Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: geeky
  • Music: Girlyman, "Invite Me In."

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!
Tags: geekiness, making lists, reading things
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  • 224 comments
...go 1 level up... Expand

vixyish

May 22 2010, 16:47:39 UTC 7 years ago

Overall I liked the Paksenarrion series (though I didn't know there was a new one), but I could only just *barely* tolerate the levels of rape and torture. So, I'm just adding a trigger-warning in case people aren't able to take that kind of thing.

mephron

May 22 2010, 21:51:01 UTC 7 years ago

Yes, you're right, I should have mentioned that. Thank you.

And yes, there's a new one, although it's less about Paks and more about Kieri Phelan's issues with becoming king, and what happens as a result of things at the end of the last Deed book - an entire family hit with Attainder, and what happens with Phelan's lands since he can't hold them and be king of another country. It also has moments that could be rather triggery, and thus caution taken.