What Makes This Book So Great

Over the last few weeks I've been gradually making my way through Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great, a collection of essays written for tor.com between July 2008 and February 2011, with a couple of extras thrown in for good measure. In one of the essays, Walton states that she doesn't consider the pieces to be literary criticism because she considers herself a fan rather than an objective, academic critic. But this is the collection's greatest strength: Walton's enthusiasm, engagement, and comprehensive knowledge of her subject material make it a joy to read.

As might be expected, each piece is relatively short and generally focused on a particular book — and sometimes just a single aspect of a particular book. Long series — C.J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union series, Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, and Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels — are explored in detail over a series of chapters, allowing for greater depth or, for someone who isn't interested in a particular author, making it easy to skip forward to something else.

A handful of the essays explore Walton's own attitudes to reading, such as why she reads series in sequence and why she doesn't consider a book to have been read completely until after she has finished her first re-read. The collection also includes my favourite Tor piece, How to Talk to Writers, which obviously comes from years of engagement with fandom. I also like the Walton's own description of being rendered tongue-tied by her first meeting with Samuel Delany — I'm sure I'd feel exactly should I ever meet Walton! — which mirrors China Miéville's star-struck attitude while interviewing Ursula Le Guin for R4 back in 2009.

One of the most interesting metaphors Walton employs is that of the spear-point: a small sharp thing that has a large impact because it is backed by the weight of a long shaft and the power of strong person pushing. This, she says, is very similar to a succession of novels, such as Bujold's Miles Vorkorsigan books, where the author builds up the character over a number of books so that when the spear-point is pushed home, it carries the weight of the rest of the series, greatly increasing the emotional impact of the event. Which makes a lot of sense to me. I can see it at work in my current series — Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce Mysteries — and I now suspect that the reason Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, which I read for last year's Hugos, didn't work for me was because it lacked the pressure of the rest of the series.

My only real gripe about the book concerns its lack of references: its usefulness as a reference could be massively improved by the addition of an index and a bibliography. I can understand why an index wasn't included — it would have massively increased the time required to compile the collection and, given that the pieces are available on-line and indexed by Google etc, not entirely necessary — but if you're interested in Walton's views on particular subject rather than a particular book, it'd be much easy to find if the key topics were listed at the back. I'm less bothered by the lack of a bibliography — the chapter headings generally include book title — not least because it prevents me from going out and buying the whole lot in bulk...