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!

mythos_amante

May 22 2010, 17:07:50 UTC 7 years ago Edited: May 22 2010, 17:13:40 UTC

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Jack of Kinrowan by Charles De Lint - a great faeries-in-modern-times tale
Madouc by Jack Vance - OMG I love so much of this man's writing!! This one's got faeries, too
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis - a time-travel love story with WONDERFUL descriptions and just fantastic writing.
The Stardust Voyages by Stephen Tall - SUPERB science fiction
The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley - an old time favorite I probably read at least once very year.

OK, yeah, people may have heard of these authors, but OMG I love them! I' also digging the feedback on your post and plan on utilizing peoples' suggestions on the next half price books run! THANKS ALL! :D <3!

bookblather

May 23 2010, 01:52:46 UTC 7 years ago

I haven't read To Say Nothing Of The Dog, but I just read The Doomsday Book and quite enjoyed it. Same universe?

May 23 2010, 15:34:31 UTC 7 years ago

Yes, same universe, though much more frivolous and silly and mostly set in the Victorian era with flowery, descriptive writing like in Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat" but yes, the same time-travelling group of historians. I think of all of Connie Willis's work, I like this novel the best (read Lincoln's dreams, Doomsday Book, and Passages so far, which were all quite good but very dark.) but of all her writing, I find her short stories to be the MOST enjoyable, so if you land your hands on a copy of Impossible Things or Miracle you might find a few stories that stick with you and make you think. There are both dark and light stories in those ones.

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