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Jane Espenson and Brad Bell's Picks
Jane Espenson and Brad Bell's PicksJane Espenson is a writer/producer best known for her work in television on shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, The O.C., Gilmore Girls, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones and, currently ABC's Once Upon A Time. Brad Bell co-authored Husbands: The Comic with Jane Espenson, in addition to serving as co-writer, Executive Producer, and star of the sitcom version of Husbands, for which Bell has won acting and writing awards. Check out their recommendations below!
Her Picks
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 1
This is the issue that launched the post-broadcast life for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It features that pure Joss style that the rest of us aim for. Start here and keep on reading through season 8 and 9 for the continuing story of Buffy. Note that one thing the books do supremely well is tell stories that would not have been easy to film.
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A non-fiction book in which the author travels the world twice, first in luxury as a travel writer, then on a mission to meet people in the developing world who have benefitted from micro-lending. Funny, moving, insightful, addictive.
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Gaiman is obviously the author of many famous novels and graphic novels, and penned the introduction to the Husbands comic as well. I chose this book from among his many works because I love the scope and ambition of it, and because it features something I would have thought impossible: a protagonist who is compelling while remaining largely a cipher. Masterful.
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An odd and quirkly little novel with an unreliable narrator. It reads like Nabokov only more so. I devoured this book.
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A stunner of a book from 1486. The title means "Hammer of the Witches" and it is essentially a user's manual for the prosecution of witches. Oddly readable, lurching between risible and horrifying. You won't believe what you're reading.
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A dystopian future novel about a woman living in a world in which women have been stripped of most rights. Chilling, well-observed, and so very real. This is sci fi for people who don't think they like sci fi.
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A novel by the author of Remains of the Day, which I loved. I picked up Never Let Me Go and read it without knowing anything about it - not even its literary genre. I suggest you do the same.
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Pride and Prejudice (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
A must-read for anyone who knows people. Jane Austen was such a sharp and humorous observer of human nature that her characters and dialog remain sharp and modern and gorgeously human after all these years. If you encountered this first as required reading, try coming back to it as leisure-time joy.
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His Picks
I love to see classic narrative tropes reinvented. In fact, both the comic book and sitcom versions of Husbands employ many familiar devices, made unique by a modern context. Chew is a wickedly funny and unique reboot of the "psychic cop" yarn, telling the story of a detective with clairvoyant powers. However, he can only access his psychic insight by eating the objects he wishes to learn about.
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Apparently, I have a thing for anthropomorphism. David Sedaris' collection of short stories is a social criticism that features various woodland fauna and captures all the tenderness, heartbreak, vulgarity, and nonsense of the human experience -- far better than any story about people ever could.
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Speaking of allegories, one of my favorite "Sci-Fi cautionary allegory" tales is The Giver, a young adult novel that could be described as a '90s era Hunger Games. Because it's written for a younger audience, The Giver has an elegant simplicity. It's an easily digestible Fahrenheit 451 or Nineteen Eighty Four, but with just as much relevance, poignancy, and mastery of humanity's despair/hope dichotomy.
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Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince)
The Little Prince continues to be a timeless fantasy story, remaining as profound as it is whimsical. My aunt gave a copy to my mother the day I was born, so I spent my childhood exploring asteroids, tending to a vain rose, and offering friendship to a downed pilot in the Sahara. What I couldn't articulate then was how much I related to the loneliness, the search for something greater, and the realization that adulthood would be a bittersweet freedom.
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Written as an abecedarian style children's story, Gorey's adorably macabre tale of twenty six children (and their untimely deaths) is all at once a beautiful blend of words and images, as well as a biting criticism of parental overprotection. Of course, this was also something I couldn't articulate when I fell in love with it as a child. All I knew was, rather than being creeped out by the creepy, Gorey got a kick out of it. To me, there was just nothing cooler.
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House of Leaves is not an easy read. The footnotes have footnotes…toenotes? Jonny, the drug addled, schizophrenic, or possibly demon-tormented narrator discovers an academic analysis of a documentary about a suburban home that mysteriously develops new rooms and corridors, which extend for thousands of feet on the interior, while the exterior impossibly remains the same size. Like the home's endless labyrinth of dark hallways and mysterious growls, House of Leaves is a dizzying, addictive metaphor about self destruction and the descent into madness.
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Joe the Barbarian is a simple-but-impossible task story, with a real-world framing device that transports Joe, a young diabetic, into a hallucinatory realm of fantasy. As Joe's blood sugar drops, his journey to find a can of soda becomes an epic quest of monsters and mayhem.
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