A new meme. Cool. This one is the Nobel Prize for Literature winners meme. I took this list from Larry's OF Blog of the Fallen. You know the rules: bold if you've read anything by the author, italicize if it's on the TBR.

2011 Tomas Tranströmer
2010 Mario Vargas Llosa
2009 Herta Müller
2008 Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
2007 Doris Lessing
2006 Orhan Pamuk
( Read more... )

Apparently, World Book Night asked people to nominate their top ten books in order to determine what titles would be given away next year. Bold if you've read it; italicise if it's on the TBR.

1 To Kill a Mockingbird*, Harper Lee
2 Pride and Prejudice*, Jane Austen
3 The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
4 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
5 The Time Traveler’s Wife ( Read more... )

Lists, lists, lists, lists. Everyone likes lists. NPR are doing one here. They have cunningly called it a "Top-100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Titles", which can mean either favourite or best. First they asked people to nominate titles. Then they asked Giant SF Brains Gary K Wolfe, Farah Mendlesohn and John Clute to whittle down those picked to a list ( Read more... )

... someone somewhere will be determined to drag you backwards. Everyone is talking about women in sf and the fact they're appallingly under-represented... and Technology Review goes and publishes a list of The Best Hard Science Fiction Novels of All Time, which includes ten books, only one of which is by a woman sf writer. Sigh.

As if that weren't ( Read more... )

As promised, here is a list of science fiction novels by women sf writers whose careers have been active chiefly during the past decade. The sharper-eyed among you will spot two authors who were also on the previous sf mistressworks list. I felt both books deserved to be on this list, and so they are. While researching this list, I discovered that ( Read more... )

I can't even remotely pretend the ten authors in this list are the "greatest" in any commonly-accepted sense. They're not all favourites, but they're certainly the authors whose writing I admire the most. Still, it's a list. Everyone likes lists.

In no particular order...

1. Lawrence Durrell - I love the way he uses the English language. At a sentence ( Read more... )

After all the comments on my list of 50 British science fiction masterworks, I decided to revisit it. There were several authors I'd inadvertently left off - and no, I've no idea how I managed to miss Paul J McAuley (sorry); but he's on there now. There were also a couple of books I listed which, on reflection, were either too peripheral to the ( Read more... )