I Planted Daleks

This instalment of the Dalek Game is really for the Lifeline Bookfest, where I bought Richard St. Barbe Baker‘s autobiography, I Planted Trees. Several years ago. And haven’t read it yet.

I am certain it will be compelling and life-altering because most books I buy at the Lifeline Bookfest are (my criteria: pretty spine, not my genre, never heard of it and/or don’t read that subject; don’t even bother trying to fight for the Pratchett books, there is blood in the aisles there).

I am not allowed to go to the Bookfest again until I buy more bookcases and have more time to read things not-for-illustration. So you should all go. It’s amazing. Enormous exhibition halls full of old, beautiful, mouldering, dog-eared, out-of-print, rare, too-common, dusty, inscribed books. Money raised goes to support services including a crisis line and post-disaster support.

The next Brisbane Bookfest is from 19 to 28 January at the Convention Centre. Take a cut lunch and a backpack.

 

Daleks at Play

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for An Almanac of Words at Play by Willard R. Espy which I must have acquired somewhere second-hand, perhaps at a Lifeline booksale. It is a collection of light poetry, word games, literary games, amusing letters – charming, esoteric, veering between the heavily educated and the extremely flippant.

I am not a very keen player of board games. I am, rather, fond of parlour games and word play, and this book has a place in my heart for introducing me to several and to the idea of more. We make up games over coffee or while driving (witness the Daleks), add to them, integrate them into dinner parties. The game I remember most from this book, at the moment, is a game of rhyming couplets, where you are given a famous line and have to add to it. Of everything in the book, I probably remember this because of the example:

“I’ll take you home again Kathleen,
That last martini turned you green.”

In other news: I have put up the last instalment of the American Sketchbook. I am in the throes of drawing a comic and designing (other people’s) wedding invitations, but after that more (non-Dalek) posts will arrive. And this beautifully written, beautifully printed book has arrived, and will get a post of its own soon!

 

A Dalek in Her Hand

And I’m back! Not with a World Fantasy Award – that was deservedly won by the very stylish John Coulthart, and contended by the enchanting Julie Dillon, the jaw-dropping Jon Foster and the darkly luminous John Picacio (whom I met!).

But I have returned with a sketchbook and Daleks!

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Bess Streeter Aldrich’s A Lantern in Her Hand. I remember very little of this book, except that my mother read it out loud to my family, and by the end of the opening we were all in tears.

In other news: Midnight and Moonshine (with my cover) has been successfully launched! And you can get a copy signed by the authors until 8 December 2012.

 

American Daleks

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Neil Gaiman’s remarkable novel American Gods, a road-trip, murder-mystery, missing-identity, conspiracy, hustling, stranger-comes-to-a-small-town, Götterdämmerung of a fantasy. For me, it’s a pair with Diana Wynne Jones’ Eight Days of Luke – the grown-up, explicit, visceral, wry, partially-unrecommendable-in-certain-circles elder sibling of a novel with many of the same themes (as Stardust pairs with Howl’s Moving Castle). And in my head it is more than one book and world, as fits a cross-country novel in such a broad country – cold isolation of an ex-con walking by train tracks, hot southern funeral parlours, sweat and loss of hotel rooms, the baroque horror of a carousel…

In other news: A month and a half until I go to America! A little freaked out. Reminding myself that all I need is a passport, credit card and the will to eat my way across a continent.

 

Little Daleks (and giveaway)

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a book containing one of those scenes which sear themselves into my memory – the death of the bird when the girls are allowed to do as they please on their holidays and forget to take care of it. It was scarring and awful scene, because it was such an obvious, inevitable, unexpected, Lord of the Flies thing to happen. To many readers the book seems to be a hoops-and-bonnets fantasy. But while it taught me to do my chores (as What Katy Did taught me to give explanations for rules), and while I like Little Women much more than Lord of the Flies, and can forgive it a great deal for the collapsing bed and “Rodrigo! Save me!”, I cannot quite consider the novel without that memory, or consider the March girls aside from that momentous, careless cruelty.

An element of gritty reality underlies the charm (the teasing, the burned hair, the lost love). It is absent from (best-beloved) near-contemporary What Katy Did (1872 to Little Women’s 1868-9), for all its squabbles and games, and from the Little House Books (published in the 1930s recollecting the 1870s) where consequences come from outside forces and the best intentions of human effort seem to dissipate in locusts, blizzards, sickness and fire. Absent too from Anne of Green Gables’ cringing embarrassments (1908), and from Seven Little Australians (1894) which contains larger tragedies but which (in spite of laundering) most helpless animals survive. 

This, too, is the reason that I did not care for the latest Pride and Prejudice movie as Pride and Prejudice. P&P is about veneers, manners, appearances and trying to live and love through and in spite of them (oh, that one beautiful sentence about Lizzie and her aunt not talking as they leave Pemberley). The movie showed mud and pigs and sweat and pores, and the fantasy of muslin and carriages and plumes suspended above all that. And I still think, as I said when the first promotional pictures came out, that for Pride and Prejudice it is a very good Little Women! (And for the record: best Lizzie = Jennifer Ehle (that smile!), best Darcy = Laurence Olivier (spoiled boy), best Mrs Bennett = Alex Kingston (darling), best Mr Collins = Nitin Ganatra (no life without wife)).

In other news: Giveaway! Rowena Cory Daniells interviewed me on art and writing, and there is a chance to get a Dalek drawing of your very own.

 

 

Year of Daleks

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, which reached me through the general enthusiasm of ladies-who-bookclub. Actually, a vague memory surfaces that it might have been passed to me by a magistrate with whom I was doing work experience. The novel created, for me, a curious looking-glass sensation, like going to a country where they speak your language but the geography and idioms and supermarkets are different and they don’t have newsagencies. It was much like that moment when, with the trepidation of the SF reader given chick-lit, you are reading Karen Joy Fowler and realise hang on, wait a minute, she’s one of us! Only in reverse.

Because the middle ages and black death and all their accoutrements are native language to fantasy readers, but this was historical/literary, and it… wasn’t my world. It was an alienating feeling – going into what felt familiar with the best will in the world, and finding unfamiliar ground. Or, in the end, ground that followed the shape of another genre, the endings of which never clicked with me.

So I cannot offer a useful commentary of the book at all. I dare say it was very good – it was certainly popular with people whose taste I respect. Probably I should read it again, with a decade of broadened tastes. But it was historical, which is a genre that often makes me feel cheated of reading histories, and literary fiction, which often makes me feel cheated of a satisfying conclusion. And then I found Connie Willis‘ Doomsday Book, and it was Just Right, and I was home.

 

Storybook Dalek

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Fables Vol 3: Storybook Love, which, just – I love. I admire the concept and execution of Fables generally, and beyond that I frequently adore (or loathe, or both!) the characters, and those two things aren’t always sides of the same coin. But of course, this also means this drawing is for The Princess Bride, and therefore also for Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and for Mark Knopfler, and all good things. And for initial capitals in fairytale books, with which I filled far too many pages of old sketchbooks.

In other news: All I’ve been able to manage about the World Fantasy Award ballot (after many tweets of congratulations) is “meep!”

And just today, Ticonderoga Publications announced Midnight and Moonshine , a collection of intertwined stories – cold and cruelly beautiful – by awesome fellow-present-and-past nominees Lisa Hannett and Angela Slatter. And I did the cover :)

 

The Dalek, the Witch and the Wardrobe

This instalment of the Dalek Game is obviously for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and of course for Pauline Baynes’ illustrations which are Narnia for me, and whose White Witch (so elegant) is the one true Jadis, no matter how magnificent Tilda Swinton was.

Narnia infused my childhood – they are among the earliest books I remember reading (and being read, and reading aloud every year). For me they are the standard of wonder, the true quality of fairytale and fantasy – almost tangible, utterly ethereal, the best of the mundane and the least trammelled by the dullness of the world. Through the door and into the woods, through the desert and over the sea, forests and hunts, high romance and low loving adventure, “once upon a time” and all stories (they begin, after all, when Sherlock Holmes was living in Baker Street and the Bastables were digging for treasure in Lewisham Road), and always. Unlike The Lord of the Rings, which gained the third foothold in my heart, they were almost within reach, and unlike The Chronicles of Prydain (which I learned to love between Tolkien and Lewis) they never ended. They barely even began.

And here is a bonus drawing – originally for a card, with a touch of greenery added for current purposes:

 

Every Dalek’s Just So So Special

This rare coloured instalment of the Dalek Game is for Robert Shearman’s short story collection Everyone’s Just So So Special (being read here by the Dalek) and was particularly commissioned by the Lair (Angela Slatter and Lisa Hannett) for their interview with the author, which you may (and should) read here: The Lair’s Just So So Special or here: The Lair’s Just So So [So] Special.

I do not know if either Robert Shearman or, indeed, a red Dalek owns this table cloth and crockery pattern, but one of them should.

 

The Complete Daleks of the New Yorker

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, because I love it. There is such a wonderful survey of styles and eras (the dresses of the 30s, the cell phones of the 80s), such sly odd wit, such artists as Addams (of the Family) and de Seve. I like sitting down with a cup of tea and spending a few quiet minutes flipping through it.

(If you don’t recognise this incarnation, the Dalek is based on Eustace Tilley, from the first cover of the New Yorker).