I ticked Castle of Otranto but don't recommend it. It was a book club selection that I really disliked.

You have presumably read Jo Walton's Farthing, so Ha'Penny and Half a Crown should be pushing themselves to the front.

(And I did like Queen's Bastard. mizkit getting an almost GGK voice.)

China Mountain Zhang and Goodnight Mr Tom are my recommendations from that list - humane books

There's a lot more of those books on my 'To be Read' pile than I've actually read. There are few enough of them, so here's my thoughts on the ones I checked:

Guy Gavriel Kay: A Song for Arbonne Not his best, but a decent historical fantasy.

Fumi Yoshinaga: Ooku: The Inner Chambers, Volume 2 I love this series and cannot recommend the available volumes enough. I think Volumes 2-3 were awesome. Vol 4 was also excellent, but had a slightly different focus.

Editors of Playboy: Transit of Earth As with any short story collection, a mixed bag. I really did enjoy this over all, possibly more than I was expecting for such a slim collection, and it was a great reminder that Playboy used to publish the best science fiction.

Peter Emshwiller: The Host Not a great book, but there were some interesting ideas in there.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin Excels as abolitionist propaganda but for me, a bit less successful as a novel. I think it was mainly because I tire of getting preached to very easily. It is, on the other hand, entirely worth reading.

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Complete Sherlock Holmes I've recently picked this back up and been making my way through it again in between other things. My father is also re-reading it for the first time in years. Definitely worth the time.

Katherine Paterson: Jacob Have I Loved I was probably 13 or 14 when I read this and remember it as being dark and melodramatic. I don't know if it actually is those things, or if it's worth reading as an adult.

Frederick Douglass: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Probably the best of the slave narratives that I've read, certainly the one with the most authentic authorial voice.

I read and reviewed The House of the Seven Gables a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it. Otherwise, I've read so few of these that I can't really help very much I'm afraid!

Old Goriot is a pure work of art... but SO SAD! :(

Read everything by Alastair Reynolds and Kim Stanley Robinson. That's the best rule for happiness. I've never read Galileo's Dream but I bet it's awesome.

CHASM CITY. READ CHASM CITY. I don't even know how you can have that book near you and not be reading it. I LOVE IT. Have you read Revelation Space? A lot of people start with chasm city because people suggest it. I suggest reading EVERYTHING Alastair Reynolds has written, but in ORDER. But I am very weird about order and perhaps other people are right and you should just read what you want. Perhaps.

I haven't read hardly anything new since 2003 -- when I became a writer, officially.

Of the few I ticked, I've read everything by Kafka because I had to proof an edition of his complete works (with commentary), and if you're looking for something depressing and hopeless, he's your man. I personally would rather watch the Star Wars Holiday Special again than go through that.

1632 was great fun, and so was its first sequel; I haven't had the time to read the continuations.

Mythago Wood simply failed to grab me. I think I got about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through and said the Eight Deadly Words and shut the book. I remember almost nothing else about it, which is fairly unusual for me.

I've read and loved Holmes since I was a little kid; I in fact read the complete Sherlock Holmes stories to my son as bedtime stories when he was about 9 or so.

Actually they appear to have started splitting up the years into multiple books since the ripple effect has started having major events happening all over the place, to the point that you couldn't FIT it all in one book.

Time and money. I have a wife and 4 kids. If I have the time and mental focus to read and understand a book, I have the time and mental focus to write. Plus books cost money, and I am loath to spend money on anything I'm not absolutely sure I'm going to like. In addition, my wife wants time with me, my kids want time with me, and the upshot is that with the addition of a new profession (SF Writer) something had to go to the back burner. And I have a few friends and such who have some claim on my social time. (And then there's the Annoying But Necessary Social Obligations which eat up a lot of my so-called spare time).

Sometimes I have time, but I'm mentally not up to inventing stuff, so then I do games.

If I were single and with no kids, hey, I'd be reading half the day and writing the other half.

I ticked the Gormenghast trilogy but didn't like it much (was lent it by a young man I rather liked at school), and have never felt any inclination to reread it.

I enjoyed the Jacqueline Carey Banewreaker/Godslayer duo very much; I assume you have already read Banewreaker. I only discovered Carey this year (the first Kushiel trilogy) and have been working my way through the library stock.

Tom's Midnight Garden was a childhood favourite but I've not read it in 20 years.

I'd recommend Gormenghast and China Mountain Zhang, definitely.
Powers is ... I don't quite want to say minor Le Guin. Events are on a smaller scale than in some of her other books, and this is obviously deliberate. Does this mean the stories have less impact?
Invisible Man and Thucydides I find hard to rate. They are exactly what they are.
Thorns and Uncle Tom's Cabin I read too long ago to remember much of.
Vernon God Little I hated, threw it against the wall in record time.

I really enjoyed The Mahabharata

The Demon Headmaster is very definitely a children's book but I still remember it (and the rest of the series) fondly.

I ticked a number of not-particularly-good books in this poll.

My recommendation, as always, is to read O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books.

Happy New Year!

This sort of poll always makes me feel the very reverse of well-read. :(

Of the very few I've read,I particularly recommend the Decameron (surprisingly entertaining and readable, though a little bit repetitive in the end) and The Devils, and I unrecommend The Idiot (for me, Dostoyevsky is either absolutely amazing or really awful, and this is the latter - though I know there are those who love it) and Death in Venice (only grim determination made me finish, and it's short). Also, I liked 'Diplomatic Baggage' - should be required reading for diplomats, and I'm sure you know the husband.

I haven't got terribly strong feelings about any of the books I ticked. A lot of the general fiction is on my mental "to-read list" so I'll be interested to see what you think.

I think I've mentioned here before that I found Rebus' Scotland to be pretty much a waste of time, though not much time. And I say that as a dedicated Ian Rankin fan.

The Thycidides is a bit of a cheat - I read it in Ancient Greece 100 in 1986 and can't say I recall a lot. But I've been watching a lot of documentaries abou the ancient world lately and have been looking at my copy with intent.

I, OTOH, love The Castle of Otranto. Of course it's not good, but it's hilarious (I used to know whehter that was intentional). It's interesting and important if you're at all interested in the evolution of the novel in general and of horror/the fantastic in particular.

The Devils is one of the most difficult of Dostoyevky's works as it's the most tied in with contemporary political events. I read it in the context of a Russian history rather than literature class. Of course I would say you should read it because I love Dostoyevsky.

Gormenghast is hard going. Worth it, I think, but hard going.

I enjoyed the Demon Headmaster.

RG Veda is on my to read list, but I'm not sure how much sense vol 3 would make without the previous volumes. Clamp like their convoluted plots.

My Mum's the Jane Haddam fan in the household, and I haven't read them but she adores them.

I usually like the Onion but hated their Our Dumb World to the point that I actually put it out for recycling instead of giving it to the charity shop. There could have been a good idea there if they'd spent time doing the research needed to actually comment on American's ideas of various nations versus what they actually are like, but instead it's a truly despicable piece of "ironically racist" humour that is indistinguishable from actual racist and xenophobic humour (everyone in Southern Africa is dying of AIDS - repeat for every single country, Thailand is a brothel on a national scale).

I love the Gormenghast Trilogy and have read it at least 10 times since first reading it when I was 15. I also recommend the China Mieville books (obviously).

Titus Groan and Gormenghast are fabulously baroque and entertaining, but Titus Alone is a powerful depiction of loneliness and misery.

The Patrick O'Brian naval novels are great page-turners, with occasional flashes of brilliance, humour, and psychological insight. Desolation Island is, I think, the best of the whole sequence.

Thorns is from Silverberg's golden period, after he graduated from churning out pulp and before he descended into the pot-boilerdom of Lord Valentine's Castle and so forth. In this period he wrote half a dozen classic sf novels with tight plots, sharp morals, evocative settings and crisply-observed characters—To Live Forever, A Time of Changes, Dying Inside and a few others.

Ian Watson went on a similar trajectory to Silverberg (without the apprenticeship in pulp), and I think everything from his early period is worth reading. By turns intellectual, disturbing, and horrific. The Jonah Kit, The Martian Inca and Miracle Visitors are from this period, but I think his very best work is in his first three collections of short stories: The Very Slow Time Machine, Sunstroke, and Slow Birds.

(1) China Mountain Zhang is one of the best books I've ever acquired and published.

(2) If the presence of Patrick O'Brian's Desolation Island is an indication that you've read the first four books in the Aubrey/Maturin series but not book five onward, why, how lucky you are, first because Desolation Island is one of the most exciting action novels ever written, and second because it's the point where the series really takes flight.

(3) I read Joanna Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing when TNH and I typed it for her, from her handwritten manuscript. (Joanna had hurt her back and temporarily couldn't type.) I love dropping this small fact. It is a trenchant and essential book.

I love Dunnett and Zelazny so would recommend those (though inevitably, in the complete Zelazny, there are weak works amongst the gems... but thre are so many, so many gems). I think "Galactic North" shows that Reynolds may actually be a better short story writer than novelist; for me, his longer works tend to drag, and don't have the denouements that his ideas deserve, but his imagination really sparkles at novella and shorter length.

I read Mythago Wood many many years ago, and know many people who love it, but I can't remember a single thing about it.

Until now, I seem to be the only one who read the Le Clézio, but I don't recommend it.

Books that I did not check because I couldn't finish them:

The City at the End of Time: I vaguely did want to know what was going to happen to the characters, but it was taking soooo long.

Princess of Roumania: Eight Deadly Words

On a happier note...

Flora Segunda is great fun and I think the sequel, Flora's Dare, is even better.

A Song for Arbonne is a good GGK, but not one of my favorites of his.

China Mountain Zhang is excellent.

I like Niccolo (Dorothy Dunnett) more than Francis. To me, Francis starts out in a crappy mood and ends up in a good mood (redeemed). Claes starts out in a good mood, ends up in a crappy mood, and finally in a good mood by the end. I'm much more sympathetic to Nicholas. Like some of Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books, I'm often thinking to myself, 'Oh, no, no, no, don't do that...!' during the Niccolo series.

I've read and enjoyed Iain Banks' Transition and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (and if you ever chance across a DVD of the movie version of Housekeeping you should spare no efforts to watch it, because it is imho one of the best movies ever made). Alastair Reynolds is generally excellent, although I haven't read Chasm City or Galactic North. I was disappointed with Greg Bear's City at the End of Time. The Gormenghast trilogy is impressive, the first two books especially--Titus Alone is, and feels, unfinished--and I'd recommend Jack McDevitt on general principles, although I haven't read Cauldron. Plus I'd throw in a vote for Rare Unsigned Copy because, you know, how could I not?

Letters from Father Christmas, China Mountain Zhang and Far North are all excellent.

Q taught me a lot about the Reformation as well as being a fun read.

I recommend "Mythago Wood" and would love to hear your thoughts on "A Princess of Roumenia", since I really enjoyed some of Mr. Parks' other works and am curious about this one.

China Mountain Zhang really is as good as everyone says it is! Also I think you'd really enjoy Chicks Dig Time Lords - a fun, thoughtful collection of essays

There is a lot of good stuff in there, both old and new, and nothing I would particularly single out for dispraise. Of those I have read I particularly rated the McHugh (China Mountain Zhang), Gwyneth Jones (North Wind and White Queen), Hand (Waking the Moon), the Jo Walton trilogy, the Dunnett, and the Tiptree. Mendlesohn's Diana Wynne Jones is very interesting.

Having noted these are all female, and mostly fairly recent, I looked over the list again. Do I detect a recent effort to add strong contemporary female writers to your pile? If so, you have made good choices.

Of those I have not read I would pick the Patrick O'Brian, Ian McDonald and Pratchett fiction, and the Gould non-fiction, based on my previous acquaintance with the authors. Banks, Mieville and Reynolds have a good chance too. Most of the others will fall to lack of time or interest.

Guy Gavriel Kay's Song for Arbonne is one that divides opinion. I hated it worst of all his books; others love it best. I guess you will have to make up your own mind.

Death in Venice is a work of such breathtaking beauty and sadness; you must read it.

Edited at 2010-12-31 05:24 pm (UTC)

Mervyn Peake: Gormenghast Trilogy 39
Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher, And Other Stories 38
Philippa Pearce: Tom's Midnight Garden 29
Guy Gavriel Kay: A Song for Arbonne 25
Robert Holdstock: Mythago Wood 22
Maureen F. McHugh: China Mountain Zhang 21
Tim Powers: Last Call 19
Lois Mcmaster Bujold: The Sharing Knife: Passage 18
Terry Pratchett: I Shall Wear Midnight 17
Jo Walton: Ha'penny 15
Lois Mcmaster Bujold: The Sharing Knife: Horizon 15
J. R. R. Tolkien: Letters from Father Christmas 15
Ysabeau S. Wilce: Flora Segunda 14
Iain Banks: Transition 14
Jo Walton: Half a Crown 13
Gillian Cross: The Demon Headmaster 13
China Mieville: Looking for Jake and Other Stories 12
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto 12
Gwyneth Jones: White Queen 11
Diana Wynne Jones: Stopping for a Spell 11
James Tiptree: Up the Walls of the World 11
Eric Flint: 1632 11
Poul Anderson: There Will be Time 10
Elizabeth Hand: Waking the Moon 10



Arthur Conan Doyle: The Complete Sherlock Holmes 56
D. H. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley's Lover 36
Jostein Gaarder: Sophie's World 28
Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe 26
Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron 24
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin 22
Henry Fielding: The History of Tom Jones 20
D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers 20
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass 19
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Idiot 18
Michelle Magorian: Goodnight Mister Tom 17
Patrick O'Brian: Desolation Island 17
Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders 17
Franz Kafka: The Castle 17
Meg Cabot: The Princess Diaries 16
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man 16
Charles Frazier: Cold Mountain 16
Charles Lamb: Tales of Shakespeare 15
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice 15
Dorothy Dunnett: Niccolo Rising 13
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables 13
Stendhal: The Red and the Black 12
Dorothy Dunnett: The Spring of the Ram 11
Katherine Paterson: Jacob Have I Loved 11


Thucydides: The History of the Peloponnesian War 19
Joanna Russ: How to Suppress Women's Writing 18
Frederick Douglass: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 11
Mary Wollstonecraft: The Rights of Woman - and - On The Subjection of Women 9
Stephen Jay Gould: Questioning the Millennium. 8
Lynne M. Thomas: Chicks Dig Time Lords 5
Stephen Jay Gould: Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin 5
Paul Kincaid: British Science Fiction & Fantasy: Twenty Years, Two Surveys
Farah Mendlesohn: Diana Wynne Jones 3
Karen Armstrong: The Bible: The Biography 3
Peter C. Bayley: Spenser's The Faerie Queen - A Selection of Critical Essays 2
Ian Hislop: Private Eye Annual 2008 2
David Day: A Guide to Tolkien 2
Katherine Ashenburg: Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing 2
M. I. Finley: The Portable Greek Historians 2
Ammon Shea: Reading the Oxford English Dictionary 2

Edited at 2011-12-23 08:05 pm (UTC)

2 for The Spring of the Ram, 1632, Desolation Island, Housekeeping, The Devils


Edited at 2011-11-11 10:45 am (UTC)