30 "What Do You Mean You Haven't Read That?" books for geeks

[lilisonna]

Outlawcoon (with help from a few of us) came up with the following list of 30 classic geek books for our generation. Not good geek books. Not even books that will stand the test of time -- although many of them have and will. Just 30 books that we find surprising to discover geeks haven't read

Comments

[cnoocy]

That's Watchmen, by Moore. Why are some of these series and others first volumes of series?

[touchstone]

Hrm. Yeah, I suppose 1 should have been Fellowship of the Ring. I don't honestly remember what the first Sandman book was titled :)

[lightbearer]

Tolkein considered LotR to be one book. I think that's a good enough reason to count it as one book.

Sandman is slightly different, I suppose. Either Preludes & Nocturnes (first) or Season of Mists (iconic), I suppose.

[lilisonna]

Because we are random and unpredictable like that. :-)

[syn74x]

You'll be aghast at how many of those I have not read, being both a geek AND a creative writing major. (To sum: I've only read 7 of those on the list, although I probably own several unread ones, and at least one of those 7 I never actually finished.)

[lilisonna]

Which seven?

[syn74x]

1. Lord of the Rings, Tolkein
(Got 80% through the first book)

4. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

15. A Spell for Chameleon, Anthony
I've added this as #8 on my list, because I read some Piers Anthony thing, but can't remember if this was it or not.

16. The Dragonriders of Pern, McCaffery

17. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks

25. Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Weis and Hickman

26. Brave New World, Huxley

30. The Eye of the World, Jordan
stopped about 5 books in

[tahnan]

I love the way that the only eight books you've read include three of the only six I haven't read.

[mikailborg]

I'm missing several from the list, though I have read other Discworld besides that one.

Some, I honestly don't plan to read... every time I look at the inches of shelf space taken by the "Wheel of Time," I'm intimidated.

[lilisonna]

I have no plan to read Wheel of Time at this point. And for Discworld -- really any book from that series counts for this purpose.

[touchstone]

It felt to me like we ended up with two sorts of books being suggested. On the one hand, there are ones that are classics and have stood the test of time, and thus we expect people will have run into them at SOME point. There were others that were more a case of 'how did you manage to avoid it?' :)

Wheel of Time won't manage to be a classic, I think, in part because of bad editing / bad authorial self-control. But it was a sort of flagship for the Oversized Epic Fantasy armada, and it was promoted heavily enough that most geeks have either read it, or are at least /familiar/ with it.

[lilisonna]

Mostly what Touchstone said. It was something we all figured geeks of our age had encountered and likely read at least the first book. It's one of the "First to Go" books for the younger generation, and I'd replace it with Harry Potter in another two or three years.

[tahnan]

Some of those are definitely "how did you manage to avoid it?" books. I managed to avoid Jordan by not liking epic fantasy--actually, I hadn't even really heard of it until a number of the books were already out and some of the fans had begun to grumble about how long the whole enterprise was taking.

If only I had similarly managed to avoid Lord Foul's Bane. I'll have to consider (possibly repost) the list at length after I've had lunch, but it seems a pretty sensible Geek List. Though "Hogfather" seems a weird choice--it's in fact the Discworld novel I liked by far the least.

[touchstone]

We went back and forth a few times between either picking individual novels for prolific authors, or just saying 'Something by Pratchett'. Finally decided that giving a specific title was better, though somewhat arbitrary.

[lilisonna]

Hogfather got the nod because it has a movie version. We tossed a number of Discworld novels back and forth. We couldn't really put Color of Magic on the list because we all agreed it was pretty dreadful, and we didn't want someone reading it without fair warning.

Lord Foul's Bane, OTOH, should already have plenty of warning labels attached to it. Yuck.

[tahnan]

"Yuck"? Did you just--did she just say "yuck"? I thought you loved that book? Hell, I remember trying and failing to read that book twice because you loved that book!