What do you recommend?
Read any good books lately? Come tell us about it.
This is an open post, where we would like to invite everyone to come tell us about any good books and short stories you’ve read recently. A good movie you’ve seen. Your favourite television series. An exciting new writer you’ve discovered; best comic book/ graphic novel of the year; must read short fiction anthology or favourite magazine; your favourite anime and manga. A good blog that deserves to be read.
11 comments so far.
My picks:
1)Books:
The Truth - Terry Pratchet:
After a 5 year hiatus from Pratchett, this was a terrific book to start with again. Brilliantly funny, and it is about time Pratchett poked fun at publishing and journalism. Lots of cameos and in-jokes to older stories, but it shouldn’t detract from this book for people who haven’t read them which does mostly feature a new group of characters. And dwarves. Can’t have enough dwarves.
2) Shorts:
One of my favourite of the shorter stories this year has been Robin Wayne Bailey’s “The Children’s Crusade.”
Idealistic? wishful thinking? absolutely, but it’s the kind of wishful thinking I can get behind, and I’ll keep on saying this but that ending image is just one of the most vivid and haunting I’ve read in some time.
And I simply have to do a shout out for AC Wise’s Matthew:
http://chizine.com/matthew.htm
a story that’s just not gotten enough attention, imo. A woman has to deal not only with the dead rising, but with her own attraction to her best friend’s resurrected husband.
Very beautiful and touching. A gentler story, which makes for a nice turn of pace from more plot-heavy and action oriented shorter fictions.
3) Comics:
Crossing Midnight - Mike Carey (Vertigo).
Two twins. One born a minute before midnight, one a minute after. To appease their superstitious grandmother, their father accidentally promised them to the God of the shrine.
Carey flawlessly weaves Japanese folklore with modern urban realism.
4)TV:
Chuck—missed the first 3rd of this series, but at the end of season 1 (there had better be a season 2!), I’m as addicted to this as Boston Legal and I’m a HUGE Boston Legal fan.
This is in keeping with what’s a typical trend now—nerdy boy, utterly useless in a fight and forever the...dude in distress, with a kick-ass girl to keep on saving him and looking out for him. And of course they can’t be together, for professional reasons.
Excellent balance between humor and a bit more serious-toned, surprisingly absorbing plot once you get into it and of course a whole army of minor characters who often steal the show.
I really should ban television from my house. This kind of show is just too addictive for me.
The story that simply blew me away is actually a couple of years old: “Zima Blue” by Alastair Reynolds.
I finished it and just sat there, thinking wow wow wow wow, before sanity kicked in, and my thinking became “I wish I’d written that.”
Anyhow, this one sent me off to find more of his writing, and I have been enjoying it since.
I had a similar experience with Alistair Reynolds a few months back. Different story, from the Hartwell&Kramer;Best of SF 12, but stunning.
Definitely want to read more of his work myself.
YA novel. Cory Doctorow’s _Little Brother_.
British television shows “Doctor Who”, “Torchwood”, and “Young Dracula”. And sort of pilot movie, since it’s to be a series soon, “Being Human”.
<cite>The book of Joby</cite> by Mark J. Ferrari.
TV series: <cite>Noein</cite> and <cite>Mushi-Shi</cite>. The latter is in the process of being posted to YouTube by its US distributor, and the manga series it’s based on has been partially published in English. Both are worth checking out in partial form because they’re completely episodic.
Incidentally, the “Preview” button doesn’t seem to work, even with JavaScript switched on…
I haven’t read much from 2008 yet but the two books from 2007 that are elegible that I think are classics are BRASYL by Ian McDonald and SHELTER by Susan Palwick.
Two books in the timeframe that I greatly enjoyed, one by a friend of mine: MultiReal by David Louis Edelman, which is as real and crunchy as the first book in the trilogy, Infoquake, but now with added adventure. I think this business based the-Singularity-was-kind-of-meh future feels much more real that virtually anything else I feel in the genre, and the technology is new and yet kind of obvious too. This is The West Wing with nanobots, and now, did I mention, guns? The other book is The Martian General’s daughter by Theodore Judson, which is large-scale military/epic history of the future stuff, again with an emphasis on who, in the end, is going to empty the bins. I commend them!
Sadly, I’ll have to limit myself to novels alone, but here goes:
Ursula Le Guin, Lavinia - what she managed to accomplish here was amazing, considering how well-known Vergil’s Aeneid is.
Michael Cisco, The Traitor - two re-reads and there’s still layers of meaning to decipher in this feverish tale.
More later, once I look through my collection.
Two eligible stories I’ve been terribly impressed with are David Moles’ “Finisterra” and Elizabeth Bear’s “Shoggoths in Bloom.” Both are beautifully written, though the Moles is more epic and the Bear is more intimate. Amazing stories.
One short story that I think has been horribly neglected is “IN THE FOREST OF THE QUEEN” by Gwyneth Jones (from ECLIPSE 1). A novella to be read is “THE TEAR” by Ian McDonald (in Galactic Empires ed by Gardner Dozois). Other novellas would be “THE HOB CARPET” by Ian R. MacLeod (in Asimov’s June 2008) and “PINOCCHIO” by Walter Jon Williams (from The Starry Rift ed by Jonathan Strahan) Also two short stories from that same collection are “DISMANTLED INVENTION OF FATE” by Jeffrey Ford and “AN HONEST DAY’S WORK” by Margo Lanagan. Another Novel - “THE DRAGON’S OF BABEL” by Michael Swanwick.
1. Charles Tan on 01st September 2008 at 6:43 am
As far as short fiction goes, I really enjoyed the magazine/anthology Nemonymous: Cone Zero. I think the book strikes the right balance between “fun” and “literary”.