A Month In The Country by J L Carr. Probably the best novella ever written where nothing happens. Also one of the only books that can make me cry.
Avatar: take two parts EK Weaver for one part Dan ManganMy favourite science-fiction novel of all time is Fallen Dragon by Peter F Hamilton, who is not exactly hugely famous. Fallen Dragon itself is a rather odd anomaly within his works, as it is a stand-alone novel amongst his better known works which are generally series of multiple Door Stoppers.
edited 15th Aug '11 5:59:55 AM by pagad
With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.Swingin back around because I'm mildly surprised this thread is still here. Haha, I've heard of A Month in the Country! Not the book though...the ballet. Yeah that existed. From what I've seen it was quite intruiging! But enough about that.
The Underland Chronicles were also huge in my school, because we're awesome like that. Also read Children of the Lamp. I really liked it too, never got around to the sequels...
Anyone heard of Bill Brittain's novels? He was always kind of like a darker Bruce Coville in my mind. Wings, All the Money in the World, The Wish Giver and all that jazz. Wings is frankly a giant pain to find on the Internet because there are like a thousand books with that name. Also apparently critics hate it with a passion. :c
edited 24th Aug '11 2:01:47 AM by piearty
I try to keep good series from being neglected at school by recommending them to friends.
Some books I feel are underappreciated:
- Distant Waves (Suzanne Weyn)
- The Year of Secret Assignments and The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie (Jaclyn Moriarty)
- Tiger's Curse Series (Colleen Houck)
Someone mentioned Avi back in 2010. The only book of his that I have is Keep Your Eye on Amanda, which I found totally at random at a bookstore.
I was exposed to very little reading growing up, but I did scoop up a few. Everyone seems to know most of the kiddie-to-young adult cornerstones like Roald Dahl, Wayside School, Maniac Magee, Redwall, etc. (As a footnote, I never read two other kiddie cornerstones — Goosebumps and Animorphs.) But I never see anyone talk about Silverwing. I have all 4 Silverwing books but have never read them because I'm lazy.
I also have a few obscure comic books that no one seems to know about but me, but that'd be off topic for this forum, wouldn't it?
I honestly don't even know what kind of books I would like since my reading history provides so little to go on. Where do you go when your bookshelves are mostly composed of comic strip anthologies and Uncle John's Bathroom Reader?
@Piearty: From what I remember, the first Children of the Lamp book is the best. I read them a long time ago and they didn't make too much of an inpression.
^^I remember reading Jaclyn Moriarty's books. My friends were crazy about her in year 5, so I read them even though they weren't really to my taste. Feeling Sorry for Celia was my favourite.
"Doctor Who means never having to say you're kidding." - BocajI remember bits of the Silverwing cartoon! It was a bit odd though, since they sort of made all the characters kinda-sorta-but-not-really anthropomorphic. They had human-ish hairstyles and their fur patterns vaguely resembled clothing. But I think it was otherwise close to the source.
Speaking of Oppel, has anyone hear read Half-Brother? I saw it in a library, thought it looked nifty, didn't think to check it out, haven't seen it since. Depressing.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaI know, but Amazon also charges shipping. I usually have much better luck and can get things more cheaply on Barnes & Noble online, at least for recent books, but I'm fund-short in general right now and am mostly set to skimming libraries.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaI loved Wayside School Is Falling Down as a kid, but that was the only one I read because our library only had that one. There was another Louis Sachar book I read a lot, but I don't remember the name of it. It involved a hat that had the phrase "PIG CITY" written on it. I loved it as a kid, but usually when people talk about Sachar, it's either all about Wayside or Holes. Which are still great books, but I always have a place in my heart for that PIG CITY book.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada@Pagad: I've read Peter F Hamilton's stuff. I did like them, but two things stopped them from being favourites.
Firstly, they are sooooo big. I mean, there's nothing wrong with doorstoppers. But if I'm exhausted and looking for a conclusion to the story when I'm halfway through the first book of three, you must be doing something wrong. I can only keep my emotions and imagination invested in a bunch of people for so long before I start getting tired.
Secondly, the sex scenes just started seeming over the top, openly pornographic, and shoehorned in for no real reason. The way he described women seemed kind of exploitative to me, as well. I mean, nothing wrong with having a woman in a skimpy dress. But if you say, offhand "The men in the party were wearing suits", and then press pause on the scene so you can describe how the women in the party had half-naked breasts falling out of their exceeding skimpy cocktail dresses in loving detail, I'm going to get the distinct impression that you don't really care much about me as an audience member.
Be not afraid...Alas, I have never heard or seen anything about a lovely little western book from Penguin that I read once ages ago. It concerned a tontine(really a battle royale but it was called a tontine) in a town known as Salvation, in Texas. The main character, Jim, whose name I only remember due to the first line of the title character, receives a letter inviting him to the tontine though he has no idea what a tontine actually is.
I know it was named for the character Trapp, whose signature weapon was a shotgun sawed down so far that it could allegedly kill six men in a single blast if the wielder were lucky and they were positioned correctly. I believe it was a Mossberg shotgun, though I could be mistaken.
I'm desperate to find this book again, in fact. If anyone else has heard of it, please tell me what it's actually called and who wrote it.
@freezair Oh, god. Sixth Grade Secrets was another favorite of mine.
I'm possibly the only person I know that read Babysitter's Club books. I remember when I was nine I got 15 from my babysitter. Then again, they were written way back in the 80's and 90's, so not many people my age would know them.
Anyone else read Sweet Valley Twins books when they were younger?
I don’t even know anymore.Sixth Grade Secrets! I knew I could easily find the title by going to Wikipedia, but I was too lazy and felt like letting you people do it for me. :P
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaOh, someone else who liked The Mouse That Roared, it's a fun read. I also have the sequels, The Mouse on the Moon and the Mouse on Wall Street.
Has anyone else read Jane Yolen's Sister Light/Sister Dark? I really enjoyed the snarky meta-ness of the bits in the front of each chapter, moreso than the story itself. Her Cards of Grief is also not well known and very good, it deals with the dangers of cultural contamination for isolated societies.
Sheri Tepper's pretty well known, but I like some of her early work more than her more recent stuff. The books about the True Game are a very odd trilogy of trilogies, which starts out like fantasy and ends up being a very odd type of SF. Her Marianne trilogy is also very whimsical and fantastic, and far as I can tell nearly unknown.
Night Calls and Kindred Rites by Katherine Eliska Kimbriel are fantasies set in Appalachia during the times when they were the frontier. Very good books about a time and place that are not well mined for their potential in mainstream fantasy. The only others I can even place as similar are Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John books, and they're set closer to our time. Patricia Wrede is doing something with Frontier America, but hers are set more in the breadbasket rather than Appalachia, they are good also; but not quite as obscure.
Jane Yolen? Snarky? Meta? I haven't read it, and reading that description, I have no damn idea why I haven't! TO THE LIST!
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaThe Firestar series by Michael Flynn, seriously. (I wrote the trope page, natch. Didn't do much with it as yet, though.) Near-future space travel, optimistic about the future without ever forgetting that its characters are human beings. When a major character is put out of commission by a totally mundane medical emergency, you take it as seriously as the characters do. In any other science fiction universe I am familiar with, it would feel like some sort of crude author manipulation, but here, no. The natural course of life feels natural. Best of all, there's this undercurrent of humans as capable, which we get increasingly less in modern society.
Hail Martin Septim!A lot of the books written by Nora Roberts are great, like the In Death series. It's a shame that no one seems to have heard of them, let alone want to discuss them!
^Really? I see them everywhere in libraries and bookstores. I think it may just be that the literary tastes of this forum are skewed towards fantasy and sci-fi.
Cyril Connolly appears to have disappeared off the face of the Earth. Once one of the most influential literary critics of his time, he has now been relegated to a joke in a Monty Python song. I've been hunting his Enemies of Promise for years.
"Doctor Who means never having to say you're kidding." - BocajColleen Mc Cullough's Masters of Rome books. Particularly the first one. "The First Man in Rome". Utterly terrifying in its brilliance.

Kraken, by China Mieville is pretty slick. perhaps the New-Weirdest book I have read.
edited 10th Aug '11 5:47:46 AM by doorhandle