WG 2009-39 is about book recommendations. To be perfectly honest, most of the book recommendations I follow come in the form of books literally shoved into my hands by fellow BC in DC members. We get passionate sometimes, and more than once I’ve shown passing interest in a book, only to get a glowing “OMG you must read this”-style exclamation from whoever brought it. More often than not, I give it a try. And am rarely disappointed. I’ve come across several great authors this way, including Simon Singh, Neil Gaiman, and Catherine M. Petrini. Basically if a book looks interesting, regardless of genre, I’ll give it a shot.
Sometimes the books I read are a random find, such as the infrequent occasion when I catch a BookCrossing book in the wild, or if I happen to win it in a contest. I usually have a large number of to-be-read (TBR) books on my shelves, so it is rare indeed for me to finish my current book and have to go searching for something else to read. If I do, though, there’s always The Book Seer, Literature-Map, and Debbie’s Idea, all of which are fine tools for discovering new books and authors.
The official assignment this week involves reader participation. Since the vast majority of my readership exists solely in my head, I may have to play music to drown out the crickets, but hey, maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. But anyway. The assignment is to ask for recommendations, and give my own, both within a single genre. So I’m going to choose science fiction/fantasy (SFF) as my genre. Some people may protest and tell me that’s two genres, but I beg to differ. First, several popular authors write books that are difficult to categorize as one or the other (e.g., Anne McCaffrey and Christopher Stasheff), and as Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
First off, I’d love to hear your recommendations. I don’t mean stuff that necessarily aligns with my established tastes, I mean great SFF books in general. What are some titles/authors I simply should not miss?
And now for my recommendations, again in SFF. The WG page suggests I start with something like “If you’re looking for…” which could just mean narrowing it down by genre, but I’m going to narrow it down a little further. So here goes:
If you’re looking for a rowdy yarn set in the far future… Mike Resnick is your man. Most of his books are set within the future chronology laid out in Birthright: The Book of Man
If you’re looking for a beautiful fairy tale… then march right up to Neil Gaiman and Stardust
If you’re looking for a powerful tale of children in an adult world… I cannot recommend Ender’s Game
If you’re looking for hilarious satire in the guise of SFF… then you want definitely to read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
If you’re looking for time travel… The Time Machine
If you’re looking for good YA SFF… I really enjoyed the Borderlands books, especially Elsewhere
If you’re looking for great concept stories… Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov are all excellent choices for expanding your horizons.
And finally, if you’re looking for mythology in the modern world… you’re sure to get a kick out of Gods Behaving Badly
So there you have it. I’m sure I’ll missed a bunch, but this is a good start. What glaring omissions do you spot on this page? Have you read any of these? What did you think of them?
Most importantly: enjoy! :)
by Jeffrey Eugenides: I picked this one up because I loved Eugenides’s other book, 
by Michael Cunningham: Sometimes I wish books came with reading prerequisites listed on the cover. There are very few novels with which one can assume the average person will be familiar. In The Hours, I suspect it would have been rather helpful to have first read 
by Virginia Woolf. Or be, you know, at all familiar with Woolf in the first place. Not that a quick skim of the 
by Simon Singh: A history of cryptography from ancient Egypt through quantum computing. My favorite parts were about WWII, with Turing and the Navajo Codetalkers. Some parts were a touch slow – cryptography isn’t nearly as thrilling as the activities associated with it – but by and large it was an informative read. My only real complaint was how long it took me to read. Though Singh’s text was thorough and readable as ever, it took me nearly a month to finish. I think I just wasn’t in the right mood for a math book.
by Kenneth Grahame: A book that appears to have been part of everyone’s childhood except mine. We had a lovely hardbound copy as long as I can remember, but I never read it until now. And it doesn’t translate well to adults. Having been written a century ago, I expected it to be dated, but I didn’t expect it to be quite so…odd. Each chapter is more or less a separate story about the same group of characters: poetic Rat, generous Mole, selfish Toad, gruff Badger, and friendly Otter. Toad has by far the most personality, what with his utter conceit and his obsession with motorcars, but he’s less entertaining than tiresome. I don’t have any issues with the idea of talking animals in general, but when they begin interacting with humans it can get a little strange. For example, the illustrations in this book show Toad at roughly half the height of an adult human – which he would have to be, given part of the storyline. Maybe I would like this book more had I grown up with it, but as it stands I just see it as a really bizarre little tale that I will most likely never read again.
by Orson Scott Card: The League Wars are over, but the struggle continues between various world powers. Someone kidnaps all the Battle School kids who served under Ender during the Bugger War. Bean alone escapes this fate. Though he must go into hiding, he seeks out the only person who can help him free the others: Peter Wiggin. Most of the story revolves around Bean and Petra, but I didn’t feel like I got to know her any better than I did in Ender’s Game. Of course, I’ve noticed Card’s difficulty with writing realistic female characters before. The continuation of Achilles’s tale was kind of interesting but not especially believable. I hear the series improves as you go along. Not that this is such a bad book – it just didn’t do much for me.