Buffy non-fiction

O

OldSwede

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I know this is supposed to be a forum about the novels, but since the thread on the "Watcher's guides" was allowed, I'll go on anyway.

Besides these guides, any other non-fiction you would recommend?

I've read "Why Buffy matters: The Art of Buffy the vampire slayer" by Rhonda Wilcox. I really enjoyed it, but it's a bit more academic than the "guide" type of books. Wilcox discusses Buffy (and a few particular episodes in detail) like she would Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot or Dickens (and pointing out the references to these authors in the script). The book opened my eyes to the fact that the show isn't just entertainment, it is really art, and worthy of such discussion for many years to come.

And I've read "What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide" by Jana Riess. She discusses the show more from the angle of moral issues and religious symbolism, and it's actually more interesting than it may sound. Or at least I thought so!

I just got "Bite me! The unofficial guide to Buffy the vampire slayer" (new edition covering all seasons) by Nikki Stafford. Looks good, with episode summaries making it function like a comprehensive Watcher's guide.

So, any other non-fiction books you would recommend?
 
The Monster Book Still haven´t read much of it. But it seems really good. And even though it´s not a "reading book" I´m glad to have The Official Sunnydale High Yearbook in the bookshelf. And if you like "Bite me!" you just might as well look up Once Bitten Personally I have them both along with the Watcher´s guides and "Angel: The casefiles".

It´s easier to post links than try to describe them myself. And I recomend you to read the reviews.

And I´m definitely buying "Why Buffy matters" at some point.
 
O
OldSwede
Read the review of Monster book that says it will change your life forever. Sounds like a must...
Odd, I'd never have described the tales of Buffy The Vampire Slayer as the truth.
Fictional yes, but not non-fiction.
 
O
OldSwede
Yes, but no-one said otherwise, or?
I have "Bite Me!",but I also have 2 copies of Keith Topping's "Slayer"-another unauthorized guide to BtVS. The first one goes through season 3,while the second ends at season 5. It's always nice to hear someone else's take on the eps-and he's just as exhaustive as Bite Me! is,if not more so.
 
OldSwede said:
And I've read "What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide" by Jana Riess. She discusses the show more from the angle of moral issues and religious symbolism, and it's actually more interesting than it may sound. Or at least I thought so!
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I did too. I liked this book a lot, and I used it when I wrote a paper a few years back on BtVS and feminism "“ the paper isn't that great 'cause it was in English and I didn't know anything about academic writing at the time (as if I do now?). Anyways, the book helped me a lot. I also wish I had read the book before I wrote my paper in high school on BtVS as a substitute for religion 😉

I've also read teh "Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale" one. I know I used that one too, in that essay thingy, but I can't honestly remember exactly what was in which book..

Other than that... I've read at least parts of the Slayer Slang book. As I remember it was a fun read...
 
Well, I should check out the Philosophy book for sure, then! There is also the online journal Slayage which I plan to go through when I get back to work and have more time...

I got the Bite me! book, one advantage of becoming an addict late is that I could get the edition covering all seasons right away, instead of having to buy several editions...

I also found the box of three watcher's guides cheap from someone selling via Amazon UK. The postage to Sweden was much more than the box, but still cheaper than buying a single guide in Sweden.
 
This is something I should do. I've never read any of the non-fiction Buffy books. I might check and see if my Library has them.

But tell me, because I'm a very fond reader of fiction, are the non-fiction books more a study of the show and the cult it created, or does it delve into all that classical, you want to fall asleep by the second page because you had to keep rereading the big words and you could care less about all those philosophers type of thing? 🙂
 
I've found that many people who write about BtVS tend to have a pretty entertaining language – I guess the show inspire them to write that way. So they're usually not too difficult, even for someone like me who isn't – and certainly wasn't – used to reading academic English. The stuff I have read have pretty much been a fun read.
 
I love reading these kind of books. Right now, the books I have-

Seven Seasons of Buffy
Five Seasons of Angel
What Would Buffy Do?
The Psychology of Joss Whedon
Reading the Vampire Slayer
Once Bitten
Bite Me!
Slayer
Hollywood Vampire
The Watcher's Guide Vol 1.
Angel-The Casefiles Vol 1.

All of them are great reads but I would especially recommend What Would Buffy Do? and both Seven Seasons of Buffy and Five Seasons of Angel. The Psychology of Joss Whedon goes a better deeper than the others and strays a bit from the shows but is a good read nonetheless

Out of the episode guide type books-Slayer and Hollywood Vampire are written by Keith Topping and Bite Me! and Once Bitten by Nikki Stafford. I can't decide which one of these writers I like the best but Nikki Stafford's books are a lot better presented and are a wee bit more concentrated on reviewing episdodes whereas the Keith Topping guides have less review and more details - a bit like a Buffy and Angel encylopedia, if you ever need to know what song was used in an episode, any references you might have missed or where you've seen a certain actor before, this will tell you.

Personally, I prefer the unofficial stuff to the Watcher's Guides and so on.
 
i have 70ish buffy books mix of story's and things like the watchers guides and unofficial guides to the seasons and bite me i also have around 8 angel book.sadly i'm a slow reader and have yet to read most of them but am slowly gettin through them. my faves so far are chaos bleeds,doomsday deck, ghoul trouble, crossings and chosen.still got alot more to read yet so may be new ones to be added lolz. i am saving tempted champions for my holiday which i go on in a couple of weeks
 
Bluebird said:
Personally, I prefer the unofficial stuff to the Watcher's Guides and so on.
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I started with the Watchers' Guides, so I thought they were great. Recently though I started reading some unofficial stuff in Waterstones, and I see what you mean. It had a less freindly tone. Which is a good thing. The Watchers' guides at times seemed a little bit like an adult trying to be "down with the kids" and was overley informal. Great content, but I think I'll start getting some of the other stuff. Too bad they're all not as cheap though...
 
Bluebird
Bluebird
Yeah, they are quite expensive - I got most of mine second and off Amazon or ebay.
i have yet to read all the any of the watchers guides although i own them all, i prefer reading the story books but am a slow reader however i do love to read the other book and the last one i was looking at was the monster book which was pretty cool i thought giving you the low down on the monsters from the show and also the real mytholgy behind the ideas 2 which was kool. i must get that book out agen now i've spoke about it fancy having a read of it agen. any 1 else got it? and what r ur fave story books mine are chaos bleeds,doomsday deck, ghoul trouble, crossings and chosen
 
I have Watchers Guide volume 2 and I got it quite cheap. £1.49 in a charity shop. They had Volume 1 but they only had 1 copy and my mate bought it before I could.
 
Reading the Vampire Slayer

When I was in London this summer I went to the Forbidden planet book store to see what they had in terms of Buffy litterature. To my surprise it wasn't much (not counting comics), only one shelf of novels and three or four non-fiction books. The SF store in Stockholm has easily five times as much, so I should either be disappointed or glad that I have good access to books at home. I buy some of them there and some off the net, but I like to look them through before deciding.

I did pick up "Reading the vampire slayer", edited by Roz Kaveney. This is a new edition covering all of Buffy and the first four seasons of Angel. Chapters have been thrown out from the first edition and new chapters put in.

I can recommend it, especially to those who enjoy the more academic Buffyverse litterature. Kaveney's own chapter is easy to read, interesting and fun, along the line of the various unofficial guides. The last chapter by Ian Shuttleworth about the actors and acting in Buffy likewise, and of course the interviews with Jane Espenson and Steven S. DeKnight. Those parts can be recommended to anyone. In addition there are essays on the role of Californian themes in Buffy and Angel, about gender issues, sexuality and feminism, the roots of the mythology of Buffy and Angel and on the "family" concept in the two shows. Some of them were not really easy reading (SpikedBuffy take warning), but there is certainly a gem to be found here and there.
 
Hey guys. I have read quite a few academic Buffy and Angel related books and they vary majorly in quality. A few of them are quite dense, but worth the read if you are interested in the literary aspect of BtVS.

If you're up for a smaller commitment, try reading one of the fabulous articles on Slayage. These are all written by college professors in their free time, and often read at the International Slayage Conference every year.

As is the case with everything, not every BtVS or AtS non-fiction is good.

Since there are so many, I'll just reccommend two:

Reading Angel - This is the first non-fiction collection of articles focusing on AtS entirely. Contains a very interesting article called "The Dark Avenger" all about Angel's similarities to Batman. This is put together by Stacy Abbott, the person who edits Slayage.

Televised Morality - The Case for Buffy The Vampire Slayer - Quite dense but very well-written. This takes a philosophical slant. This book is hard to find though - sorry! This guy makes the case that television (in this case, Buffy) helps not only to shape but also to reinforce the pubics moral values.

There are quite a few other books published about Buffy. Check this index.
There's Buffy non-fiction looking at the show from a sociological perspective, literary, television studies, gender studies, whatever you're interested in, I bet there's lots written about it reagrding BtVS!

Hope this helped!

Spikes fictional thesis - Very entertaining and creative 🙂 This is a fan wirtten "Thesis" based on the episode "Checkpoint" where Lydia from the Watchers Council mentions how she did her thesis on Spike.
 
Hi Joan, thanks for the link to the index, I hadn't seen that one!
Since I started this thread, I have read quite a few more of the academic books, and I haven't tired of them yet. As you say, the vary in quality, but I always find something of interest.
Most recently, I read "The psychology of Joss Whedon", edited by Joy Davidson. It's not really about Whedonwerse as much as about various brands of psychology - illustrated using Whedonverse-, but interesting nonetheless.
At the moment I'm reading "The existential Joss Whedon" by J.M. Richardson and J. Douglas Rabb, and I'm really enjoying it. The authors (very thoroughly!) make the case that the philosophy of Whedonverse is a brand of existentialism with close parallells to Dostoevsky, Shestov and Kirkegaard (and in some respects to Sartre). In short (too short to avoid misunderstanding, so read the book if you're interested), we are free to choose our own actions (in particular good over evil), we are thus totally responsible for our own choices and can't rely on any set of rules imposed from the outside, at least not without reflection. In making this argument, the authors dissect the text of Buffy and the rest of the Whedonverse to a degree which really took me to new levels of understanding, and I'm only at Chapter four... There are some similarities to Jana Riess' "What would Buffy do?", in that it discusses issues of morality, but this is a much more dense book, especially the first chapter (rather unfortunately). Get through that one, and I think you will be rewarded!
 
I too have read most of The Psychology of Joss Whedon. I thought the "Darn Your Sinister Attraction!" and "There's My Boy..." articles were quite interesting...the rest? Eh. I'm more interested in the literary perspective 🙂 But a great essay compilation non the less!
 
O
OldSwede
Agreeing...
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