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Let’s talk books! And let’s be specific! As a writer of both fantasies and thrillers, my tastes in reading are more defined by what I don’t read. I love to read across a wide gamut of genres (with an occasional nonfiction book thrown in there…right now, I’m reading Sebastian Junger’s War
While I’ve read lots of straight-laced mysteries over the years, I can’t say they’re my cup of tea. Though I do particularly enjoy Nevada Barr’s series because of the deep naturalism of her stories. I might not get to visit every State Park, but I get to vicariously through the adventures of Anna Pigeon. What I generally prefer are mysteries with a little extra something in them, like the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. Or going back further to Isaac Asimov’s series featuring a human detective and his robot sidekick R. Daneel Olivaw (Caves of Steel
And speaking of science fiction, I could wax poetic about dozens and dozens of authors from the golden age of scifi to today. Here are a few of my favorites (some classics, some not so much):
The Time Traveler's Wife
Jurassic Park
The Road
(and yes, I’m classifying the above 3 as science fiction, though you won’t find those books in the scifi section of a book store.)
Dragonflight
Lord of Light
Dune
Ringworld
The Foundation
Link
Moving onto horror, again pretty much any early Stephen King and Dean Koontz are fine by me, but I thought I’d jot down a few that really struck home for me. Again, some are classics, some are a bit more obscure.
Vespers
Salem's Lot
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
The Vampire Lestat
Watchers
In the fantasy field, I go old school and new here, from Tolkien to Rothfuss. Here’s the list:
Lord of the Rings trilogy
American Gods
Lamb, the Gospel according to Biff
Watership Down
Assassin’s Apprentice
Sword of Shannara
Name of the Wind
As with mysteries, I also prefer my thrillers that are a bit on the “speculative” side, too. Though that said, I’d never miss a Lee Child novel. Here’s again a fast list of some of my all-time favorites:
Temple
Relic
Ice Reich
The Romanov Prophecy
Brotherhood of the Rose
Hooked: A Thriller About Love and Other Addictions
Regressing to my childhood, I thought I’d talk middle-school and YA (since I also just started a series in this genre). As a kid, I cut my teeth on the old Jupiter Jones series and Danny Dunn, but there’s some great stuff out there now. I don’t have to mention Harry Potter, do I? Plus a couple of my favorites out now:
Little Brother
The Hunger Games
And going old school, the novel that made me want to be a veterinarian:
Black Beauty
And I must say I do occasionally sneak off the genre reservation and read the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction every year. One of the most influential (and a book that made me look at prose in an entirely new light and to this day I think helped turn me into a published author) is The Shipping News
Another such author is Dan Simmons. I’ve been reading his books since he won a horror award for his absolutely disturbing novel, Song of Kali
Lastly, I must also acknowledge the books that made me want to write as a young Midwestern school boy. I devoured truckloads of the old Bantam reprints of the pulp classics from the 30s and 40s. But the best of them all was the Doc Savage series, written by various authors under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson. I still have all 181 (plus 1) of those novels still sitting on a hallowed place on my library bookshelf.
So that’s it. I’m off to curl up with a good book.
My goodness. Is that a list or what?? Some of 'em are on my list too, and some are new-to-me. I'm off to add them to my library holds. What do you think of James' list?
1 comments:
I read The Road and The Hunger Games this year and I really loved both of them!
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