Oh noes! Top 5 meme me, baby.
Ask me my Top Five Whatevers. Fannish or literary or otherwise. Any top fives. Doesn't matter what, really! Fandoms, Disney cartoons, women in my fandoms, OTPs, celebrity crushes, books I wish would be made into movies, love songs. And I will answer them all in a new post (or in comments or in skywriting).Ganked from just about everywhere. Possibly
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Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise. The Nine Tailors is her best novel, but I love this one for the verbal pyrotechnics. Advertising slogans, jingles, campaigns. A view into the life of an London advertising firm in the 1920s, with details drawn from Sayers' own experience in one. Plus catapults, and an inexcusable yet fun cricket match featuring the prowess of Lord Peter Sue. Whoever it was he was based on, Sayers was rather embarrassingly in love with him. And yet, and yet, I'll re-read this cheerfully any day. I wish I could pull off that kind of clever wordplay.
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods. In which Mr Pratchett gets marvelously pissed off about religion, and works it out while making his readers laugh helplessly. I wish I could write something this morally outraged yet so light-handed.
Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons. In this choice you can see again my love for structural games. The title is excellent. Banks is inventive as usual, and hideously nasty to his characters, also as usual. There's a reveal that is a serious whammy that made me go back and re-read it straight away to see if Banks set it up fairly. And he did, and I ought to have figured it out myself, and wow. I wish I could do that.
Jack Vance, "The Moon Moth". I dunno why, but I love Vance's weirdness and his strange cultures, invented and described in detail for three pages then left behind and forgotten entirely by his wandering everyman heroes. I wish I'd written this. Someday I'll write something that's sort of like it.
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So.. the combination of clever wording and tight plotting will make you wish you'd written that particular book? Or is an either/or response?
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The clever wordplay often snags me, but probably isn't enough by itself.
"Use of Weapons" is unusual in this list in that it is the only one that is (hrm, finding a way not to be spoilery here) a downer in that the hero is thwarted in the pursuit of his/her goals. I generally love best the books in which the protagonists get to, if not where they wanted to go at the start, at least to where they needed to go after all.
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