Saturday book club post.: seanan

Saturday book club post.

It seems like there are books that everybody hears about. I don't mean books like Pride and Prejudice or The Great Gatsby, where you would have to be either dead or completely unfamiliar with English literature to have missed them; I mean books like World War Z, which even my non-zombie lovin' friends have heard of, or Twilight, which, God, you couldn't miss without stranding yourself on a desert island for the foreseeable future.

Because every group is essentially a sociological tide pool, shifting slightly whenever the tide comes in but still cross-contaminating itself at a remarkable rate, we also tend to have a somewhat distorted view of "everybody." I bet if you polled a sample size of, say, the readership of this journal, you'd discover that Rosemary and Rue was one of the best-known books of 2009. Why? Because I wrote it, and talk about it constantly, and you read this journal, hence exposing you to it on a constant basis. I'm a literary pathogen!

On a more localized scale, we loan books to our friends, talk books up to our friends, and constantly infect each other with our literary passions. In the last year, I have caused my friends to read I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Shivers, A Madness of Angels, the complete works of Kelley Armstrong, The Mermaid's Madness, The Enchantment Emporium, and Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded. These aren't the only good books I've read in the last year; they're just the ones new enough to still be available, and to have excited me with their sudden existence.

So here is today's challenge: Infect us with books we may not have heard of, but which are so damn AWESOME that it verges on a crime that more people don't know about them. Go for out-of-print things (that's why libraries and used bookstores exist), or the first books in series that started eight years ago. Bring enlightenment to the heathen, in the form of literary smallpox.

I'll start with five of my favorites, books I honestly think everyone should read (whether you enjoy them is up to you):

Hellspark, by Janet Kagen.
Mermaid's Song, by Alida Van Gorres.
Emergence, by David Palmer.
The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, by Tim Pratt.
Paper Moon, by Joe David Brown.

Authors, feel free to pimp your own work here; just get the word out, and let's see what we're not reading!

catnip13

May 22 2010, 16:09:04 UTC 7 years ago

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Jim Butcher: Dresden Files and Codex Alera
Tamora Pierce: Anything, but especially the Alanna books.
Gael Baudino: Gossamer Axe
David Eddings: Belgariad and Mallorean
Mercedes Lackey: The Last Herald Mage

seanan_mcguire

May 22 2010, 16:11:06 UTC 7 years ago

1) Love your icon.
2) It seems weird to me that you'd jump to Butcher as "books nobody's heard of but everybody should read." I thought he was on the NYT list?
3) GOD YES, Gael Baudino.

May 22 2010, 16:16:45 UTC 7 years ago

1) Thank you!
2) Apparently I haven't had enough coffee yet because I missed the "nobody's heard of" part, and just went with "everyone should read." I shall replace Jim Butcher with Robin McKinley, Beauty and Outlaws of Sherwood. Though anyone reading one of Butcher's series should also try the other. And then go get another cup of coffee.
3) I don't love everything by her, but that book is awesome, and sadly out of print, and the Strands of Starlight books are pretty good too.

janetmiles

May 29 2010, 01:41:22 UTC 7 years ago

Apparently the Blount County (TN) public library has never heard of Jim Butcher, for it has none, not one, of his books. Does have a few of Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series, though, which speaks well for the good taste of their collection development librarian.