Is this just fantasy?

Best lists aren’t just for the end of the year — and they’re not just for professional book critics, either. Right now, NPR has a fun exercise going, compiling a list of the 100 best science fiction and fantasy books ever written. They’re soliciting suggestions (five titles at a time) from listeners/readers and in four days they’ve received more than 4,600 posts. Take that, all you reading-is-dead handwringers!

There are a couple rules — you can suggest a series as one of your entries, as long as that series is written by a single author. And YA is banned, which made it a little difficult for me because Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy would have been high on my list.

Still, even though I would not consider myself a big reader of scifi or fantasy, I managed to come up with five. * Here’s my list, in no particular order: Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series (always glad to give this one a mention; it’s alternative historical fiction, Napoleonic wars with dragons and it’s AWESOME). Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, a loopy literary alternaworld to which I will be forever grateful for getting me through the Horrible Hurricane Year of 2005. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis — highly recommended for people who like medieval stuff and/or time travel. American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which needs no help from me but is pretty cool, and will soon be a major motion picture. And The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas, a book about a book that is powerful and strange. Both books, I mean. Just read it.

If you are into books, by the way, and you don’t follow or check NPR’s books coverage (it’s compiled at their website and has the requisite Facebook and Twitter feeds) then you are missing out. And if you prefer to get your radio auditorially but can’t listen to NPR all day long, they do a nice podcast of compilations of their books coverage every week or two.

The Guardian, another bastion of book coverage in the popular media, has also compiled a 100 best list recently, their picks for best nonfiction titles. They solicited reader suggestions after the fact; my contribution was The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. Amazing book about biodiversity and evolution and island biogeography and if those sound like heavy, dry subjects then trust me, in Quammen’s hands they are not. If and when I have to do a serious weed of my own book collection, this will be one of the last to go.

* Addendum from 8/18/11 — Since writing this I have joined the George R. R. Martin Cult and am midway through the third book in his Song of Ice and Fire series — and they really as addictive as everyone says. Martin didn’t need my help — he still scored high on the final list — and I’m not sure which of my initial five I’d knock out. Either American Gods or the Thursday Next series, which is loopier than straight-up fantasy anyway.

Don’t worry I’m not writing about ebooks

I’m sick to death of reading about ebooks and digital publishing because it all seems to come from the poles — either we’re looking at the Glorious Future or the Terrible End of literature. Plus there’s so much being written and published, both online and in print, by self-obsessed media types, that you couldn’t possibly follow it all. Plus as a wise person once said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything. So why kill myself trying to figure it out when really smart people who are paid to do so obviously can’t?

I chose this image because I recently completed two online book club reads — in both cases, ahead of the official schedule. The first was Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for the inaugural One Book One Twitter. The second was Justin Cronin’s Passage for the inaugural Salon Book Club.

Recent reading roundup

I’m currently immersed in one of this summer’s Hot Books — The Passage by Justin Cronin — which I’m attempting to read with Salon’s Reading Club (look for a future post contrasting that with the One Book One Twitter experience reading American Gods — the short version is that I like the Salon experience better, at least so far). And there are a couple other titles I’ve read in the last month between everything else — though now we’ve got the cable with the World Cup on and the Tour de France right around the corner so my reading rate could slow right down. (There are three copies of The Passage in the Monroe County Library system, by the way, with two requests pending so if you want this one you should get on the list.) But here’s a report on a couple of recent reads before they get too far into the rearview mirror.

My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliviera — historical fiction set during the Civil War about a midwife who longs to become a surgeon, with lots of family drama going on. For some reason, this one just didn’t grab me though I did finish it. It struck me as one of those “look how much research I did into the time period” historical novels. That stuff needs to come through not quite so obviously. We do have it in the Monroe County Library collection, just not at the Key West Library. I’ll give it 3 stars.

More than 140 characters on recent reading

First of all, I did finish Elif Batuman’s The Possessed and I intend to review it for Solares Hill so no review type copy here except to say that I liked it very very much and give it an A. Or four out of five stars if that’s the system I wind up going to, which I might. Maybe even four and a half.

After finishing that I started on Neil Gaiman’s American Gods … and started following the One Book One Twitter experiment on Twitter. I’m not going to go into the reasons I resisted then finally caved to Twitter — David Carr does that far better than I in this piece from the New York Times. I don’t think it will supersede Facebook in my online life — most of my friends and family are on Facebook; I hardly know anyone who Twitters. I signed up for a bunch of book-related feeds and will use it for local stuff. (Hey Key West Citizen — it’s great you guys have a Twitter feed and all, but I think the point of Twitter is that you post to it occasionally — as of this writing the most recent post is 11 days old — that’s not very, um, newsy.) I am starting to get the protocols, with feeds and hashmarks etc. though I still feel like a blundering ignoramus in danger of making an online fool of myself. But I can see its appeal and think it might even be a good exercise for someone like me, who has a tendency to think I must be up on all things all the time. That’s impossible on Twitter and good thing, too — so you just check in, see what others are saying and maybe follow a couple interesting links.

As far as a reading/literary experience goes … well, it’s not a coherent conversation of any kind, that’s for sure. More like dropping into a big cocktail party where you don’t know anyone but everyone’s pretty friendly, and eavesdropping and engaging in a couple quick exchanges. Is that edifying? I’m not sure. It’s kind of fun. I can’t say I’ve gotten any big insights into the book from any of the posts that I’ve read. But I’m grateful to the people who made this happen because 1) they finally got me to read American Gods and 2) now I finally have a rudimentary understanding of Twitter.

I can see that for others, including Neil Gaiman, Twitter is an important part of their lives. I don’t know that it will ever become an important part of mine. And I really would like to resist Yet Another Online Timewaster. But it’s been an interesting introduction.

The bird pictured here, in case anyone was wondering and didn’t already know, is a Northern Mockingbird, Florida’s state bird and the primary twitterer of local environs. Recently, many people I know have been complaining about this bird twittering outside their windows early in the morning. Personally I don’t mind that but don’t like it when they divebomb you because they think you’re too close to their nests.