What to read next year?
In the last couple of years I've been tremendously helped by the start-of-year poll asking which books from my unread shelf you all have read. I guess my logic for this is that I basically trust the literary judgement of my friends and other readers, and am interested to know what in particular from my sagging shelves I might look at next. (I also
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The Patrick O'Brian naval novels are great page-turners, with occasional flashes of brilliance, humour, and psychological insight. Desolation Island is, I think, the best of the whole sequence.
Thorns is from Silverberg's golden period, after he graduated from churning out pulp and before he descended into the pot-boilerdom of Lord Valentine's Castle and so forth. In this period he wrote half a dozen classic sf novels with tight plots, sharp morals, evocative settings and crisply-observed characters-To Live Forever, A Time of Changes, Dying Inside and a few others.
Ian Watson went on a similar trajectory to Silverberg (without the apprenticeship in pulp), and I think everything from his early period is worth reading. By turns intellectual, disturbing, and horrific. The Jonah Kit, The Martian Inca and Miracle Visitors are from this period, but I think his very best work is in his first three ( ... )
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