what do you read?

[thanate]

Ok, so I have Words for jazzfish, but my brain is not quite in essay mode this week (as analytical functions have been co-opted by the readercon drama, which seems to have sorted itself out, and doll wing design) but I have a question for the masses.

I've been finally putting some effort into seeking out author/reader-related SF/F conventions (speaking of which-- anybody else want to contemplate CapClave?) and they're all full of guest authors I've never heard of. And while I'm entirely familiar with the concept that everyone who reads fantasy has the authors they read and the authors they always see on the shelves and never actually bring home with them, and the people who only have one book at the library and so unless you pick that up you'll never have heard of them (or if you forget that was who wrote that somewhat interesting book you read years ago...) Anyway, one of my goals for the next year or two is to finish reading all the fiction that I kept aside when shelving everything because it came out of my boxes and I hadn't read it yet. And there are a few people who grauwulf recommends I read that we've got in house as well.

But what I want to know is: what authors/books do you think are quintessential? Things that rocked your world, or that half of what you read afterwards seemed to refer back to, or just things that you couldn't imagine anybody not having read. Lists of names are fine, but if you have particular works or "this is why everybody should read this" that's excellent, too. Doesn't have to be SF/F, either, although I will probably be resistant to Russian authors or anti-communist themes since I've had enough of that sort of depressing and it makes me want to rip pages out.

So, thoughts?

Comments

[jazzfish]

CapClave: I could be convinced but nothing's particularly jumping out at me. Michael Swanwick, maybe. I've not yet decided whether I like Swanwick's work or not.

---

Quintessential:

I got most of my Required Reading out of the way early on, so I'm no longer sure what to recommend that "everyone" has read, or that everything plays off of, or whatever. (Other than Tolkien and Dune.) About all I've got is "this is amazing stuff and you should read it."

Gene Wolfe. Book of the New Sun is the standard recommendation. I found Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun much more readable. The Soldier books and the Wizard Knight duology are also excellent. Wolfe does things with viewpoint and memory and perception that one shouldn't be able to do in print, and makes them all readable.

Anything at all by John M. Ford, including his RPG work and Star Trek novels. Of particular note: his alt-history epic _The Dragon Waiting_ and _Heat of Fusion and Other Stories_.

(Coincidentally, I've a spare copy of a Tor Double featuring both Wolfe and JMF, should you wish. The JMF is more headache-inducing than most of his other stuff, but the Wolfe's actually pretty straightforward.)

Steven Brust's _Agyar_ astonishes me every time I read it. Do not go looking for plot summaries or reviews, they're guaranteed to spoil your enjoyment.

Raphael Carter's _The Fortunate Fall_ is dense and multilayered and incredibly sad. It's sort of post-cyberpunk, in that it's not cyberpunk but it's got a firm grounding in some of the conventions (and turns others on their heads). Also it has an AI language called Sapir and a strange hybrid human/AI language called KRIOL, which names amuse me in totally different ways.

And Emma Bull and eBear and The Phantom Tollbooth and "Bears Discover Fire" (by Terry Bisson) and Ted Chiang and Samuel R. Delany and UKL and and and.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

capclave-- indeed. I'm not completely positive I've read *any* of them, aside from a few chapters of a Catherine Asaro I completely failed to get into. But it's within commuting distance, so it's a much, well, smaller investment than Readercon and the like, and I'm interested to see what the programming looks like.

Wolfe-- I read the long sun ones (er, I think-- with Silk & decaying androids & crazy spaceship culture & recorded gods) and tried to go on and read the one with the planet they ended up on, and failed to get into it. The soldier ones are in my hardbacks to read pile, as I picked them up as library discards. Not sure how I feel about him in general, though; his characters seem overall worthy, but his worldview is a bit dark for me.

Ford-- haven't read his novels, although he wrote one of my favorite short stories (Green is the Color-- a Liavek shared world thing)

Brust & Delany are definitely on my names I know but haven't really read list-- any recs on the latter? Or for Emma Bull? (the only thing of hers I've read is Freedom & Necessity-- lettergame with Brust, oddly enough, which was interesting but I petered out about 30 pgs from the end.)

Are all of eBear's things Promethean novels? I found the one you gave me somewhat interesting, but not quite enough to pursue, and all the blurbs for others that I've looked at sounded very secret-society, which is definitely a turn-off for me.)

the Phantom Tollbooth is one that my parents read me early (although they feel that it's a fantastic beginning to which the last 2/3 fail to live up) but should probably put it on the re-read list since it's been years. LeGuin I just read some of, but after Left Hand of Darkness, I do want to go look up a few of the related novels.

Will definitely look into the others, thanks. :)

[jazzfish]

Wolfe: that's Long Sun, yeah. I'd forgotten that Short Sun, in addition to being rather cool, is kinda trippy and difficult to get into. I blazed straight on through all seven of those at a go. As for a dark worldview, he /is/ Catholic. . .

Ford: o yes, "Green is the Color" (and "A Cup of Worrynot Tea") are among the best things in Liavek. Those two (along with a longer story that didn't make it into the anthologies) can be found in _Casting Fortune_, sometimes findable in used bookstores.

Delany: um. He's really hard for me to recommend to people, just because of his style. If you're into short stories, the collection "Aye, and Gomorrah" is excellent, but skip the first one or two. Novels, _Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand_ is classic. You might dig the Neveryon books, of which I believe there are four (and the sort-of-thematic-companion Trouble on Triton).

Emma Bull: Read _War for the Oaks_, which along with Charles De Lint and Bordertown spawned the genre of urban fantasy. I adored _Bone Dance_ for its use of tarot and gender, and _Falcon_ for its Welshmen. _Territory_, her latest, is good, and possibly great if you're into Westerns. (I adored F&N; James and Susan are one of my very favorite fictional couples, ever.)

eBear: I'm kind of surprised you couldn't get into _Blood and Iron_, although if secret societies are a turn-off that's understandable. You might get on better with _All the Windwracked Stars_ or _Dust_. Both of them involve people who know more about what's going on than the main character, though.

[dante-di-pietro.livejournal.com]

Guns, Germs, and Steel -- Jared Diamond
Catch 22 -- Joseph Heller
A Separate Peace -- John Knowles
Amusing Ourselves to Death -- Neil Postman
The God Delusion -- Richard Dawkins
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
1984 -- George Orwell
The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Walden -- Henry David Thoreau
The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
God is Not Great -- Christopher Hitchens
The Divine Comedy -- Dante Alighieri (John Ciardi translation)
Paradise Lost -- John Milton
Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead -- Orson Scott Card
The Once and Future King -- T.H. White
Idylls of the King -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Fahrenheit 451-Ray Bradbury

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I've read about a third of these, and several more are in my various "to read" piles.

Have you read Charles Mann's 1491? I actually got both Guns Germs & Steel and Collapse as library books after my mother had finished with them and at a point when I didn't have nearly enough time to get all the way through them before they had to go back to the library, and haven't gotten back to either, but her impression (having read all the way through all three of the above) was that Diamond was drawing his conclusions without a lot of information that Mann presented in his retelling of things, to the point of seeming highly skewed. (and I, having actually read all of 1491, do highly recommend it.)

Also, do you have any other recommendations for Bradbury? I loved F451, have failed to be captivated by the beginning of Dandelion Wine, and am not sure what else I ought to try.

[astormorray.livejournal.com]

Gaiman/Pratchett - Good Omens.
Philip K. Dick - UBIK (so insanely insane!)
Dune, absolutely, it's one book I keep going back to, that and Pride and Predjudice.
Micheal Chabon - the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Daniel Pinkwater - The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror (also - Alan Mendelson, boy from Mars)

But, I don't read a lot of books these days, so... yeah. :/

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Heh, I would have said The Neddiad and Young Adult Novel for Pinkwater (and his wife did a couple lovely YA books, too)

I keep forgetting Kavalier & Clay, thank you. (and I do need to re-try Dune, since I read it at 12 or 14 and while I have some nice crisp concepts I do remember, I think I've forgotten half of what everyone else thinks is so exciting about it)