September's FEATURED AUTHOR: Catie's favorite reads!!

I always love finding out what my favorite authors like to read, especially when they share new-to-me authors that get me hooked! And Catie's no different. Read on to see what her favorite books are...

"What are your favorite reads," drey asks. At least it's not "what's your favorite book," which is an impossible question to answer. This one is hard enough!

Actually, according to my husband, who is much more observant about this kind of thing than I am, Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana is my favorite book, and that's an assertation I can't argue with. It's a book about a country whose name was taken away from it--no one not born there can hear it spoken, and the few who were born there are dying out--and about the fight to break the magic that took the name away. And I love it. I re-read it more often than any other book, and I *keep* loving it, which is quite a trick. The relationships in it break my heart, even after dozens of re-reads, and that's about as much as you can possibly ask from a book, I think.

Neck and neck with Tigana, though, is Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence, which both as individual books and as a whole are possibly my favorite books ever, too. The wonderful thing about them is I read them first when I was eight and now, nigh unto thirty years later...they're still as fantastic as they were when I was a kid.

Leaping out of genre--at least, out of the SF/F genre--I *love* Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January novels. They're murder mysteries set in 1830s New Orleans, and the main character is a black surgeon, born in Louisiana as a free man of color and trained in Paris. They're simply magnificent books, with incredible worldbuilding. Highly recommended!

And back in genre, I just finished reading Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series, which is military SF that delivers exactly what it says on the box. I really enjoyed those and sort of wish I could write something like it.

I could probably stay here for a week thinking up other favorites, but there's a taste of what I like--and lo, it goes all over the board, doesn't it? But that's what reading is for!

According to Catie, I should definitely check out Susan Cooper. Have you? What did you think of the rest of her list--are any on yours?

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