The Longest "Best Books" List I've Ever Seen

So I was wandering through friends-of-friends-of-friends pages looking for interesting books reviews and recommendations, and I happened across this list that purported to contain the 1,001 books one should read before one dies.

I have not read very many of them. Alas, by the standards of the creator of this particular list, I am shockingly ill-read. I note that I have read very little of what is considered important literature (at least according to the creator of this list) from roughly the last 50 years, with the exception of important science fiction. There are certainly some authors on the list that I want to read, and want to read more of, but even were I to read everything I wanted to, I’d have read considerably less than half of the books on the list.

(Sept. 10/07) Edit: I've decided to revist this list from time to time, becasue there are books on this list I plan to read. Edit dates entered in the list refer to date of edit, not date the book was read.

( “2000s” )

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All told. I’ve read about 175 of the 1,001 on the list - I lost count a couple of times and didn't really want to start over from the beginning.

It’s a flawed list in many ways, although at least it does have books by women and even a few by authors writing outside of the Western European tradition, which makes it better than some I’ve seen. It seems to be more of an author’s list than a booklist, though – for some authors, it lists almost all of their works, even the weaker ones, thus taking up places that might have otherwise have gone to other authors I happen to think are just as noteworthy, and ones that I’m glad I read before I died.

Through a Compound Eye, Darkly

Karin Lowachee:
Warchild
Burndive
Cagebird

Let me say this right now and get it out of my system: Karin Lowachee is an innovative, powerful and sometimes brilliant writer. With these three books, she has achieved something that goes well beyond being entertaining and thought-provoking. She has pushed the structure of the “novel series” in a fashion reminiscent of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and in the process given her readers a multifaceted view of the alienating, dislocating, damaging effects of war, political and media corruption, profiteering and privateering on society in general, with specific and profound focus on what happens to children trying to survive in the middle of all of this, at the mercy of adults who see them, in various ways, as commodities and means to an end that may serve the adults interest, but rarely those of the child.

Each book is complete in itself, although all three books are strongly paralleled in terms of their overall story arcs and the paths of their characters. Each novel deals with the personal journey of a child or adolescent, deeply injured by the impact on their lives of war between two space-faring cultures. The three protagonists - Jos Musey (Warchild), Ryan Azarcon (Burndive) and Yuri Kirov (Cagebird) – must find their paths through loss, terror, violence, and exploitation toward a place of relative security where they may have a chance to restore their damaged sense of self. Each book stands alone as a solid character-driven coming-of-age action adventure with a strong undercurrent of social and political analysis – never didactic, never polemic, but always connecting the self-interested actions and delusions of those in power to their ultimate impacts on the lives of “ordinary” people.

At the same time, each novel covers essentially the same time period and brings its lead character to the same point in time and space, providing different perspectives on the events that lead to one critical point where the possibilities of war and peace are in the balance, and multiple insights into the characters involved in this decision-point. Lowachee uses her parallel lenses to present, through the stories of her protagonists, a perspective on the persistence of violence, exploitation and salvation across successive generations. There is nothing new in the horrors of war and child exploitation; violence begets and breeds violence, a point driven home by the complex variations on the relationships of father/son, master/slave, teacher/initiate, captain/crew, sponsor/protégé which bind so many of the pivotal characters together.

While each book is a fully satisfying experience in terms of the growth of its main character, the gestalt formed by the three books remains incomplete, and, to this reader’s eyes, lacking in a certain balance of perspectives. Although Lowachee’s next novel is reportedly not connected to these three, it is my belief – and fervent hope - that the author intends further volumes in this “series,” both to complete the set of perspectives leading to the crisis point and, to follow the key characters – which include but are not limited to the protagonists of the first three books – through the critical events that have drawn them all together, to a conclusion of the arc that lies beneath each protagonist’s story, the direction of the long war and the evolving relationship of the two peoples, human and striviirc-na, who have fought it.

And while I wait, I’ll be reading anything else Lowachee writes, because she’s a damned good storyteller.

Hero, Meet Quest. Quest, Meet Hero.

Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory:
The Outstretched Shadow
To Light a Candle

These are the first two volumes in a quite enjoyable fantasy about – what else? – the eternal war between good and evil, personified by elves and their less humanoid allies on the one hand and demons and their less humanoid allies on the other, and in the middle, an unsuspecting batch of humans led by powerful but power-corrupted leaders vulnerable to manipulation by the dark powers. Of course, there is a magically gifted young hero, with a manifest destiny, who joins the forces of good after suffering misunderstanding, disillusionment, abuse and rejection at the hands of his own people, and who seems likely to be the key that unveils the corruption at the heart of the human kingdom and offers the possibility of at least a limited victory against the forces of darkness.

What might otherwise be a relatively formulaic piece of high fantasy is made more intriguing by the effective use of both unicorns and dragons, and by the details of the various forms and schools of magic, who can use them and how.

What can I say? Both books I’ve read so far were good, light reads. I like the characters well enough to want to know how it all ends, and I’m rooting for the unicorn.

The Enemy Within

The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham

One of the great classics dealing with mid-20th century xenophobic paranoia, The Midwich Cuckoos is, for the handful of people who don’t know the basic plot, the story of a quiet English village that, along with a number of other small human habitations scattered around the planet, falls asleep one day and nine months later finds itself rearing a group of very unusual and psychically gifted children who are ultimately revealed to be a threat to all humankind.

It’s a simple story, one that that couches the question of the human response to fear of the unknown, the different, the other, inside a Darwinian framework – preservation of the species against the possible introduction of a new improved species that might compete successfully for resources and eventually drive out and condemn to evolutionary failure its less adapted predecessor.

The mysterious and obviously inhuman children are born with powerful defence mechanisms that protect them from deliberate attempts to harm them and enable them to retaliate against and punish much of what they cannot protect themselves from. Their difference, and their gifts, evoke fear in the humans around them. The situation moves quickly to a face-off in which both groups – the children, and the natural inhabitants of the world they have appeared in – assume that competition to the point of destruction is the only alternative.

The assumption is that Midwich and the other sites where these strange children have been born have been seeded by aliens, who leave their young to either survive or die with nothing more than their exceptional abilities to help them – in itself an evolutionary mechanism that permits minimal investment in reproduction at a great potential cost.

The fact that the children are shown to be a species of hive-minds – each town actually host only two alien individuals, one male, one female, with multiple bodies – without much in the way of difference or individuality in their component parts, suggests an interpretation of the book as a ideologically slanted parable of the Cold War, with the recently “hatched” communist totalitarian states invading the long-established capitalist and individualistic nations of the West via an insidious "fifth column." The enemy might be, not just the person beside you, but the very child at your breast.

Was Wyndam saying in The Midwich Cuckoos that co-operation between different species – or different socio-political systems – is doomed to failure and must inevitably end in the destruction of one or the other? Or was he lamenting the mindset in which fear of the unknown and the impulse to answer threat with escalated threat makes such co-operation unthinkable? I’ve never been completely certain, but either way, The Midwich Cuckoos does present the question for consideration in unforgettable fashion, and, as it was when the book was first written, it is a question well worth considering today.

Voices and Gifts

Voices – Ursula K LeGuin

Voices is the second volume in a series LeGuin (or her publisher) is calling the Annals of the Western Shore; I read the first volume, Gifts, a couple of years ago when it first came out and was quite enchanted with it.

Voices is not exactly a sequel, although the main characters of Gifts appear and play crucial roles. It is rather a continuation, a development of themes and issues touched upon in the first book – the importance of understanding and accepting your own abilities and gifts, of knowing who you are and following your own path.

The main protagonist of Voices is a young woman, Memer, who herself has a gift to be acknowledge, accepted and nurtured. For Memer, however, the use of her gift – a gift of vision – can become one of the flashpoints of rebellion against a tyranny that has limited not only the freedoms of the body and of choice, but of the mind and of thought. Memer’s city has been conquered by a people who believe that reading and writing are acts of evil – the works of demons. Memer’s family guards the only surviving collection of her people’s books – their history, their literature, their dreams, their cultural heritage. And closely linked to these books is Memer’s oracular gift to read and voice the truth.

Into Memer’s world come Orrec and Gry, the protagonists of Gifts. Orrec is now a master storyteller, with the gift to create and communicate his creations. When both Orrec and Memer give voice to their gifts, they restore the past, illuminate the present and change the future.

I could also talk about the topicality of a depiction of a war characterised by leaders who believe they are chosen by their deities to drive out evil and demonic forces, of the tragedies that can result from a vast communication gap between cultures, of the muffling and shrouding of women, of the uses that power has for keeping the lessons of history, the voices of truth, the strength of personal integrity and the hope of free creative vision out of the hands of the people, but you’ll get all that and more when you read the book. LeGuin never writes on just one level.

Different Strokes

Boy in the Middle – Patrick Califia

I’m very picky about my porn. I prefer stories to pictures, but they have to be well-written, with interesting characters and scenarios. I like my porn kinky, and I don’t much care what genders are involved, as long as the story draws me in rather than leaves me outside looking.

Patrick Califia’s work does all that for me. Califia’s own sexual journey has given him a broad perspective on genders, orientations, kink, leather, all the delicious flavours and smells, touches, sights and sounds of desire, and you’ll find all of them in the stories collected in Boy in the Middle. As Califia says in the introduction to this feast of pansexuality:

So here is a book that celebrates several forms of passion. It is diverse, perverse, and bold. Not all of the sex within these pages is same-sex, but it is all queer.

If this sounds like your cup of tea, then I can promise you hours of reading pleasure.

(no subject)

Reluctant Voyagers – Elizabeth Vonarburg

This is not an easy book to write about, because very little of what one might choose to say about the characters or the plot is necessarily true. The “realities” described in this book are as fluid and dream-like as Vonarburg’s exquisite and exquisitely translated (by Jane Brierley) prose.

Readers of Vonarburg’s English-language collection of short stories, The Slow Engines of Time will have read, in her tales of the voyagers, the seeds of this novel, but those seeds have travelled through both time and space, and grown in some unexpected ways, in journeying toward this nouvelle incarnation. The voyage begins in an alternate Montreal, where Catherine Rhymer, like her literary predecessor Thomas, is led by uncertain paths into an unknown reality - or realities - that will challenge and change her perceptions of everything she thinks she knows, including her own existence.

Reluctant Voyagers is a meditation on memory, belief and identity, an exploration of divinity, creation and mortality, an investigation of reality, probability and choices. It’s about the courage to step beyond boundaries, and ignore definitions, and the need to experience what lies beyond that drives some of us to plunge into the unknown, knowing that we may never go home again. It’s also an examination of the perils of refusing to change, to take that leap into the unknown. And it’s beautiful and it's brilliant.