My Learning and My Top Ten Books

I wasn't going to blog today, but I decided that I might as well. Neil Gaiman always is interesting to me to read as he posts, so maybe, some day, I’ll be interesting to someone. I am still writing my story and corresponding with L.E. Modesett Jr. for help in processing stuff. I am still working on some of the stuff I’ve been assigned at work and studying up on virtualization and grid computing. It’s interesting and I think that it might be influencing my story. In fact I know it is, but so is everything else I read.

I commute about forty miles each direction to and from work, for now. So I made sure to stock up on audio books to listen to going to and from work. I am using KU’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction’s Basic Science Fiction Library as kind of a list to give me suggestions as to what to read. They are at http://www2.ku.edu/~sfcenter/ and well worth the visit. Dr. Gunn and Chris McKitterick are two wonderful human beings. I started my listening with Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker Trilogy. I personally enjoyed the rather darker tone of Mostly Harmless unlike Adams himself.

The sad thing here is, though, that the Salt Lake Public library has no other audio books between Adams and Haggard and then nothing again until Heinlein. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers (the book never the movie), and Stranger in a Strange Land rank as three of my top ten novels of all time (I think I’ll list them as part of this post). I am currently listening to The Rolling Stones and seeing where Roddenberry got a lot of his ideas.

I am also physically reading other things: Neuromancer by William Gibson and Ansen Dibell’s Plot. I am trying to refine my story telling tools. But I realize that my writing will still only improve if I actually do it. So I am hoping to prove Bradbury right, from Zen and the Art of Writing, when he said through quantity (of words and sentences written) quality will, with all hope, come.

Mason’s Top Ten Books (In No Particular Order):

1. Herbert, Frank Dune

2. Card, Orson Scott Ender’s Game

3. Bester, Alfred The Demolished Man

4. Gaiman, Neil American Gods

5. Gaiman, Neil Anansi Boys

6. Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land

7. Heinlein, Robert A. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

8. Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers

9. Asimov, Isaac The Foundation Trilogy (I know it’s three books but I have them in one volume)

10. Bester, Alfred and Zelazny, Roger Psychoshop

I would also rank Zelazny’s Amber Chronicles, the entire thing, up there too, but that’s ten books all on their own and, as with my cheat with the Foundation Trilogy I would include them as one.

I haven’t blogged in a while. For that matter, I don’t think anyone actually ever looks at these. But I guess I write them more for me, to have a bit of a record as I make my way through the sledge to the bright shores of publication and prepare for the whole new strain and struggle that will be. I am writing my story, many thanks so far and more to come to LM for all the help you’ve been thus far. Thanks to Neil Gaiman, though he’ll probably never read this, for blogging and showing me that I can be a writer and be normal as well. He is a dad, just as I am, and he successfully juggles his writing career around his family. I do find it hard, though, to write when I have work from 8:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday and have to drive an hour each way. (I know people in New York are saying ‘cry me a river’ but for me it is hard.) I don’t have the option, really, of car-pooling, having a wife with the occasional special need or emergency, as our lovely children end up hitting her or damaging her at least every other day, I have to have the flexibility and mobility of being able to leave at a moment’s notice. And then even when bedtime hits, it is not always well received or respected. What can expect? They’re two and one.

But I love all three of my dependents, they are the light of my life and world. Art serves life, not the other way around. I write because A) I have to and B) my family deserves better than they’ve had. Kori deserves better than she has ever had in her life. I know money won’t make that happen, but perhaps my writing and the money I will get from it will make it easier for us to be able to do the things Kori and I have been denied in our childhoods.

Such is love, such is life.