Finding a Canon

There's an ongoing conversation in the genre world on the subject of canons. Sarah Gailey is running an excellent series called 'Personal Canons' on their substack, and this was meant to be a submission to it, but I forgot about the deadline and missed it. So here you are.

I read reasonably often but inconsistently for a long time. And then in 2017 and 2018, I became a heavy reader. And now I have five books going at any one time. Last year I read 99 books, and this year I'm set to finish more then 120.

The process of becoming a frequent reader means that part of what I've done over the last few years is find a canon. A point someone on Twitter made was that everyone entered genre fiction through a different door. That if we all have a personal canon, then there is no one canon. There are thousands.

Mine started with Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet. The first book, the first time I read it, was a little slow, but interesting enough that I wanted to continue with the series. The second book I devoured, then the third book, and then the fourth book, and then the epilogue for the fourth book brought me to tears.

(I reread the series sometime after. Cried again at the epilogue. I reread it a second time earlier this year. I've slowed down as a reader, and become more attentive, and so I was able to enjoy the first book as if afresh, and noticed details in the others that I hadn't the first time around. And yes, I cried again.)

Something about it spoke to me. I picked up his next series almost immediately after, The Dagger and the Coin.

(Spoiler warning. You've been warned.)

The Long Price Quartet is better, but I feel in some ways that The Dagger and the Coin is more important. Both do something crucial: they don't just draw upon medieval European history, they draw upon twentieth century, and even twenty-first century, history. In LPQ, the andat remind one of nuclear bombs, for example (and, further, the Khaiem of the LPQ is inspired by Asian settings -- East India if I remember right one of the stronger ones -- even if not necessarily Asian history).

The historical influences are even stronger in Dagger and Coin, a quintet whose magic system derives from Karl Rove ("We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.") and Joseph Goebbels, a character inspired by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen (who objected to the Nazis on the basis that they were a "revolution of the window-washers"), and a storyline mixing the development of central banking with World War II.

In a way, it's a more traditional fantasy tale: there are wars, grand battles, single individuals pitted against each other for the future of the world. In other ways, though, it's not: the Chosen One, Geder Palliako, is the antagonist -- and one of the most human and comprehensible antagonists ever written, thanks to his being one of the viewpoint characters. The orphan child is not a magician, not a sorcerer, not secretly rich -- she's a banker. The noble aristocrat obsessed with honor is also a conservative trying to cling on to the power of the nobility with everything he has. The world-weary embittered old veteran never stops being world-weary or embittered. And one of the protagonists, Clara Kalliam, doesn't easily fit into any archetype: a middle-aged noblewoman, with full-grown children, whose storylines revolve around writing letters, around what's said and what's carefully unsaid at knitting circles, around the parts of life normally never seen in fantasy.

In the final book, one of the major storylines is putting a stop to the cycle of violence and vengeance -- an interesting turn on the usual glory of battle so often seen in fantasy. And throughout the series, questions of truth and certainty appear again and again, leading to one of my favorite quotes in everything I've read: "Truth and lies, doubt and certainty. I haven't found them to be what I thought they were. I dislike certainty because it feels like truth, but it isn't. If justice is based on certainty, but certainty is not the truth, atrocities become possible."

These two form one of the cornerstones of my personal canon: flawed people trying to make the world a better and a kinder place, and storylines inspired by twentieth and twenty-first century history.

What's another cornerstone? Completely different in style, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast is a fantasy-of-manners set in an immense, decaying ruin where the past rules all its inhabitants through obscure rituals carried out for no reason other then that they have always been carried out. (I need to reread this soon.)

Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is another: a tale of two magicians and their friendship and rivalry amidst the early 1800s, the Napoleonic Wars, all written in an Austen-esque pastiche and liberally adorned with footnotes that sometimes fill pages. For all that Strange and Norrell are the leads, much of the book is driven by characters on their margins: Vinculus, poor and working class; Stephen, black; Arabella and Lady Pole, women. This is another place where I am interested: the power of characters who exist in society's margins.

(Peter Harness's television adaptation, by the way, is well worth checking out, as it is one of the few televisual adaptations of novels that manage to match, or nearly match, and in my opinion this one even occasionally exceeds, its original source material.)

Other parts of my canon aren't even genre fiction, but they shape my reading and my writing nonetheless. Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson is one of the most singularly powerful works of literature ever written and can lay strong claim to being the best work of prose ever produced by an American writer.

Not just a biographer of person, Caro is interested in power and how it's used. And so while his biographies of Moses and Johnson are indeed biographies of those individuals, they're also biographies of the way they attain and use power, of the places they live in and the places they shape, of the people that their power touches. "The Sad Irons," one of the chapters in The Path to Power, on the subject of rural electrification, is perhaps one of the most powerful works of non-fiction ever written.

There's a chapter in his Robert Moses biography, The Power Broker, on how power is used, too. But where "The Sad Irons" focuses on how electricity was brought to the Texas Hill Country -- and you'll have to read that volume to grasp, to whatever limited degree we in the twenty-first century can, the poverty of the place at the time -- "One Mile" focuses on how Robert Moses destroyed a vibrant and happy community for no reason other than that he could.

I said before that I have been in the process of discovering my canon. I hold to that. I've recently read many of Ursula K. Le Guin's works, and be it her short stories, such as in The Birthday of the World, or "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," or her masterpiece novels of the 70s, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, her works are always beautifully written and thoughtful.

China Mieville's October is a fantastic work of narrative history which shows that, far from being "inevitably doomed" to devolve into state capitalism, the Russian Revolution was an exciting, vibrant time pulsing with possibility and potentiality. It shows that had history turned in another direction -- because those years, at the tail end of World War I, were pregnant with the possibility of revolution, something that the ruling classes have done their best to suppress from official history -- we might well be living in a socialist world right now.

Alix Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January connected with me on a far deeper emotional level than I could've ever expected and left me in tears again and again. Words to describe it that fully capture the impact it had on me don't exist, and so I won't try.

Hilary Mantel's trilogy on Thomas Cromwell was my main reading project during July, and I assure you, all three books are dense enough that calling it a reading project is entirely accurate. It was marvelous, and I know that I shall eventually reread it, because I do not feel that I fully grasped it. Perhaps I will try and read up on that period in time, as well.

The second book of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, Seven Surrenders, sits on my bookshelf. The first book, Too Like the Lightning, was an incredible blend of far-flung futurism blended with Renaissance stylistics, as told by an unreliable narrator, and it stunned me. It will find a place in my canon, I think.

At this very moment I am reading Seth Dickinson's The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, having already read Traitor and Monster, the first two books of the series. Even though I haven't yet finished it, and even though the fourth and final book is unreleased (and presumably incomplete besides), the Masquerade -- that is the name of the series -- has still carved a place into my canon. Its exploration of imperialism, colonialism, working within power structures to try and change them from the inside, all speak not only to history but to today.

Jo Walton's Among Others was excellent, and My Real Children, which I read in two days, is one of the best books I have ever read, and it too connected deeply, such that I cried, and just thinking of it puts a lump into my throat. Once again, words fail me.

And there are books still yet to find places in my canon, because there are still books I have yet to read. Among the authors I haven't yet read there is N.K. Jemisin (at least her novels -- I've read How Long 'Til Black Future Month?), or Robert Shearman (I've got We All Hear Stories in the Dark sitting on my bookshelf), or Octavia Butler (my Library has some of her books), or Stephen King (I own both Under the Dome and Duma Key and my father owns copies of many of his other novels and even some of his short story collections). There are a hundred thousand million authors that I haven't read yet.

My canon isn't necessarily a list of classics. It's not even books that I think everyone should read (I mean, everyone should read them, but if you were to ask me for recommendations, I'd scope what you liked first, and then base my recommendations on that), and they're definitely not books I think everyone must read. They're just the books that I've loved, the books that make me think, the books that shape my reading and writing and thinking.

A canon shouldn't be strict. It shouldn't be books that must be read, but books that it would be interesting to read, or books that have historical value that is best appreciated by reading. "Canon" is given too much weight, too much importance, too much heft. Reading widely within and outside of your preferred genre, which is what I do, is, in my opinion, more valuable than trying to read a list of classics.

For my part, I hope my canon is always a growing thing, a changing thing, a living thing, never complete, never fixed. I hope that it's something I am always finding and discovering -- and never found or discovered.

(EDIT: Sarah Gailey's pronouns are they/them. The original version of this post incorrectly used she/her.)