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Apr. 19th, 2018 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnPlease rec me books with dads who are major characters (important secondary character is fine) and for whom parenting is an important component of their character, with kids who are older at the time of canon (teenager or above). They don't need to be good parents, necessarily, and they can make horrible mistakes, but they should be (relatively?) non-abusive and clearly love their kid(s).
So far I've got
-Aral Vorkosigan (...I guess he's not super a main character any more, but he casts a pretty long shadow)
-Atticus Finch
-Andrew Wiggin
-Jean Valjean
-Reb Saunders and David Malter
-Van Hohenheim (taking the prize for not being a good parent and making horrible mistakes...)
...this is a much lower percentage of the books we own than I had thought it would be!
So far I've got
-Aral Vorkosigan (...I guess he's not super a main character any more, but he casts a pretty long shadow)
-Atticus Finch
-Andrew Wiggin
-Jean Valjean
-Reb Saunders and David Malter
-Van Hohenheim (taking the prize for not being a good parent and making horrible mistakes...)
...this is a much lower percentage of the books we own than I had thought it would be!
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Date: 2018-04-20 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-20 11:42 pm (UTC)Patrick Bronte in Dark Quartet is the most major character after the Bronte siblings--we even get his POV a few times--and the focus is on him as loving, non-abusive parent who sometimes makes mistakes. Dark Quartet is one of my all-time favorite books and highly recommended.
If you're a Star Trek fan (or this is a rec list for someone who is), Star Trek: Best Destiny requires familiarity with canon, but the focus is on George Kirk as father of teenage James Kirk. It's not one of my all-time favorites, but I do like it and own it.
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Date: 2018-04-21 09:05 pm (UTC)Yes, Star Trek fan here! (and it's a rec list for me, really, though some of these will probably end up going to my spouse as well). I haven't read that one. But that reminds me that The Pandora Principle has a pretty strong emphasis on Spock-as-Saavik's-father-figure -- have you read that one? (It is one of my all-time ST-novel favorites, but that is pretty much because it hits all my buttons. I've always wished Clowes had written, well, anything else, because I would have bought it.)
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Date: 2018-04-21 09:49 pm (UTC)I've recently been rereading some Star Trek novels, so I've downloaded the sample for The Pandora Principle onto my phone to see if I want to reread it. Will let you know what I think if so!
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Date: 2018-04-21 10:10 pm (UTC)(Besides Pandora Principle, I also loved the Duane books, particularly The Wounded Sky and the Rihannsu ones, and also The Final Reflection, though admittedly John M. Ford is something of a specialized taste. Second-tier favorites would be Ishmael, though I don't know anything about Here Come the Brides, and Spock's World, and I remember having a lot of confused shippy OT3 feelings about Triangle.)
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Date: 2018-04-22 01:51 am (UTC)First tier:
Best Destiny
Spock's World
Dwellers in the Crucible
Second tier:
The Kobayashi Maru
Ishmael--Ditto, I read this first in junior high, and periodically since then, and only learned it was a crossover in the last few years!
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Strangers From the Sky
Federation
Plus a few more that I have positive memories of that I want to reread to see if they're as good as I thought 10-15 years ago:
Sarek (I don't remember how much of the focus is on him as father, although I know it inevitably comes up with the ostracism of Spock.)
First Frontier
A Flag Full of Stars
Prime Directive
I may also come up with others if I keep rereading and decide I like something more now than I did then.
Oh, and I generally wasn't a TNG fan, though I watched the show, but for some reason I did quite like Imzadi and reread it occasionally..
admittedly John M. Ford is something of a specialized taste.
He is! And I've tried. I read the The Final Reflection during my high school "read everything that I can get my grubby hands on" phase, didn't remember anything about it, saw all the hype about it on the internet, reread it more recently, didn't get what all the excitement was about.
Hmm, I don't remember Triangle, though I know I read it. Might have to check that out.
The Wounded Sky didn't get me especially excited (again, I felt it was overhyped), but I liked it, and I especially liked K'tlk and was glad when she showed up again in Spock's World. I always wished there were more of her and Scotty.
Did you catch the plagiarism in Wounded Sky, though? I should hope it was unconscious (I certainly know how easy that is to do), but it's so blatant I'm surprised no one else has caught it (at least in my googling and reading reviews on Amazon, and believe me, I went looking):
A recorded voice spoke: Uhura’s.
“The whole thing,” she said, her voice quiet and pensive, “would have broken your heart.”
“Why?” said Lia Burke’s voice, equally quiet. “Was it so sad?” “Sad? No!” said Uhura.
And I'm sorry, but that's from Voyage of the Dawn Treader:
Lucy could only say, "It would break your heart." "Why," said I, "was it so sad?" "Sad! No," said Lucy.
Similarly, this passage in Spock's World, which maaaay be different enough not to be unconscious plagiarism? But the passage it reminded me of is so famous that it immediately raised a red flag, especially after the Dawn Treader example.
Surak: "Can you give life again to what you kill? Then be slow to take life."
Gandalf: "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement."
Given how popular both Narnia and LOTR are, I think they're probably the sort of thing Duane read over and over until the wording felt natural. But given how often *I've* reread them, the echoes were very striking to me.
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Date: 2018-04-22 06:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-22 02:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-22 01:59 pm (UTC)What I loved about John M. Ford -- and still like quite a lot, although I think if I read him for the first time now I might be much less patient with it -- is how all his books are like a puzzle, where he gives you enough clues to figure out what's going on but no more, and so it's always like a game to figure out what exactly happened (and sometimes it's taken me years) -- and how he's constantly making allusions and references -- and how he carefully works out his worldbuilding (though these days good worldbuilding is less hard to find, I feel).
I definitely thought the Lia-Uhura exchange was meant to be an allusion rather than plagiarism -- I feel like Duane did this a lot in the ST books, especially with Uhura, who's written as a fairly literate character (though I'll have to go back and look at them to see if I can find more examples).
The LOTR one is more unclear to me, although I remember also seeing that as a LOTR callback -- it seems to me that it might be making the point that this is such a fundamental principle that it comes up in both our society and in Vulcan's.
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Date: 2018-04-22 06:20 pm (UTC)It's the sort of thing that if I ran into it in a student's work when teaching at university, I'd be obliged to report it. And sprinkling verbatim, unattributed passages of copyrighted works throughout her work and making them appear to be her own words was the exact thing that got Cassandra Claire banned from FFN. That's why I'm trying to give the author the benefit of the doubt by saying it was probably unconscious.
I'd also argue that from a Watsonian perspective, the passage doesn't make sense as a conscious allusion on Uhura's part. It's not a quote, it's a dialogue between two people. Making it conscious would mean that Uhura said, "The whole thing would have broken your heart," expecting Lia to recognize it as a quote, and that Lia then responded by quoting the next line in the passage. "The whole thing would have broken your heart," on its own, is so generic that I'm skeptical that anyone would recognize it as a quote, especially since the passage in the source isn't--stop me if I'm wrong--*that* famous or widely quoted (unlike the Aeneid, which learned people have been quoting extensively for millennia). The only way I would expect one person to say, "The whole thing would have broken your heart," and their listener to say, "Why? Was it so sad?" and the first person to reply, "Sad? No," is if they both had the source text as a common reference and were in the habit of reciting dialogue from it.
Not impossible, given the characters in question, BUT, in context, making the Wounded Sky passage a recitation of a passage from an old book would undercut the intensity of the mood. Lewis's dialogue is a *good* way of concisely expressing the ineffable, which is exactly what's going on in Wounded Sky:
McCoy: "The common factors among all the reported experiences are initial discomfort—discomfort— secondary, I think, to everyone’s perception of loss of duration— and extreme vividness of experience, to the point where physical reality seems insufficient, or temporarily ephemeral, on recovery. Oh, and one other. A perception of the experience as desirable— even if it wasn’t exactly pleasant at the time— and a desire to return to it. A few people made the distinction that it wasn’t the experience specifically they desired to reenter, but the background— the context— and the emotions it inspired in them.” He touched a spot on the desk, and a recorded voice spoke: Uhura’s. “The whole thing,” she said, her voice quiet and pensive, “would have broken your heart.”
“Why?” said Lia Burke’s voice, equally quiet. “Was it so sad?” “Sad? No!” said Uhura— and the joy and longing in her voice were astonishing to hear.
“Evaluation,” Jim said. “Are these ‘experiences’ going to impair the crew’s ability to function?”
McCoy shook his head. “I have no idea, Jim. I see no such impairment at present. But some of them might be covering."
The moment you assume that dialogue is a quoted passage, and not an authentic, spontaneous attempt on Uhura's part to express her depth of feeling to someone who doesn't already understand what she experienced, the whole mood changes. The dialogue ceases to be the reaction of someone in the grip of strong emotion--"pensive", "joy", "longing"--and becomes an artificial, scripted performance. Putting myself in Lia's shoes, I can't imagine hearing a description like that from a friend, and replying with "Why? Was it so sad?", which sounds like a genuine question, while I was really quoting C.S. Lewis with the understanding that it wasn't sad. It doesn't make *sense* to me as how people behave.
What *does* make sense to me is that Duane was writing a passage about a ship's encounter with the extraordinary and reaching for the words to relate an experience similar to what C.S. Lewis had already related so well--and came up with the same words without realizing it.
The right way to do this, from both a literary perspective and an ethical one, would be to have had Uhura explicitly reference Lewis as a way to call attention to her own inability to put her feelings into words, while at the same time expressing that she was experiencing something much like what Lucy experienced. This is exactly what I did when describing what it felt like to have saved someone's life:
I don't really have emotion words for something of this scope. Except to quote Tolkien: "To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful."
I.e., if the whole passage had come from Uhura's lips instead of including an artificial-yet-genuine-sounding question from Lia, it would have worked for me, and it wouldn't have been plagiarism if it was obvious she was quoting someone else.
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Date: 2018-04-22 11:23 pm (UTC)I wouldn't think that an allusion put into the mouth of a character has to be understood as being made by that character. For example, when Aeneas says "Unwilling O Queen, did I depart from your...shore", he repeats word for word nearly an entire line of Catullus' translation of Callimachus' "Lock of Berenice" ("Unwilling, O Queen, did I depart from your head!"). Clearly Aeneas the character has not read Catullus, and cannot be aware of an event (the catasterism of the lock of hair of a Hellenistic queen) that is going to take place about 700 years in the future in for him. Whatever we make of that allusion (and it's a perplexing one!), it's present for the reader, who can see and make something out of the way that the author of this poem is connected to that other author and that other poem. I don't think allusions operate -- generally speaking -- on a Watsonian level. And it works so well for me -- at exactly the point where the characters are struggling to describe the ineffable, the author in a sense concedes that she can't do it justice either and resorts to a famous description from a work in the same genre, with roughly the same plot and themes.
Ovid apparently talked about this kind of allusion as "stealing, yes, but with the intent of being caught" [theft is the standard classical Latin metaphor used for plagiarism]. And that seems right, whether we take such intertexts as subconscious events that happened when an author landed on an apposite phrase from her reading without precisely knowing where it came from, or as deliberate "easter eggs" that she put there for the knowledgable reader to enjoy. With the Dawn Treader allusion, I'd think the latter, but, to be honest, I'm not terribly upset if it's the former, nor do I particularly want an author to add footnotes or an afterward listing all of the allusions in their text -- don't spoil the game for the readers and reviewers and critics! Fiction isn't the same as scholarly writing, in large part because the interpretative possibilities are left more open.
I have much the same feeling about much of the Cassandra Claire scandal, to be quite honest, although the extended passages, where page-long exchanges of dialogue and description were produced practically verbatim are perhaps in a different category. And there's definitely something to say about what happens when a deliberately allusive work moves beyond its intended readership of the people its quoted bits are directed at to a wider audience who takes the whole thing to be the "original" work of the author (and CC definitely cherished the reputation for witty dialogue). I don't know. The lines aren't entirely clear, but there definitely is a line somewhere. I'm not inclined to think that the Duane examples cross it, however, and I'm usually more excited than disconcerted when I find this kind of stealth quotation.
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Date: 2018-04-23 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-23 01:59 am (UTC)For me, I guess the dividing line comes down to whether the reader would reasonably be familiar with the quotation/allusion or not. (Which depends on the author, too. John M. Ford, since he came up earlier, basically expects familiarity with a much wider swath of literature, including e.g., Charles Williams, who isn't normally on the Western-canon list -- he is the reason I have read a whole bunch of Charles Williams now. Though he flags it by also having additional attributed quotes from Williams as epigraphs.) I feel like Duane can reasonably expect her audience to know Narnia and LOTR (in fact, earlier in Wounded Sky Harb is walking around in a simulation of the world "Lorien," with elanor in the grass, which isn't explicated any further).
I seem to remember the Cassie Clare thing being around two issues, one of which I think is serious and the other of which I don't. One was a bunch of unattributed Buffy (and other TV) quotations -- and I don't think that is at all a big deal because it's reasonable to expect her target audience would be able to spot those. Obviously not everyone, I read some of her stuff at the time and I hadn't watched any Buffy, but I was aware that it was sort of "geek cultural literacy." The other problem, and much more serious in my opinion, was that she had big unattributed parts from Pamela Dean's Secret Country novels, which in my opinion are not reasonable to expect a reader to be familiar with (unless she'd previously made a big deal out of those books and/or used them repeatedly with attributed quotations, as Ford does with Williams, which I don't think she did). (Even then I don't think that very small bits, like a phrase or two, would have bothered me, not in fanfic.
you should see my teenage MacGyver fanfic, omgBut this was much larger swathes of text.)That all being said, in Duane's case I think it is also very possible it was carelessness, because I've certainly had issues with Duane being careless before. I went to reread and I agree that it's definitely the case Watsonially that Uhura and Burke, themselves, weren't consciously referring to Narnia, whatever one might say Doylistically, and Duane seems not to do that elsewhere in the book (unless you count the Others saying "We are who are," which in any case was picked up on by McCoy and Spock even though the Others obviously didn't realize that their words were allusive). But I guess because Duane does do so many particularly-geek allusions, and because it's Narnia, and in particular a bit of Narnia that I would never be able to read as not Narnia (it's a pretty memorable bit, at least for me), it doesn't bother me because I would never have read it as Duane's words rather than Lewis's.
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Date: 2018-04-22 02:15 am (UTC)A Summer to Die (spoiler in the title: major character death) is a great book about a family consisting of mother, father, and two teenage daughters, but the parents are maybe a little less present than in some of the other examples? They're also fairly somewhat lacking in dimension, but definitely present, significant, and loving.
Scrolling through my Kindle for the umpteenth time today, I just remembered that two of the three major characters in Neal Stephenson's Interface are father and daughter, and the book is in large part about their relationship. Since the daughter is already a neurologist by page 1, it's less about his parenting and more about the relationship between father and daughter as adults, but maybe it counts? It is definitely my favorite Neal Stephenson book, and the only one with good characterization (I attribute that to the fact that there's a co-author listed).
I keep seeing Searching for Bobby Fischer in my Kindle list and reflecting that I wasn't a big fan of the book (which is non-fiction), but I loved the movie. (And I say this as someone who almost never watches movies and even more rarely likes them.) The kid is maybe a bit younger than you're looking for, seven, but he's a chess prodigy, and a major theme of the movie is the father's dilemmas about how to do a good job parenting a chess prodigy, so maybe that's different enough from your standard "raise seven-year-old" fathering skills to be interesting.
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Date: 2018-04-22 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-22 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-21 04:22 pm (UTC)Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman. Sooo good.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond, by Elizabeth George Speare. I'll always have a soft spot for Matthew.
At least the first part of Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress, and I would say Roger casts a long shadow, even after he's no longer around.
If adoptive fathers count, Creb in Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean Auel.
Not sure the fathers here are quite important enough to be what you're looking for, but I've personally found them memorable, and their parenting is an important component of their character:
The Giver, by Lois Lowry.
Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell.
Jackaroo, by Cynthia Voigt. (Which I think you've read, but I mention it for completeness' sake.)
Grania, by Morgan Llywelyn. I just love this book so much I can't not recommend it, even if Grania's father isn't the most important character.
Oh, and how could I have forgotten The Godfather?
If antagonists are okay, The Temple Dogs, by Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran, has another mob boss father.
Season of the Two-Heart, by Lois Duncan, is another of my favorite comfort reads that pushes Tillerman-like buttons. The book is mostly about families, and the father is somewhat on the fringes and not especially memorable, but to the extent that he's present, it's qua loving father who makes mistakes and grows and learns by the end of the story. I'm recommending it mostly because I would like to not be the only person I know who's read this book.
ETA: If you want me to elaborate on any of these, let me know!
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Date: 2018-04-21 09:08 pm (UTC)I have read Witch of Blackbird Pond -- how could I forget Matthew!! Such a great character. Also Roger from Beggars in Spain -- such a combination of fiercely loving his kid and making all kinds of fraught (and sometimes plain wrong) decisions. LOVE THESE. I honestly don't remember either the father or much of the plot (beyond the most most basic) of Jackaroo -- clearly time for another read.
Antagonists are definitely OK!
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Date: 2018-04-21 09:43 pm (UTC)Gwyn's father in Jackaroo isn't perhaps the most striking character in literature, but what I remembered is how much Voigt made me empathize with him. Rather like Maybeth--different personality, but somewhat sidelined character who's nonetheless very well (imo) depicted. Jackaroo is Voigt's only non-Tillerman book that I wholeheartedly love.
Caveats and trigger warnings for the ones you didn't mention having read:
Clan of the Cave Bear has graphic child rape. It also has long boring stretches. I like it mostly because it contains a few memorable scenes that have always stuck with me, mostly between Creb and his adoptive daughter Ayla. It's not one of my all-time favorites.
The Godfather and The Temple Dogs are full of violence: murder, domestic abuse, you name it. Also drug use. No graphic depictions of rape coming to mind (I reserve the right to think of some later), but definitely references to it, and prostitution. The bigger sticking point for some readers might be the The Temple Dogs' cookie cutter white savior narrative.
Speaking of white, Gone With the Wind is notoriously full of slavery and KKK justification. I have a whole unwritten post in my head as to why the book doesn't bother me despite that. It largely comes down to: the characters are racist, but the book itself is complex and three-dimensional enough that if you already know the reasons slavery/racism/etc. is bad, you can find them there--it's just that the author's not going to point them out for you. It is at least made super clear that these characters are not your role models. But given how the author beats you over the head with white people's justifications of slavery and makes you read between the lines for why they're wrong, I can toootally understand anyone not wanting to read a book that's set firmly in the POVs of slaveowners and that glamorizes the antebellum South. If I didn't already know about things like Stockholm Syndrome, I sure wouldn't get it out of this book.
Re fathers, I was thinking of Gerald (Scarlett's father) when I mentioned Gone with the Wind, especially in the beginning of the book, but it occurs to me that the focus of the last 20% or so is Rhett as a father, and how his overindulgent parenting techniques go horribly wrong.
Season of the Two Heart is another potentially problematic one: I am not an expert on 1960s Pueblo culture and cannot say whether the book depicts it fairly or not. I will say that the author goes out of her way to show a nuanced, complex picture of both Pueblo and white culture, and how the Pueblo culture (as depicted in the book) succeeds where the counterpoint white culture fails. I will also say that there have been plenty of cultures (and individuals) throughout history that have done the things the author is finding fault with when she depicts the Pueblo doing them, and that I largely agree with her that when people do such things, they are wrong. It made me wish Lois Duncan had written more books like this and less of her largely forgettable (IMO) paranormal thrillers.
Anansi Boys is just plain great, read it. :P If you like Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book has a good adoptive/in loco parentis father.
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Date: 2018-04-21 10:13 pm (UTC)Yes! You get where he's coming from, by the end, and why he does what he does, and he gets some great moments in there too. <3
I've seen Godfather (and loved the movie), so I get the warnings for that :) I know enough about Gone with the Wind that I am not surprised by any of that -- but now I'm surprised I never actually did read it, it sounds like the natural sort of thing I would have inhaled as a kid. (ETA: not because of the slavery/KKK, of course, but because of the antebellum South historical-ish etc.)
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Date: 2018-04-22 01:19 am (UTC)I reread When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit tonight and can now say that the father gets as much page time as Charles Ingalls, and in fact the story is about as similar as it gets, given the different setting (1930s Europe): fictionalized memoir depicting the author as a young girl and her close-knit family moving around, adapting to new places, and trying to make money stretch. (No food porn, alas.)
As you can tell by the fact that I read it in one go, it's a short, easy read. The protagonist is 9-11 eleven years old in the book, and her brother about 2 years older, so I think that meets your criteria. The book is aimed at children of about that age, 9-11, and stylistically probably most similar to The Banks of Plum Creek. It's probably the only book aimed at that age range that I constantly reread.
There are sequels, but I didn't really enjoy them. You might, though! Ditto The Giver.
Re Gone With the Wind: Scarlett's a teenager at the beginning when she's interacting with her father, but I remembered that Rhett's child is about 3-5, so she might fall outside the age range you're looking for. If you're into antebellum historical fiction, though, I can't recommend the book enough on its own merits.