline, and Serafina Pekkala’s, were parts I skipped over to begin with, because at that point I had no attachment to those characters and so their plots seemed irrelevant to me. Nevertheless, the strength of The Subtle Knife is that (even though it’s now my least-favourite of the trilogy) I enjoyed it whilst under the impression it was a standalone novel – even with all the questions I had about the worlds and Lyra. In fact, reading the novels out of sequence only strengthened their impact in the end: nearly all my questions from The Subtle Knife could be answered by Northern Lights, and my attachment to Will was increased by my first experience in the various worlds being through his eyes. Even though I read the books completely out of order - Knife, Lights, Spyglass - it didn't matter, because this is a story beyond structure.

So why did His Dark Materials matter so much to me? Well that’s a tricky question, so let’s start with the obvious, easiest, shortest answer: it’s a great story. A young girl sets off to the far North of the world to rescue her best friend, accompanied only by her daemon, Pantalaimon, the animal embodiment of her soul. On her quest she encounters monsters, a kingdom ruled by a despot and a lab conducting unspeakable experiments on children. She makes incredible friends and discovers terrible truths. There’s intrigue and murder and fights, and she meets talking bears, ages-old witches, Texan balloonists, finger-sized humanoids and distant father-figures. Pullman’s world – Lyra’s world - is Narnia, Hogwarts and Oz rolled into one, with a sprinkling of Stephen King.

Those characters she meets, the bears and witches and Texans – they’re another reason the trilogy is so fascinating. No one is perfect in Lyra’s world, and that’s a strong message to send to impressionable young people. Grey character casts have become increasingly popular in recent years, the most famous being the sprawling crew of A Song Of Ice And Fire by George R. R. Martin, where little girls can become murderers and men lose their lives for being honourable. But what I've now realised is, His Dark Materials has the same - and Northern Lights predates A Song of Ice and Fire by a year (A Game Of Thrones was first published in 1996). No one in His Dark Materials is purely good, or without conflicted morals - Lyra famously survives throughout much of the story by lying through her teeth; Will kills a man within his first chapters; Stanislaus Grumman breaks a promise he made a dying man; Lee Scoresby murders thirty men to save one. Even Iorek Byrnison, the bear-king who can talk with humans but can't empathise with them, finds himself conflicted over the fate of the world he lives in. That’s a powerful thing to read when you’re a young girl - that the world is not black and white, that sometimes doing bad things or telling lies doesn't necessarily make you a bad person.

My original copies - well-loved and dog-eared.

Then of course, there was the Homeric feel to Lyra and Will’s journey through the worlds. As a teenager I hadn’t yet become acquainted with The Iliad and The Odyssey, but as I got older I realised that Pullman had littered his work with allusions to Greek mythology and Homeric epic. Take, for example, the Land of the Dead in The Amber Spyglass: it’s basically Hades and, if you know your mythology, you’ll know that Greek heroes frequently made trips down to retrieve lost loves or seek counsel from the dead – just like Lyra and Will. Then there’s the Land of the Dead itself. See, the Greek underworld was never a pleasant place, like the Christian Heaven is purported to be: it had nice corners, sure, with the Elysian Fields and the Isles of the Blessed for particularly worthy souls, and Hell-like counterparts called Tartarus and the Fields of Punishment where, if you were evil, you were punished accordingly. However, if you just happened to be a normal person who didn't do anything particularly evil in your life, but never did anything particularly good either, you ended up in the bleak Fields of Aspodel, a dull wasteland where souls spend their eternities doing nothing. All of this was separated from the mortal world by the river Styx, the domain of Charon, ferrier of the dead. Pullman's underworld could be the Fields of Aspodel – it’s an endlessly empty landscape, grey and flat and full of souls without anywhere else to go on to. It even comes complete with a boatman, who ferries the souls across from the living world to the Land of the Dead. And all this is in addition to the shape-changing daemons, who are souls manifest in Lyra’s world but messenger-spirits in mythology, or the Harpies, the half-woman half-bird hybrids who torment Lyra just as they once tormented blind Phineas, the seer. And they're probably the tip of the iceberg -there’s undoubtedly loads more allusions if I could care to scour for them.

The ending of the series also taught me a powerful lesson: that sometimes the right endings are not necessarily happy ones. The first time I read The Amber Spyglass, by the time I finished it I was in floods of tears, and even now – fifteen years later - there are some passages that will still cause my face to crumple. This is because Will and Lyra, the children who saved the worlds, suddenly find at the end of it all they have fallen in love, but just as they realise this - just as they recognise their souls match - they are informed that, in order to maintain the new equilibrium they have created, they must separate forever, with Will to live in his world and Lyra to live in hers (I'm not going to explain exactly why because that will take forever). There are no loopholes, no compromises: they must give up the love of a lifetime, with the only comfort being that they might find each other in the Land of the Dead again, and that in the meantime they will share a bench across worlds for one hour, one day a year. Their final parting is desperately poignant, and yet there is no avoiding that this is the best course: Will and Lyra sacrifice each other so they can both live strong, healthy lives apart, instead of a short and sickly one together, and in doing so will also save all the people across all worlds from having to endure the unending misery of the Land of the Dead again.

Quite frankly, I could go on forever like this, and never quite manage to make my point over what an incredible series of books this is: it’s an adventure story at it's core, but with huge emphasis on both politics and religion, which you don’t often encounter in children’s literature (at least I don’t). It's sprawling, covering several different worlds yet somehow never confusing them, and the imagery used to describethem is rich and satisfying to read. It boasts a huge cast where, somehow, everyone is memorable,well-developed and unpredictable. It covers all the definitions of love you can think of - maternal, paternal, passionate lust, first love, vocational, friendship – and how it affects everyone, regardless of how they started out. When I read it as a teenager, I saw it only as an adventure in a world akin to Narnia or Hogwarts. As I grew older, however, I came to recognise the powerful, controversial subjects it brought up and questioned, which enriched the story and deepened my understanding  and appreciation of it. I don’t know why I forgot about this series, or why it fell out of favour, but I’m so glad that the Northern Lights anniversary reminded of it with such a jolt: it’s made me truly think about what His Dark Materials means to me, and has made me realise that, of all the books I’ve read, all the fictional worlds I’ve visited and all the characters I’ve met, Lyra and Will have influenced more than any other.

My First Audiobook

I’ve been pondering the idea of using audiobooks for some time now: I’ve never listened to one before, and when I was younger they came in clunky cassettes boxes, usually with several tapes if the book was a long one. They seemed to be aimed at older people who had vision problems and couldn’t read a book – certainly not for me. But the rise of digital media has pulled audiobooks into the limelight, with companies such as Audible regularly touting their wares on public transport, aiming them at people too busy to read, or those who travel on routes that are so crowded that holding books, Kindles or papers are near impossible. It was actually an advert for Audible – ‘first 30 days free trial’ – that finally pushed me over the edge. I’d been so reluctant, after all, about ereaders, and yet now I’m seldom without mine, so who’s to say audiobooks won’t be a similar revelation? I decided to take Audible up on their trial offer.

First things first: I needed an Audible account. This was terrifyingly easy to set up because it’s an Amazon company so, naturally, I could sign in under my login for that site. Everything – including payment details – was transferred without a hitch. So far, so 1984. That unnervingly simple step out of the way, it was time to choose my one free audiobook, as per the terms of the trial offer – but hang on, I thought the offer was a 30-day free trial? Doesn’t that mean I get as many free audiobooks in a month as I want? Actually, no: the slightly confusing bit about Audible is that (as a card-carrying member) you pay a monthly fee of £7.99, and for that you get ONE free audiobook a month; after that, you have to pay per audiobook you download. My free trial meant I didn’t have to pay the monthly subscription fee this month, but would still get a free audiobook. Once that had been cleared up – and chalked up as a bit cheeky, but understandable, particularly from an author’s perspective – I continued on to my selection process for my free audiobook.

Another slight hiccough: it seems the free audiobook is taken from a chosen selection – mostly bestsellers, which is good, but I had been under the impression I could choose any that I wanted. I might’ve been less cranky about that if I hadn’t read most of the titles on offer already, and I thought my first audiobook should be one I’ve never read before. Eventually I settled on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (narrated by Saul Reichlin), which everyone has been telling me to read for ages but I’ve never gotten round to. It was at this point I discovered yet another issue – ish – with Audible: if it wasn’t free for me this time, the audiobook of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (unabridged) was about £25. Now, I understand that there are additional costs involved in creating an audiobook – hiring voice actors, recording studios, etc – so I was expecting it to be higher than the ebook or print, but considering Amazon currently have the paperback available for £3.85 (discounted from £8.99), 25 quid seemed a bit steep. If I wasn’t getting it for free, I definitely wouldn’t have bothered. That’s not because I don’t think the book itself is worth it, but £25 is a bit out of my price range for a print book or ebook, and they’re formats I’m already very comfortable with.

You’ve probably surmised (correctly) by now that I had a few misgivings with Audible, but I figured Audible wasn’t my only source for audiobooks, so I could always take my custom elsewhere if I decided I liked the format: so far, my only qualms were with the service, not the product. However, I had some issues with the audiobook too.

Firstly, I’ll be honest: I overestimated my ability to work and listen at the same time. I started listening to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo during work, assuming I could merrily work away whilst listening the story. That was not so, as may well be obvious to you – I found that I kept tuning out the dulcet tones of Reichlin so I could concentrate more on the task in hand. I only even noticed I was doing this when I suddenly realised the narrator was reading, ‘in hindsight, this was a mistake’. WHAT WAS THE MISTAKE?! I’d completely missed what could well have been a crucial plot point. In a print or ebook, if I’d skim-read the page, or zoned out for a moment, I could go back and re-read the passage again – but with an audiobook, it seems really difficult to replay a specific passage. Even when I left work and entered the realm of the relatively mindless – i.e. my commute – I struggled to concentrate, because external noise kept drowning out the narrator, even with the volume turned up quite high. Buses speeding past, mopeds, even the beep-beep-beep-beep of a pelican crossing all managed to drown out words and passages. So I can’t listen at work because I’m, well, working, and I can’t listen on my commute because my surroundings are too noisy. When CAN I listen to it?!

I also had not anticipated how long an audiobook would be – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about 18 hours and 50 minutes long. Being the nerd I am, I did some maths on how long it would take me to get through in other formats – feel free to correct me if I’m wrong because maths was never my strong suite at school!

•   Let us assume that, on average, I read for an hour and a half every day – 90 minutes. 18 hours and 50 minutes translates into 1130 minutes. So we can assume that, listening to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo every day (instead of reading) would take me 12.5 sessions – let’s call them days – to get through, at a rate of 90 minutes per day. This made me realise how probably inconsequential it is to gripe about having to pay for the audiobooks AND the subscription – if it would take almost 2 weeks to listen to a 500 page book, it’s not like I’m going to burst my bank downloading audiobooks.

•  Additionally, as mentioned, this is a 500-page book - 542, to be exact, according to Amazon. Since I started my book log in January 2014, I can say I have read 10 books with page counts between 529 pages and 578 pages – an average of 554. The average reading time for those 10 books was, based on the log, 8.6 days. Excluding one title that took 31 days to read - an anomaly – the average is even lower at 6.1 days. 

So based on that (possibly hairy) maths, providing I didn’t dawdle, it would take me roughly half the time to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo than it will to listen to it. If it would be far quicker – and more enjoyable – for me to read, then why am I even bothering? Because, despite all my misgivings, I am enjoying the story itself, which – so far – is quite gripping, when my environment permits me to be gripped. It’s slightly annoying though, because now that I’m getting quite into it, I still don’t know if I want to continue listening to it, and me being me (also having missed a fair bit through not paying attention), I think I’d have to re-read it from the beginning once I procured a copy. And I know I got it for free, but there’s still that niggling thought in the back of my head that as I already own this in one format, why should I buy it in another unless I really love it – which I won’t know for certain until I finish it? Talk about a dilemma.

I suppose it all comes down to one big disappointment: audiobooks are not something you can multi-task with. I had visions of me being able to spend an entire day at work, listening to a great story whilst I went about my daily business, but this is not so. Audiobooks require as much attention as reading a print book or ebook. If you’ve ever tried reading at the same time as trying to do something else, you’ll know that one or the other will suffer – either the pan boils over, or the hoovering doesn’t get done properly, or you walk into someone on the street, or you just put the book down. I thought audiobooks would be a way to experience a novel without encountering those kind of issues, but it now seems that, if anything, it’s actually easier to be distracted away from an audiobook. This begs the question: why listen, when you can read? I’ll probably stick with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo on audio for now, see how I get on and if my opinion improves, but – with 15 hours and 30 minutes still to go – I’m not sure anything will change.