2008 books
29) Harold M. Sherman, The Green Man, 1946
I found this piece of mid-century pseudo-SF via a local dealer in rare books. It's about a messiah-like alien from the other side of the Milky Way who arrives in Hollywood in a cigar-shaped UFO with a message for humanity. It first appeared in Amazing Stories in October 1946, at a time when the magazine was edited by the UFO-obsessed Ray Palmer. A novel like this only makes sense contextually if you can visualise it in the era from which it comes, hence it's best imagined as a 1940s black-and-white TV comedy caper; indeed it was probably written with that kind of thing in mind, otherwise it's one of those pulps that are best left to decompose further beneath several more decades of 'real' science fiction. Sherman, a prolific author of pseudo-science and self-help books, also wrote a sequel The Green Man Returns, which I will not be reading.