My Other Great Love: Literature
[Off-Topic] On writing, my history as a writer and my favourite books.
If you write for pleasure long enough, you’ll eventually be asked the question: why do you write?
I’ve delved into a whole plethora of different topics here on Scanlines’ Journal, from video games to Formula One and CRT TV’s but until now I’ve never discussed the one thing that unites us all on this platform, as a species even: the written word. Every great civilisation recorded their legacy in writing, you could even say that writing is civilisation. We are not the first to write and neither will we be the last.
Today, I’m deviating from scheduled programming: not just the gaming but the goth article too (next month, probably) to bring you a particularly bookish edition of Scanlines’ Journal where I’m going to speak a little more personally than usual, share some of my favourite page turners and discuss the long series of events that led to me taking up the keyboard and the word processor rather than a tennis racquet or having a social life.
The Big Question
Why do I write?
I have a million different answers for this question, all of them true and in typical me fashion, I’m going to put some of them in a sentence that goes on for far too long and lists too many items.
I was born in 2000 and grew up in a golden age for British children’s literature: Horrid Henry, Tracey Beaker and of course, Harry Potter all appeared in the 1990’s and were brought to life in successful film and TV adaptations in the 2000’s leading to new editions of the books with colourful illustrations; there were no smart phones yet and the internet was confined to a cubby-hole under the stairs on a PC only my dad ever used, so the only way to escape reality was the PS2 or the beige pages of a book. When you’re surrounded by great books and growing up in a West Midlands civil parish: the exact kind of leafy, peaceful, small-town English setting Tolkien based the Shire off, it’s difficult not to get inspired. I read voraciously. Greek myths, sanitised Old Testament stories for children, those Doctor Who choose your adventure books but my favourites were books by Roald Dahl.
Everyone has that author whose voice sounds like an old friend, that author who makes everything feel better, that author who you hear in the back of your head when you write, for me? That’s Roald Dahl. If I have to point to one author as my ‘why’ it’s him.
Of course, I graduated onto J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books as I got older and would stay up late into the night reading them with a lamp or night light.
I mentioned (more like, I revealed) a few weeks ago that I’m on the spectrum: not the ZX but the ‘tism, this is a disorder that eases with age but when I was younger I would get all sorts of tics, moments of being overwhelmed and short periods of dissociation; a read in the school library or outside in the Summer was always the perfect cure. Reading was the only thing that soothed my insomnia and stopped me from driving myself crazy.
I write in part. because I want my writing to bring others peace, like the words of Dahl, Rowling and the rest did for me.
Last reason and simplest of all: I write because I must. The Norse called it the Mead Of Poetry, the Greeks called it Apollo’s Gift and the Bible says the world and humanity were sculpted in God’s image: power, wisdom and love made-manifest. I’m no deity, neither have I a belly full of mead but I think, being made in God’s image, that will to create and express is in everyone; we all feel a compulsion to procreate but some of us have a very real need to create works of art, criticism and thought too. This isn’t a voluntary action for me, my brain gets full, my creative energy has nowhere to go, I have to write.
Literature might be the only scenario in the universe where we can create something from nothing, worlds and people that don’t exist are made material.
A Lover Not A Hater
Next, I want to write a brief section about criticism more specifically.
I get the impression sometimes, from restacks and whatnot, that I might be considered a harsh critic or opinionated… but the idea of criticism being harsh or opinion-centric writing is a bit alien to me. Isn’t all criticism, to some extent, an opinion? Sure, spaghetti shouldn’t be crunchy and the sauce shouldn’t taste of only salt but isn’t the acceptable extent of these flaws down to the individual? I’m shit at cooking, so I’ll drop the analogy. What makes criticism harsh? Is it tone and language? Or the extent to which the granular details are examined? I genuinely want to know damn it! Is it really that harsh to call things what they are?
To me, there is no ‘critical lens’ or a different mindset when I’m critiquing a game or some other piece of media, this is my natural thought process. I can’t fathom either enjoying something or hating it then not wanting to work out why.
Dissecting something piece by piece, evaluating every detail and studying what each cog in the machine does to elevate (or defile) the greater whole doesn’t tarnish my enjoyment, it enhances it. To me, critiquing a video game or a film or a book is like taking in that wonderful cross-section when you cut off a piece of cake or slice a burger in half, you get to assess, layer by layer, what fits, what doesn’t and what there should be more of.
Page Turners
I’ve waffled on for long enough, in no particular order here are some of my favourite and most formative novels, novellas and plays. Many of these I read as a child, others I came to appreciate through education and others I chose to seek out myself.
Going Solo by Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl wrote 2 autobiographies: Boy and Going Solo, the former exploring his school years and upbringing and the latter his early adulthood, particularly his Royal Air Force Service and time working for Shell in Africa. Going Solo is my favourite of the two and one of my favourite Roald Dahl books overall.
It’s been a very long time since I last read Going Solo: probably 17 years but there are moments from this book I still remember to this day. During Dahl’s time in Africa, he saved a woman who was being carried away by a lion, learned Swahili, survived a severe bout of malaria and had a local house servant: Mdisho, who was so loyal to him that he took it upon himself to behead a local German once hostilities broke out. Furthermore, what most people don’t realise about Dahl is that he wasn’t just a pilot in the RAF, he was a full-blown fighter ace and shot down 5 German planes over Athens.
Read Going Solo. I don’t want to spoil it all, it’s a wonderful book written in a way that’s suitable for children without compromising on the facts of Dahl’s life.
1984 by George Orwell
1984 Is a foundational pillar in the modern British literary canon and I’m happy to have read it in that formative 15-18 years age span when I was young and impressionable enough not to be fatigued with politics and political literature but simultaneously old enough to understand such topics.
I don’t want to veer too deep into hyperbole but 1984 is a book that makes you very awake to the mechanisms of control different groups and organisations in our world use and when you notice the parallels to this book, it always produces an uneasy feeling in the stomach. Orwell’s ‘newspeak’ and the re-writing of history is something I spot every day in our political discourse and in the news. Western-aligned countries are ‘governments’ and ‘states’ while others are ‘regimes’ and ‘establishments’ Eurasia and Eastasia-I mean, Russia and China, are framed as eternal foes and antitheses to our civilisation when we were allies in the Second World War less than 100 years ago; phrases like ‘New Normal’ ‘Foreign Intervention’ and ‘Special Military Operation’ become ubiquitous and sinister euphemisms overnight. I’m not taking sides here, I’m talking about the tools all those in power use.
On another note, many of Orwell’s predictions for Britain came true and his depiction of tyranny feels rooted in our culture; when discussing the literary canon of any country, it’s helpful to think about the ways in which a book is uniquely of that culture and in my opinion? 1984’s vision of dystopia could only have come from a Briton. The denizens of Airstrip One: 1984’s Great Britain (a political entity divorced from Europe and subservient to North America, something that was not true in 1949 but certainly is true today) aren’t kept in line with S.S meatheads or economic incentives but by nosy neighbours, armies of dour public servants and government departments with vague names and nebulous objectives.
The Tragedie of Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Macbeth, Romeo And Juliet, Othello… if you were schooled in the UK then there’s a 99% chance you’ve been exposed to one of the above works from William Shakespeare; Macbeth is my favourite. This tale of regicide and the descent into madness should be read by everybody.
When I was first made to read Shakespeare in school (already not the best way to experience a play) despite my love for literature, theatre (I acted at a community theatre and in secondary school productions for many years) and creative writing I just didn’t get Shakespeare. I would go over the same sentences over and over, wringing my grey matter dry for the tiniest drops of understanding, this continued for weeks and weeks until one day I had something of a hormonal, expletive-laden tantrum where I directed my ire both at the material for being so impenetrable and myself for not grasping what is a cornerstone of British culture. Thankfully, I had a great teacher who recognised that my outburst wasn’t an attempt to avoid work or a product of laziness but instead was born out of a genuine attempt at understanding. She wrote down the link to an actual Shakespeare performance on YouTube and gave me an absolute gem of advice: you don’t need to understand every word, it’s better to focus on the feeling and the intention conveyed by each scene.
I went, I watched and I understood. Shakespeare doesn’t speak to the brain, instead it speaks to the heart and soul. To enjoy Shakespeare, you have to give yourself to the rhythm and the beauty of the vintage language. My favourite version of this play is the 2010 Captain Pic-I mean-Patrick Stewart version.
UK Universities are gradually phasing out Shakespeare and Chaucer and including infantile trigger warnings to the texts left and plenty of ways to side-step reading the playwright’s work if you so desire. This is a national tragedy as far as I’m concerned and one of the reasons I quit my degree after the first year.
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Hopping across the sea now to Ireland we have another novel I deeply enjoy: Dracula, a true gothic classic.
Dracula is an epistolary novel which means it is told entirely though the medium of character’s written documents such as newspaper clippings, letters and diary entries; if you’ve never read Dracula, or any other epistolary novel before, then the best way I can describe it is as a book made up of Resident Evil notes. Dracula was published in the final years of the 19th century, a time of rapid technological advancement, the decline of the traditional landed nobility in Europe and of great anxiety about the world all this would produce. This is a novel that concerns itself not only with horror and chilling scares but with the conflict between the folk superstition and traditional knowledge of old with the rationalism and science of the new age.
Count Dracula is of course a timeless character, parodied, iterated and committed to film more times than anyone could reasonably count.
I thoroughly lament the rebranding of vampires in media from Dracula: an undead, blood-sucking parasite who hoards generations of treasure from his subjects and preys on attractive young women to the pretty boys we’ve had since Twilight. We seem to be in the midst of a bit of a gothic horror revival with the (rather unenjoyable) Nosferatu and the Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, which I haven’t seen yet, here’s hoping the traditional vampire is elevated beyond two hour long nepo baby vehicles.
The War Of The Worlds by H.G Wells
This is one novel I haven’t quite gotten round to finishing: I’m not the voracious reader I used to be, the appetite comes on suddenly and strongly, vanishing as quickly as it arrives but I enjoyed what I read so much that I decided it belongs here.
Wells’ story about a Martian invasion of the United Kingdom (often swapped to the United States in modern adaptations, the supplanters of the British Empire’s naval and colonial hegemony) just like Dracula, is emblematic of that fin de siècle feeling in literature: that unease at the dawning 20th century and what the rise of new powers, particularly Germany would bring.
The War Of The Worlds was prophetic. Wells’ vision of an advanced, highly mechanised invader routing the armies of Britain came to pass a few decades later in Northern France and the columns of refugees written of in this novel were seen all over Europe; France herself was fully occupied, as Britain is by the Martians and the aliens’ mass incarceration and industrial murder of humans bears an unsettling resemblance to the Holocaust.
Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 4 times but never won it, based on what I’ve read? That’s a damn shame.
The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard
This gory paving slab of a book is a huge anthology containing all of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian short stories and novels, a universe I got into after loving the 1982 classic Schwarzenegger film.
I read a fantastic article recently by Kailani B. mulling over the idea of an ‘American Tolkien’ and whether one has, can or even should exist; Robert E. Howard is the closest we’ve got. Like Tolkien, the world of Conan is set in a fantasy pre-history where many of the nations and polities are supposed to be primordial versions of real world civilisations but unlike Tolkien’s Aragorn, Conan is not the Christ of this world… he’s more like Genghis Khan: a roving warlord prophesised to conquer the Kingdom of Aquilonia and rule it thereafter. Conan also takes on a more Classical Antiquity feel than Tolkien’s Medieval Middle Earth: a name that was itself, derived from medieval Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Howard’s Conan stories aren’t exactly considered high literature, they often come with partially nude women on the front, fawning over the warrior as he’s moments away from eviscerating an opponent but who cares? Howard’s prose is pleasant, the stories are action-packed and Conan is a great character. The Chronicles span Conan’s entire life and he has more depth than the reputation might suggest, he comes to rule Aquilonia and is feared by his enemies but internally, the Cimmerian knows his faculties are declining and longs for the days of his youth, free of politics and of courts and advisors.
Legends And Myths Of Ancient Greece by Nikolai Kun
Quite a few years ago, I told a friend how I grew up reading Greek myths and I was working hard to get to university to study a combined English Lit. and Russian degree, a few weeks later, just after my birthday, I got this book in the mail. It stands as one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received.
Nikolai Kun was a prominent Russian historian and educator in the late empire and early Soviet Union, he lived in Rome for 2 years where he lectured on Greek and Roman classics and later in life, he would be a contributor to the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia; this particular book was published first in 1914 and has been popular since: his most enduring legacy.
Nothing expands your vocabulary quite like reading does. If I feel my Russian is getting a bit rusty or I want to learn some new, more interesting adjectives then a quick read of this book soon sets me right. What most people don’t get about learning a language is that it’s a snowball effect; the more you understand, the more you can infer. You might not speak a single word of Russian but if I tell you that we put salt and perets on our food, you can now infer what that word means and bang! You know how to say pepper in Russian… my point is that I know these Greek myths and Russian well-enough to learn by inference and when you get to a certain level of proficiency, the process gets fun like that, so if you’re learning a language this year, don’t give up.
Various Lyrics by Aleksandr Pushkin
I often tell people interested in Russian literature that Dostoyevsky is the best Russian author if you ask a Western European but most Russians you ask would probably tell you that Pushkin is Russia’s greatest literary mind.
Lyrics are short, sometimes musical poems where the author talks about personal thoughts and feelings; Pushkin wrote over 700 of these things. I’m not much of a poetry reader but Pushkin’s charisma and the sincerity of his voice transcend language and time; his work is the only literature I’ve ever read that has genuinely made me laugh, alone, in my room, looking at ink printed on paper.
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I see a lot of love Dostoyevsky on Substack and I get it, his works are rich, deep and thought provoking but along with Tolstoy: the other Russian literary titan the West reads a lot, I think this causes people to have a very bleak and limited view of Russian literature. It isn’t all poverty and gloom and murder, some of this stuff is fun! Most people who haven’t had much contact with Russians in my experience assume them to be grey, oppressed and conformist but Pushkin is a better reflection of what I would call real Russian culture: often being deeply unserious and an almost genetic gift for taking the piss out of things that are foolish.
Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev’s Fathers And Sons, published in 1862, was the first novel to break out of the Russian intellectual sphere and find widespread appeal in Western circles. Throughout European history, Russia (despite speaking a European language, following Christianity and being located in Europe) found itself religiously, ethnically and politically othered, a state of affairs that didn’t really change until Peter the Great in the early 1700’s. Turgenev paved the way for Russian literature to be considered among the highest canons in Europe later, in the 19th century.
Fathers And Sons is a story about generational and class conflict in 19th century Russia: between the traditional landed power in Russia, the Nihilists and the Liberals, both seeking to effect change based on Western ideals. This is another book that became prophetic as the inflow of Western ideas and young men looking to change the nation drove massive unrest and political chaos in late Imperial Russia: so much unrest that over a million soldiers died during peace time; these were not standard casualties like missing or injured soldiers, these were deaths. Turgenev had a desire to understand this new generation, Fathers And Sons came about of that.
The Liberals were able to effect positive political and economic change in Russia but the revolutionary fervour and atmosphere of rebellion stoked by the Nihilists laid the perfect foundations for the later growth of Bolshevism and the First World War unsteadied the political structure enough for it to be collapsed.
Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
Here we have it, my final book on the list: Dmitry Glukhovsky’s 2002 post-apocalyptic horror classic: Metro 2033. This book enjoyed widespread popularity in Russia and the rest of Europe but wasn’t translated into English until 2010 to coincide with the release of its video game adaptation of the same name.
Metro 2033 tells the story of Artyom: a young lad living in the Moscow Metro’s VDNKh station (often named Exhibition in English) after a nuclear war. Life in the Metro is brutal: people don’t live long, children are rarely born and if so are often struck with horrible birth defects and exist as weak, pale little things in need of more care than this new world can provide, the different factions of the Metro wage petty skirmishes over the scant resources and left, tunnel collapses threaten to cut off these oases of humanity from each other at any moment and to make matters worse, a new kind of mutant has appeared, inflicting madness and slowly killing the people of VDNKh. After a close ally vanishes, Artyom is despatched to the far away station of Polis to get help.
Metro 2033: both the book and video game were formative experiences for me, I’m going to discuss the video game another time but I read this book at age 16 and found myself identifying with Artyom a lot: his inexperience, his perseverance despite the horrors of the Metro and the fragility of life seen in the novel stuck with me.
I don’t want to spoil it but the ending is a brutal, sobering gut-punch.
Things To Come
I’ve been writing stories all my life with the dream of getting published; I finished my first novel at age 12 and wrote several more as a teen, honing my craft even as I knew nobody so young would be taken seriously. In the years since, I lost faith in traditional publishing and largely gave up on that dream… until now.
Seeing other people’s fiction on Substack has led me to believe that there might just be a place for my work here too.
I don’t want to commit to anything right now, especially as Scanlines’ Journal takes a lot of time and effort to maintain but let it be known: I’m starting a second publication for fiction and some time in the near future, I will begin uploading there. It might be fantasy, it might be sci-fi, it might be a short story here and there… I don’t have a clue yet but I hope you’ll join me when the time comes to send it out into the world.
Thank you very much for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed today’s post, as always I’ll be happy to chat in the comments below and please like and subscribe to the Journal for more.
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As a fellow bookish child, I really enjoyed this. It’s interesting what shapes us and how that changes over the years. And I agree with your teacher, Shakespeare is much better when it’s experienced rather than read in a classroom! As I read with my son now, I feel kid’s books are very much the same. There’s something about hearing written word read aloud that really transforms it into something special.
Look forward to your other writing!
Thank you for sharing this with us. I really enjoy learning about the books that taught people to love to read/write.