Comments | mollydot: another book meme

mollydot

another book meme

Jun 29, 2008 00:34

This is a longer list - it's recommendations from a bunch of people, rather than the results of a poll. This also means some authors have a number of books, so I'm condensing them into one line. If I want to read the author, eg Octavia Butler, but don't know what book in particular, I'll italicise the author name ( Read more... )

meme a little meme of me

Comments 4

hellison June 30 2008, 10:57:45 UTC

Woo, I've only read about ... 3 of those I think. There's a few more I'd have down as intended, but an awful lot I've never even heard of.

Maybe a good reminder I need to take a step away from classics (and fantasy) and branch out into more modern novels.

mollydot July 5 2008, 16:01:36 UTC

Having Haruki Murakami on the list gave me a big advantage :-)

This list is a reaction against the whiteness of the other list that's going around, which is probably why we haven't heard of a lot of them.

A few of them are SF/fantasy, like Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson and, I'm pretty sure, Samuel R Delany. If you'd like to slowly step away from fantasy into magic realism, there's Laura Esquival, Isabel Alende, Gabriel García Márquez. I think they're all magic realism anyway. Haruki Murakami has not-quite-normal stuff too. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go has an SF trope, but it doesn't read like SF.

Which ones have you read?

hellison July 7 2008, 13:22:03 UTC

The ones i've read are The Three Muskateers, The Colour Purple and Never Let Me Go (which a friend lent me when I was in hospital last year, and I just realised I never gave it back!). And no, it didn't read like SF at all - it's a book I probably would never have picked to read myself but loved it! Beautifully written, thought provoking AND touching.

mollydot July 7 2008, 14:15:23 UTC

Either nuteile or myself were given Remains of the Day a good few years ago and I loved it. Then I read another book by him, An Artist of the Floating World, which I also liked a lot. I didn't like the next of his that I read at all. I can't remember the title, but the main guy was a musician. So I was both eager and trepidatious about this one. But very glad I read it. One of my favourite books this year (I read it on my hols in Jan).