SciFi and Fantasy everyone must read

I was looking for reading lists because it's been years since I worked in a bookstore and I have no idea what's good or bad and what's out there, and I don't think I have a hundred books laying around that I haven't read yet, and I found this one from the Guardian, which is more than the allotted ones I'm to read, but a good place to start to find ones that come recommended. The ones I've read will be bolded, but I don't think there's many of them:

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)

Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951) (tried to read this ages ago and it was... dry? Too difficult? I don't know, I was, like, eleven or twelve, and I know I didn't like it, and I haven't picked it up since.)

Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)

J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)

J.G. Ballard: Crash (1973)

J.G. Ballard: Millennium People (2003)

Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)

Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)

Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)

Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)

Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)

Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)

William Beckford: Vathek (1786)

Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)

Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)

Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)

Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)

Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)

Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)

Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)

William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)

Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)

Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)

Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)

Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)

Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)

Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)

Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)

Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)

Arthur C Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)

GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)

Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)

Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000) (this one comes very highly recommended from lots of friends)

Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)

Samuel R Delany: The Einstein Intersection (1967)

Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)

Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)

Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)

Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)

John Fowles: The Magus (1966)

Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)

Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)

William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)

William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)

Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)

M John Harrison: Light (2002)

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)

Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)

James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)

Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)

PD James: The Children of Men (1992)

Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)

Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)

Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)

Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)

Stephen King: The Shining (1977)

Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)

CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) (Book 1 at least)

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)

Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)

Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990)

Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)

MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)

David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)

Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)

Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)

Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)

Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)

Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)

Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)

China Miéville: The Scar (2002)

Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)

Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)

David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)

Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)

William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)

Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)

Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)

Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)

Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)

Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)

Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)

Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)

Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)

Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)

Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)

Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)

Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)

John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)

Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- ) (A few of them)

Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)

Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000) (Didn't like the feel or the tone of the first one, and haven't gone back to it.)

François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)

Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)

Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)

JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)

Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)

Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)

Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)

José Saramago: Blindness (1995)

Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)

Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)

Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)

Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)

JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)

JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)

Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)

Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)

Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)

Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)

Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)

HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)

HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)

TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)

Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)

Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)

Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)

John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)

John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)

Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

You know, alot of the ones I have read, I don't remember that much of. Maybe I'll go back and try again...

in-reading notes: green rider

The cover is classic fantasy-- a girl on a horse in a misty wood, another horse on the back cover following her... The book, so far, is just enough off the norm to make it interesting, but it's certainly not the best book ever. Karrigan is of indeterminant age, and that annoys me a little; sometimes she seems to be in her teens and near adulthood, and sometimes she seems to be kind of too young in her reactions, and nothing has said that she's considered immature, so there's no reason for her to sometimes be flighty or impulsive and other times not. And so far, things are just sort of happening to her while she stands by and lets them. She's opinionated enough in her head, but in action, she's not terribly bold, and that's hopefully something that will change, or this book will get annoying. It's not there yet.

And I don't know what sor tof a time-period it's set in, either. It has a Medieval feel to it, but there's a Victorian-feeling mannor house and bits of Renaissance-ish-ness that sort of all clash and don't feel unified-- I don't know if maybe she's just using the wrong descriptor words and I'm making the wrong associations, or if there really isn't a sensical timeframe, but the magic of the world seems to make sense, and that's something in it's favor. It feels like a first book. I think it is one. I wonder if she's got anything afterward, and if they're more cohesive? This one feels like a pale imitation of things like Ice & Fire and quest narratives and maybe Shadowmarch. It's probably not such a good idea to be so transparent about what you've read... I don't know. It feels... unfocused sometimes, a good idea but not quite the execution I'd like. Maybe I'm being too harsh; we'll see how it ends before I pass judgement.

in-reading notes: dead until dark

I loved True Blood, and I wanted to read the books it was based on, and so far, it seems like the first book is basically the same as the first season, but there's some differences, too: No Tara, for one, which makes some of the scenes where she's picking fights either much calmer or non-existent, and makes Jason less of a character overall, and there's alot less sex because of it. LaFayette is hardly there at all, not even mentioned until almost half way through the book, which means his drug-dealing subplots are gone / never existed. Bill is much darker and stranger and more opaque, and it's harder to tell why he likes Sookie then it is in the show. Terry was in Vietnam, not in Iraq, and is much older, and he and Arlene apparently had a fling once, which isn't in the show. It's not quite a chapter per episode, which sort of makes things seem a little fast when you're thinking of the show, but it makes sense to the pacing of the book and shows just how quickly things do happen-- in the show, it seems like more time passed between the Meeting and Gran's murder, for instance. And there's alot of discriptions that aren't the same at all: Sam look different, Bill looks different, Sheriff Dearborne, Mike the Coroner, everyone is about as different in description as they can be except Sookie-- but the characters are right. Pretty much spot-on. Eric is exactly the same so far, but Pam is supposed to have looked like a milkmaid, and may have been combined with another woman called the bouncer at the bar; in the show, it's the same one.

I'm liking the book, but it's like I've seen it all before because I have-- there's kind of a feeling that things might turn out different in the end because of the changes the show made, and that'd be pretty sweet, a nice payoff for reading the book. The unrelenting southerness gets a little annoying, but as they're largely commenting on that, I can deal. And I am enjoying the read so far.

book 7: city of bones by cassandra claire

I read alot. Even before I decided to read 100 books in a year, I read all the time, and as such, it's gotten a little hard to surprise me with a book, especially with YA, which seems to generally revel in the limitations of it's age-group. Or maybe I just put up less with bad writing, since I know how it can be better now?

City of Bones surpised me. All the time, at every turn. When I wrote the notes yesterday, I was half way through; I read most of the rest before work yesterday, a little more at bedtime, and the rest these past three hours-- even for me, that's a fast read. It was because it was easy to read. It never lulled in pacing, it always took the unexpected path in plot, and it always came out differently then I thought it would, even if I'd taken the time to worry about which way it was going, which I generally didn't because it was moving so quickly and brilliantly that I wanted to keep reading, each chapter pulling me into the next one perfectly. I'm not surprpised that Cassie Claire can write well, having read alot of her fanfic, but I'm surpised that stories that feel so real and so fresh still exist in the world. It gives me faith that there's still space for me in the genre-- and this one, though classed as YA, stands well with the rest of the supernatural genre. It deals with the adult themes that kids of fifteen and seventeen have to face in a clean and honest way, it handles the weirdness of a parallel world view with grace and balance, it navigates the horror of finding out things aren't as you thought and that parents often mess things up in unexpected ways with a clarity that's refreshing, and it even manages to tacke the ideas of heaven and hell a little bit, and recast them in a postmodern framework that will make sense to kids as well as it makes sense to me. There's a little geekiness, and an in-joke or two, there's reality in the world and it's characters, and there's that juxtaposition of beauty and horror that these sorts of books need to master to really work, and that Claire has down pat. It's as bloody as a vampire novel, sweet as a coming of age book, and it's solid. It's something you could go to New York and trace the pathways of, even if the places named don't even exist-- it feels like they do. It never pulls punches; in fact, it revels in the fact that things are hard, confusing, unexpected and often unwanted and unfair, and people have to push through them, and it comes out the other side changed forever, but reassuringly intact, at least for now. It's a damned good read.

I'm starving for the next one, and I only just finished this one half an hour ago.

in-reading notes: city of bones

I've been meaning to read this book for years, since I was an LJ fan of Cassie Claire after discovering the Very Secret Diaries and her wonderful potter-fic (there's a reference in one of the chapters that made me happy that I was a fan beforehand-- see if you can catch it). I don't know why I didn't pick it up before; I think it's just because I never saw it before-- until I was at some backwater WalMart with my brother, and they happened to have a really good (and cheap) specfic YA section, featuring all three of the books. I wish I could have afforded all of them, and I was reasonably sure I'd like them, having read some of her other stuff, but I couldn't get them all and I wanted to save what little money I had just in case I didn't like it inexplicably.

Now I wish I'd been able to get them all, because now I'll have to hunt them all down (probably on Amazon, where they'll cost more, since our walmart has nothing and our B&N leaves much to be desired), because I'm really loving this book.

The characters are all interesting, teenagers in a way that feels honest and real-- and best of all, makes sense. When you're actually a teen, all your reactions seem normal and honest, and when you're older you're all, like, what the crap was I thinking?? But these kids make sense, being kids and a weird world that shouldn't make sense to people so young, and they make do with what they have. I love Clary. I want to name a daughter after her in hopes that she'd be as strong and compassionate and understanding and persistent. All their interractions are interesting to me, and I'm not sure who I want to root for as my shippy little brain looks for an OTP to ship-- which is good, because it means the book isn't predictable. I'm sad I have to go to work later; it means I'll have to stop reading.

I've decided to read 100 books in the next year

Or, more specifically, in the year since my birthday, so I'm already a month and a half through it. So far, looking back through the book posts here and on the SciFi blog, and counting the three or four books I'm currently working on, I'm at ten, which I think is a good start. I write better when I'm reading.

Here's what I've got:

Odd and the Frost Giants

A Year of Living Biblically

The Line Between

Sunshine

The Blue Sword

The Green Rider

City of Bones

Anansi Boys

Blood Price

Little, Big

Grandma let us pick through the books she hasn't traded in yet and I got the following: Azimov - Second Foundation*, King - Hearts in Atlantis and Bag of Bones**, Britain - Green Rider***, Brown - Deception Point, Cooper - The Grey King. And I bought Harris - Dead Until Dark and Claire - City of Bones, both of which I haven't even seen here and have been wanting to read for ages.

*Which I hope is easier to read than Foundation was when I was twelve, because it bugs me that I never got through that book and I feel like I'm supposed to have read them, since Azimov is such a big name in SciFi...

**I've never been a big fan of King's splatter-gore type of scariness, but I think these are on the other side of his personality, where things are more thoughtful and creepy than gory and gross. I liked his On Writing, and I want to like his books, but the main ones just never got me.

***Which seems to be pretty good so far, if a bit like Song of Ice and Fire in so much as there's a massive magical wall at the north that keeps out bad stuff. I'm unsure of what the analagous time-period is, but that hasn't been a problem so far; it seems to be somewhere almost Victorian, with bits of Medieval thrown in to replace industrialization. Can you do Victoriana without industrialization? We'll see!

Sunshine, by Robin McKinley

This is the third time I've read this book this year-- which I never do. There's always another book to read, you know, and more from the same author that I haven't read yet. But this one is so worth it.

This is Robin McKinley's first almost-now novel (that I'm aware of), and it works just as well as her awesome other-world novels. Maybe because it kind of is an other world, even if it seems pretty much like ours at the beginning. Sunshine works at a bakery, making cinnamon rolls (which she mentions incessantly) and not doing much else, other than drinking tea and reading smutty vampire romances. Except, vampires are real, and almost nothing is known about them because people don't ever survive encountering them. And there was a war some years ago, which left alot of the world population dead, almost all the cities destroyed or emptied, and just about eliminated country living, because it left big 'bad spots' that crack people's psyches, as well as giving the countryside over to gouls and weres.

When she goes out to clear her head by a lake she used to visit as a kid, Sunshine is kidnapped and chained to a wall for two days in the company of a vampire her captors (also vampires) want to torture. Instead of being the last meal for him, he exercizes amazing self-control and they sort of get to know eachother-- and the stress reawakens her own transutation abilities that she hadn't used or thought of in decades. She cam change things that shouldn't be changable, and it allows them to escape, because part of the power is that she can shield a single vampire from the sun. Against all odds and all logic, she gets him out and he gets her home, and they go their separate ways, but not before he makes sure she won't die in her sleep, and not before he finds himself in her debt.

That first part is my favorite part of the book.

After this, there's alot of waiting, as she tries to heal from the post-traumatic stress of what happened, and wonders how she was able to do waht she does, and wonders whether she's tainted by demon blood and if that means she's going to go crazy. She goes back to work, and she deals with this vampire-inflicted wound that won't heal, and she doesn't know what else to do. This part could have been really dull, what with it mostly not going anywhere, but Sunshine is such an engaging character and the world is so clearly defined, I don't mind that nothin is happening. I want to read through it at the same pace Sunshine's thinking.

The second half of the book has her getting healed by the return of Con (the vampire), who she calls up accidentally when she's at her rope's end and doesn't know what else to do, and he discovers that the cut they gave her was poisoned-- and that it was supposed to poison him, except that he didn't give in and eat her. And it has her semi-recruited as an agent of SOF / Special Other Forces when she manages to not only sense a vampire nearby when no one else does, but to kill it with an ordinary table knife. They get her to help her friend track emails across this world's modified internet, trying to find the ones that are written by vampires, and she proves to be really good at it. So good at it that she learns how to travel through a sort of un-space between realities that apparently no one else has ever traveled through before. This comes in handy when it's her time to save Con, after he's depleted by his healing of her and can't save himself. And there's a moment there that's really really hot.

Then they go after the Big Bad and somehow manage to both win and survive, and the bond between them is fixed-- he chooses to stay with her even though he could leave if he wanted to, and she chooses to stay with him, because she's figured out that you can have it both ways. And I love that. I never really liked that the heroine has to always give up everything for her love, or that the hero has to give up his life for her; this way, they can keep their lives, keep themselves, and still share in whatever it is they have.

It's a great book. It's wandering and strange and weirdly paced, but all that serves to show how strange Sunshine's life is getting, rather than to make the story unreadable. It goes back to McKinley's fondness for the Beauty and the Beast trope, and sort of mixes the two up together, finding commonality in things that should be antitheses, and making it work. And I want to know what happens next. She doesn't do returns or sequils, and that makes me sad, because this is a story that still has things to say, still has chapters left-- but the fact that she'll probably never tell them sort of makes them special, like a favorite show that was canncelled after only one perfect season: there's nothing to make it less than the perfection it is, no other memories to foggy it up. And that's beautiful.

the line between, by peter s beagle

I love Peter S Beagle's stuff. Ever since I found out that my childhood favorite movie (The Last Unicorn) was based on a book, tracked it down, read it and loved it more than the movie, which is rare, I've been a loyal fan. So when I was at ICFA, and this book was just sitting there in the book room, looking sad with it's unremarkable cover, I had to get it. And I'm so glad I did.

It's a collection of short stories. The very first one is "Two Hearts" which I heard about ages ago and thought was in a different collection-- it's the sequil to The Last Unicorn, and it made me sob uncontrollably for half an hour. It was so worth it. I'll read it to my children, if I can ever get to the point where reading it doesn't make me blind with tears. But his unicorn stories always do that to me, and the fact that there's Schmendrick and Molly Grue, and the prince grown into a poor old king... It just undid me.

After that, there's a selection of lovely and charming tales. My favorites were: "Salt Wine" which is so strange and longing and feels really authentic, and leaves a sort of haunting feeling afterward. It made me think of one of my friend Jude's stories-- I don't remember if it's been published yet-- and of how I felt when I was little and read the original Little Mermaid before the Disney version existed. And it sort of felt like something Neil Gaiman might write, so maybe that's why I like his work, too. And at the end, there was "A Dance For Emilia" which is kind of silly and preposterous, but so full of honest sadness and love that it didn't matter and really struck home all the same. And there was one that was a sort of prequil to The InnKeeper's Song", which I haven't read yet, but now want to, because the world there is so strange and weird and I want to know more about it.

All of them have a little background before them, a little framework for understanding them and knowing what they mean, which is pretty great.

It's a lovely book, one to read slowly and really savor. I'm so glad I bought it.

a year of living biblically

This is a fun, witty, often funny, often touching and very personal look at how one agnostic man manages to navigate the wilds of religion. And it made me feel like a bad person. See, I stopped thinking of myself as a Christian a long time ago, and usually I'm fine with that. There was too much I never agreed with and never felt comfortable with... and apparently, alot of that wasn't what was actually in the bible so much as it was what people have added on since then. And when he explained why things were the way they were, why things mattered, alot of it made sense. Which made me thinkmaybe I should go through my belief system and be sure I was following all the things I thought I was a well as I could. I'm kind of a low-energy person, and I know there are things I feel I should be doing, but if they take effort, I tend to not do them.

I don't think this was a life-changing read. Maybe if it had had more time to go into things, more space to elaborate on ideas and define concepts and flesh out events that happened and how he and his family dealt with them, maybe it would have been. But as it was, it seemed like there wasn't alot of time given to any of the ideas-- there were too many rules in too little time, and the book was pretty long already. It was one of those reads where I kept thinking about it when I wasn't reading it, and where I kept going back to it, but once it was done, I think it didn't quite wrap up for me the way I was hoping... though I'm not sure waht I was hoping for.

A good book, though, and well worth the time and effort. I just wish there was a companion book, or a followup or something.

linky links: books edition wk26

China Mieville has a list of Five Things Someone Else Should Do, and some of them are really flippin' sweet story ideas. Which is why the comments were so full of people all ready for an idea exchange.

Twitterlit posts the first lines of books and such to get people to read more. Awesome. Because twitter itself kind of makes people read less.

A discussion of books about cute girls who kill monsters, in the spirit of Buffy. i'm totally adding to this list as soon as I can get this one book finished.

This is how I want my author-info page to look as I rework my website (slowly. slow as a glacier in summer).

An annotated list of books that launched nre specfic genres: Some of them I knew-- I mean, try not knowing about Neuromancer-- and some of them are entirely new to me, so I'll be tracing them down in my slow and random way.

Summer Reading from io9. Way more sexy than required reading in school. Maybe people wouldn't hate reading so much if the books forced upon them were sometimes more like Kusheil's Dart and less like Things Fall Apart.

Internet tipjars as a way to make a living writing? I think it's an awesome idea... but also depends on the kindness of people you can manage to reach through your webpage / facebook / etc, and I suck at that. but it's the sort of thing that feeds into my personal view that we should all tip for everything we appreciate. Like the book you just read? Send a dollar to the author. Think someone has a nice, well-behaved kid? Give the mom a fiver. Like someone's car or haircut or whatever? hand them a little tip. Just a dollar or a few coins each time, and everyone will always have a little spending money and money will stay mobile, and that's what we need right now!

Here's a story idea: Perpetual childhood. This girl is 16 years old, but looks 16 months, has the bones of a 10 year old, and may or may not be mentally stunted. She hasn't grown. What must that be like?

One day, I will be honored in National SF / F Writer's Day.

Yay linky links!