Guessed authors
Jul. 4th, 2005 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4It's my mum's birthday in August, and she usually has a book wish-list which she gives to my dad, my sister and me in case we can't think of anything else to buy her. Now while I don't really mind buying stuff off the list, a) it seems a bit daft given that she's quite happy to buy them for herself anyway, and b) there's always a lot of faff between the three of us as to who buys what, sometimes resulting in duplicate copies. I'd quite like to get her something that she wouldn't buy for herself, i.e. something she might not even know exists, but should like anyway.
So, knowing that there are a fair few SF/Fantasy geeks reading this, I'm turning to you guys for help. Things I know she has read and enjoyed recently:
[edited to include suggestions that I know she's already got/read]
Can anybody recommend anything that someone who's liked all these might enjoy? (Apologies in advance if I end up saying "I think she's got/read that", I can't remember everything that's on her shelves...) Ideally I want to avoid authors she's already buying everything by, because it's just too easy to duplicate stuff.
NB it doesn't have to be Fantasy (you know I don't really do genre anyway!) but she doesn't read that much SF and I've not had that much success finding non-genre things that she likes... at least, I lent her a huge stack of books a while ago and she wasn't wildly enthusiastic about any of them. Open to suggestions, though.
So, knowing that there are a fair few SF/Fantasy geeks reading this, I'm turning to you guys for help. Things I know she has read and enjoyed recently:
[edited to include suggestions that I know she's already got/read]
- Pratchett (funny how it's always the obvious ones you forget to mention)
- Katherine Kerr (? I think she's got some of these)
- Terry Goodkind
- Ursula Le Guin
- Mercedes Lackey
- Raymond Feist
- Julia Gray, The Guardian Cycle series
- Robert Jordan, Wheel of Time series
- Guy Gavriel Kay, pretty much everything AFAICT
- Robin Hobb, "Assassin" / "Fool" series
- Marion Zimmer Bradley
- Sheri S. Tepper
- Barbara Hambly
- Elizabeth Moon
- Diana Wynne Jones
- "Bridget Jones" :-)
Can anybody recommend anything that someone who's liked all these might enjoy? (Apologies in advance if I end up saying "I think she's got/read that", I can't remember everything that's on her shelves...) Ideally I want to avoid authors she's already buying everything by, because it's just too easy to duplicate stuff.
NB it doesn't have to be Fantasy (you know I don't really do genre anyway!) but she doesn't read that much SF and I've not had that much success finding non-genre things that she likes... at least, I lent her a huge stack of books a while ago and she wasn't wildly enthusiastic about any of them. Open to suggestions, though.
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Date: 2005-07-04 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 02:05 pm (UTC)BTW, um, those Georgette Heyer books... [looks sheepish] ... there was faff, & I didn't have an address for you, but mostly there was just faff, & I'm sorry. I do still have them, and if you email me an address, I'll post them to you -- will pay postage ('printed paper' will be cheapish anyway) for the sake of giving them a good home & gaining the space in the library. :-)
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 02:08 pm (UTC)There's always Raymond E Feist; I liked the initial couple of Midkemia books ('Magician' and 'Silverthorn') and the 'Foo of the Empire' trilogy (with Janny Wurts) much more than the rest of it, which is more spinoff cashing-in sort of stuff, IMO.
One assumes she has read Neil Gaiman's 'Neverwhere' and 'American Gods', but if by some chance that's not the case... Also the Charles Vess-illustrated version of Stardust is very nice indeed (it's a nearly-graphic-novel format rather than a standard book).
I think that may all be very obvious. I'll ask Robert as well, because he likes some authors on that list that I'm less familiar with.
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 02:11 pm (UTC)And, um, I really liked Magic's Pawn.
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:11 pm (UTC)On the grounds that anyone else who loves DWJ might also love other things I love, I also love Ursula Le Guin. Not that the styles are the same in any way, I think it is more to do with intelligent, well written stuff not about 'real life'. The Earthsea stuff is her most fantasy, least sci fi, work but also what she's most likely to have already come across. Maybe she hasn't already found things like 'Worlds of Exile and Illusion' 'The Left Hand of Darkness' 'The Lathe of Heaven' or 'The Dispossessed' though?
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:14 pm (UTC)Raymond Feist is another one I forgot to list that she's already got lots by, I'm afraid. Including the ones with Wurts. (I preferred "Faerie Tale", which is more at the horror end of fantasy, to all the Magician stuff myself!)
She's read Neverwhere, but American Gods is a really good idea! I am dim for not thinking of it, too, as I've got it & read it and enjoyed it. Thank you!
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 02:18 pm (UTC)Another possibility is Shards of Honour by Lois Mcmaster Bujold, which I just enjoyed reading.
But John Varley is great.
totally off, but
Date: 2005-07-04 02:21 pm (UTC)She might also like "Notes from Overground" ('Man is born free but is everywhere in trains'), by 'Tiresias', which is fantastically funny and can be returned-to over and over again.
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 02:21 pm (UTC)There may be some DWJ she doesn't have but I know she just got rid of "Howl's Moving Castle" and, um, another one (in the same series? Looked like, anyway...) on the grounds that she probably wouldn't bother reading them a second time, so I suspect I may have mined that seam to the limit.
Sorry!
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:23 pm (UTC)I am too inexperienced with SF to be able to tell where something falls on the soft-hard spectrum; Robert may be able to be more specific. I'll type the blurb from the first book for you, though, and you can judge.
TITAN: a world inside a world.
Outside it was a vast, wheel-shaped construct orbiting Saturn; inside -- it was impossible, bizarre, an endless landscape inhabited by creatures out of legend.
And it had captured the crew of a NASA probe.
'Fine reading -- an exciting story...with a science fiction setting which is both awesome and unusually well-devised.' - Poul Anderson
It's probably got quite a hard SF setting, but the meat of the book is about people reacting to their environment, and discovering an organic world (as opposed to discovering fantastic technology or mystifying machines).
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:23 pm (UTC)Lyndon Hardy's Master of the Five Magics et seq (two others whose precise titles I forget, although their numerical parts follow on from five).
Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels.
Ardath Mayhar - Khi To Freedom and others.
Patricia C. Wrede - Talking to Dragons and its related works are fairly light-hearted, the other stuff rather less so.
PC Hodgell - God Stalk et seq. (Though laying hands on God Stalk itself may be Hard :/ )
(Pretty much everything I'm mentioning is off my mother's bookshelves.)
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 02:27 pm (UTC)More thoughts: I have recently read 'Lazy Ways to Make a Living' by Abigail Bosanko, which could be called chick-lit but was actually not nearly as formulaic as I thought it might be (I bought it for a quid in Hay-on-Wye). It might appeal to the Bridget Jones end of her tastes :) It's basically about relationships, but with a background of chess and lexicography.
If she doesn't have Helen Fielding's 'Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination', she might enjoy that, but it's incredibly silly.
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:27 pm (UTC)Well, there's always the George RR Martin "Song Of Ice And Fire" sequence, that's still ongoing. They're both enjoyable and good, but not very light - think Richard III in a Fantasy world.
Um... I quite enjoyed the "Novice"/"High Lord" wozzit series (Trudi Canavan, later research shows), though I don't think they're very good (but then, Elizabeth Moon is on the original list and I think she's very enjoyable and not very good).
I'm not being much help here, but we're running into my belief that there's been an awful lot of really poor fantasy written, and very little actual "good stuff". Though I enjoy much of it, it's rarely that great.
I presume she's read the Susan Cooper "Dark Is Rising" sequence.
Ah-ha! "Tea With The Black Dragon" by R.A.MacAvoy.
Although this is a mixture of Sci Fi and Fantasy, it used to be one of the best things on the Internet before it got abandoned :- http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/6113/t100256.txt
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:28 pm (UTC)* Diane Duane
* Lois McMaster Bujold (especially Shards of Honor & Barrayar, sometimes sold in one book as Cordelia's Honor)
* Ursula Le Guin (especially The Left Hand of Darkness, because it is excellent and everyone should read it)
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon The Deep or A Deepness In The Sky as a first one, I was less enthralled by Across Realtime although it is still good.
* Jenny Crusie, who's definitely Not SF or fantasy, but more like Georgette Heyer except set *now* rather than in costume drama. And makes me laugh a lot.
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Date: 2005-07-04 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-04 02:30 pm (UTC)