Building Better Book Endcaps
Dec. 3rd, 2019 06:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellPrompt lifted from "Let's Get Literate! Building Better Book Endcaps" at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ladybusiness.
1. A book you loved five years ago. That's about when I read The Thousand Names by Django Wexler. It is several things I wouldn't normally like: military milieu, fantasy doorstopper, book 1 in a whole series of fantasy doorstoppers. In its favor, it has a unique setting (an alternate-universe version of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign), bothers to actually explain the military stuff, and provides a cast of characters which are easy to tell apart by more than just name and rank.
2. A book you loved three years ago. How about Waypoint Kangaroo by Curtis C. Chen, a spy romp set on an interplanetary cruise, told in a wonderfully entertaining voice.
3. A book you loved last year. Portal of 1000 Worlds by Dave Duncan is one of his best books. It concerns a fake emperor, an alternate Boxer Rebellion, and a person trapped in a cycle of reincarnation for a unique reason.
4. A book you loved this year. Moonshine by Jasmine Gower bowled me over just in time to make it onto my Hugo ballot. Soot City is 1920s Chicago except what the speakeasies are selling is magic. The heroine is looking for secretary work and winds up with a crew of loveable weirdos who are running one such magic-smuggling operation.
5. A book you love by trans writer. This where my tendency to not read beyond the basic author bio much starts to be a problem. Okay, Yoon Ha Lee is trans, so how about Ninefox Gambit, another case of military sf winning me over.
6. A book you love by a woman writer. Changing Planes is Ursula K. Le Guin's most underrated book. Possibly because it's so different from what people expect of her work. It's her one fictional work where her sense of humor shines through, for instance.
7. A book you love by a woman of color. Every volume of Mushishi by Yuki Urushibara. Okay, for the endcap, let's just start with volume 1. A man wanders bygone rural Japan sorting out difficulties caused by mushi, which are a sort of bacteria-level lifeform existing at the boundary of the human and spirit worlds. The closest thing contemporary sf has produced to The Twilight Zone.
8. A book you love with the most dramatic cover. I don't seem to go for books with very striking covers. But I do have the Del Rey edition of A Bridge of Birds, which has a memorably nice one, and I do love it. (I love The Story of the Stone slightly more, but you've got to read A Bridge of Birds first. And my copy of it is an omnibus edition with a very meh cover.)
9. A book you love you were recommended by a friend. I got into Elfquest via the first set of graphic novel editions because my cousins were into it, and I have never regretted it.
10. A book you recommend to everyone when they ask you for recs. The sf fans I encounter in my workplace tend to be looking for space opera a lot, so I wind up recommending the Night's Dawn trilogy and everything Peter F. Hamilton has written after it. The books are huge, but they tend to be structured like 4-5 short novels that share a character or two than one huge long grind of a narrative. For the endcap, I'll pick Pandora's Star, since you only have to read one more book to complete that chunk of story, and it's the beginning of probably his best series overall (so far).
(Books I dis-recommend to everyone: everything Hamilton wrote before the Night's Dawn trilogy.)
11. A book you love that made you have extreme emotions. I have loved Chocolate: The Consuming Passion by Sandra Boynton ever since I first read it in my teens, despite the fact that I firmly disagree with her about white chocolate.
12. A book you love from a favorite author. You can't read The Cyberiad in the middle of doing a computer science degree and not fall in love with it. Despite being a fantasy about robots, it's really one of the best works I've ever seen at understanding how things work with computers.
ladybusiness.1. A book you loved five years ago. That's about when I read The Thousand Names by Django Wexler. It is several things I wouldn't normally like: military milieu, fantasy doorstopper, book 1 in a whole series of fantasy doorstoppers. In its favor, it has a unique setting (an alternate-universe version of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign), bothers to actually explain the military stuff, and provides a cast of characters which are easy to tell apart by more than just name and rank.
2. A book you loved three years ago. How about Waypoint Kangaroo by Curtis C. Chen, a spy romp set on an interplanetary cruise, told in a wonderfully entertaining voice.
3. A book you loved last year. Portal of 1000 Worlds by Dave Duncan is one of his best books. It concerns a fake emperor, an alternate Boxer Rebellion, and a person trapped in a cycle of reincarnation for a unique reason.
4. A book you loved this year. Moonshine by Jasmine Gower bowled me over just in time to make it onto my Hugo ballot. Soot City is 1920s Chicago except what the speakeasies are selling is magic. The heroine is looking for secretary work and winds up with a crew of loveable weirdos who are running one such magic-smuggling operation.
5. A book you love by trans writer. This where my tendency to not read beyond the basic author bio much starts to be a problem. Okay, Yoon Ha Lee is trans, so how about Ninefox Gambit, another case of military sf winning me over.
6. A book you love by a woman writer. Changing Planes is Ursula K. Le Guin's most underrated book. Possibly because it's so different from what people expect of her work. It's her one fictional work where her sense of humor shines through, for instance.
7. A book you love by a woman of color. Every volume of Mushishi by Yuki Urushibara. Okay, for the endcap, let's just start with volume 1. A man wanders bygone rural Japan sorting out difficulties caused by mushi, which are a sort of bacteria-level lifeform existing at the boundary of the human and spirit worlds. The closest thing contemporary sf has produced to The Twilight Zone.
8. A book you love with the most dramatic cover. I don't seem to go for books with very striking covers. But I do have the Del Rey edition of A Bridge of Birds, which has a memorably nice one, and I do love it. (I love The Story of the Stone slightly more, but you've got to read A Bridge of Birds first. And my copy of it is an omnibus edition with a very meh cover.)
9. A book you love you were recommended by a friend. I got into Elfquest via the first set of graphic novel editions because my cousins were into it, and I have never regretted it.
10. A book you recommend to everyone when they ask you for recs. The sf fans I encounter in my workplace tend to be looking for space opera a lot, so I wind up recommending the Night's Dawn trilogy and everything Peter F. Hamilton has written after it. The books are huge, but they tend to be structured like 4-5 short novels that share a character or two than one huge long grind of a narrative. For the endcap, I'll pick Pandora's Star, since you only have to read one more book to complete that chunk of story, and it's the beginning of probably his best series overall (so far).
(Books I dis-recommend to everyone: everything Hamilton wrote before the Night's Dawn trilogy.)
11. A book you love that made you have extreme emotions. I have loved Chocolate: The Consuming Passion by Sandra Boynton ever since I first read it in my teens, despite the fact that I firmly disagree with her about white chocolate.
12. A book you love from a favorite author. You can't read The Cyberiad in the middle of doing a computer science degree and not fall in love with it. Despite being a fantasy about robots, it's really one of the best works I've ever seen at understanding how things work with computers.
