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.

Mock-ing-jay, yeah!

It’s always fun to get caught up in one of those mass movements of reading — that way you can discuss books with complete strangers and/or friends on Facebook.

Mockingjay, the final installment in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, suddenly became one of those books this summer. This seemed to catch a lot of people by surprise … but not those of us who had read the first two installments, Hunger Games and Catching Fire.

The popularity of YA literature in general and dystopian YA lit in particular was recently examined in an insightful essay in the New York Times. I thought this had just dawned on me since I started working in a public library and suddenly had daily contact with YA books. But now that I think about it, I have been reading more stuff intended for young readers since the Harry Potter phenomenon hit the bigtime — especially Phillip Pullman’s magnificent His Dark Materials trilogy (though I feel like I need to go back and read Paradise Lost to really understand it and, darn it, I just haven’t gotten around to that). I’ve also read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1, and enjoyed it.

But The Hunger Games and its sequel, Catching Fire, were on a whole different level. They’re set in an unspecified future, after the nation has destroyed itself via nuclear weapons and is divided into impoverished districts that are all governed oppressively by the decadent Capitol. One of the methods and symbols of oppression is an annual spectacle called the Hunger Games in which a pair of kids from each district are sent into an arena to fight to the death. Naturally, our heroine, Katniss Everdeen, is chosen in the first eponymous volume. Actually she volunteers — she’s a skilled hunter and outdoorswoman and it’s her timid and beloved little sister’s name that is drawn on the horrible day.

The final volume is a showdown between the rebel districts and the Capitol and our heroine has become the symbol of the rebellion, the Mockingjay. I’m not going to reveal any further plot points but I’ll say that the book is, like its predecessors, compulsively readable and thought provoking at the same time — more nuanced and multi-level than a lot of your good-versus-evil fantasy tales. I felt a slight sense of letdown for two reasons, neither of which I can blame on Collins. 1) I had elevated expectations, from my own anticipation and abetted by all the public excitement — I had a similar issue with the final Harry Potter volume. In the future, I’ll have to try to wait until after all volumes in a series get published before jumping on the bandwagon. (Yeah, right.) 2) A related problem — I was reading too fast. I do that when I’m gulping down a book purely for plot, which I was here. I’d like to go back and re-read — maybe all three volumes since there’s only three and they’re reasonably sized, not Harry Potter-like tomes. Overall, though, I’ll give this one 4 stars and the series as a whole 4 1/2.

It’s all a fantasy

Something out there is trying to make me read YA (young adult) novels, specifically the fantasy kind. The zeitgeist? The fact that I work in a library? For the moment, I’ll blame this post on Chauncey Mabe’s blog which sent me to the library shelf for Incarceron by Catherine Fisher. And you know what? It was great, just like Chauncey said. So great I’m seriously considering asking a friend to bring me the sequel from England if she visits this summer (it won’t be published here until December). Then I read this post on a great book blog I just discovered, called Citizen Reader. As luck and excellent library selection would have it, the first two books in this series by Suzanne Collins — The Hunger Games and Catching Fire — were also on the shelf at my place of employment. So they’re next. As soon as I get through The Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore’s newish novel which I’ve been looking forward to forever but for some reason haven’t quite gotten around to. Now I have a reason, to evaluate its foodiness — but I’m having a little trouble getting into it. Which is scaring me, because Moore — especially her story collection, Birds of America — is one of my all time favorites. But maybe I just need to relax and let go of the fantasy world for a little and accept a little realistic, contemporary fiction. There’s plenty of Tudor crime/fantasy dystopia waiting for me on the other side …