Recommended Reading

I'm mentally and physically exhausted by work at the moment, so apologies for the "light blogging" nature of my posting for the near future. Anyway, in the comments on yesterday's post, Martin asked be for some recommended reading, and that seems a good place to go when you don't have a great deal of time for an entry and are lacking energy for reading other blogs for inspiration. So, a list of fantasy and SF books which meet with noisms' approval:

• Anything by Gene Wolfe, but I strongly recommend The Wizard Knight; everybody (rightly) praises The Book of the New Sun, but The Wizard Knight contains some simply stunning passages, and has much more of a "human" feel. Perhaps Wolfe has mellowed in his old age.
• M. John Harrison's Viriconium saga, natch. Nowadays you can get them all, three novellas and about a dozen short stories, in a single volume. A must for anybody who is interested in proper fantasy for grownups. 
• I'm not really into "young adult" books (the phrase "young adult" actually makes me want to vomit) but you can't go wrong with the Legends of Lone Wolf series by John Grant. These are essentially a novelisation of the gamebook line of the same name, but they're surprisingly good reads, and pretty well-written for what they are. (John Grant got pretty avant-garde for an author of books aimed at teenagers; one of the books contains an entire chapter written in the 2nd person.)
• Glen Cook's Black Company novels are a rollicking read.
• If you can get it, I'd say Jack Vance's best work is Cugel's Saga. If you read that book and don't immediately recognise the man for being one of the top 10 living prose stylists in the English language, you literally do not know what you are talking about. The prequel, The Eyes of the Overworld, is almost as good but not quite.
• I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile, because it's utterly insane but so po-faced it just works. And it goes on for volume after volume, so if you're into that sort of thing...
• Moving onto SF, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman has to be up there.
• It seems crass to recommend anything by William Gibson, because I'd be amazed that anyone reading this blog hasn't been through all his books anyway, but Burning Chrome, a selection of his early short stories, is excellent. "Red Star, Winter Orbit", "Dogfight", "New Rose Hotel", and the title piece are bona fide classics, and the rest are consistently great (although oddly, I never quite understood the appeal of "Johnny Mnemomic").
• Clive Barker's Galilee is not often read or talked about, but I loved it. It's as weird and all-over-the-place as you'd expect with a Barker book, but you won't read anything else like it anywhere.
• If you like animal fantasy or just fancy something different, check out William Horwood's Duncton Wood and sequels. Don't expect it to be like Redwall: features a pregnant mole having her belly ripped open by rooks, for example.
• Weis and Hickman write complete balderdash, but it can be a lot of fun. The Death Gate Cycle is an example of this. Completely throwaway and superficial, but you know what? It's entertaining, and sometimes that's all that matters.
• Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt is great alt-history, which imagines what would have happened to the world if everybody in Europe had died from the Black Death. The politics are a bit questionable, but it's an interesting idea, well-executed.
• Finally, China Mieville is a bit hit-and-miss, but The Scar and Iron Council are must-reads, in my opinion.

And some fantasy and SF books which noisms thinks are over-rated or plain duds:

• Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen is based on a GURPS fantasy campaign, and reads like it too. 
• Anything by David Eddings is just awful, but I especially recommend steering clear of the Sparhawk books. I read all of them and even at the age of 14 I spotted them for the sheer rubbish they are.
• John Crowley's Little, Big is raved about, but I found it an excruciating read. Turgid, florid, and boring.
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Arabesk trilogy threatened to be interesting with a fun setting (cyberpunk future based on an alternative history scenario in which the Ottoman Empire never collapsed). But it never gelled for me and I gave up after about 200 pages.
• Lord spare us from Anne McCaffrey.
• I actively despised Mary Gentle's White Crow novels. Boring, self-important, and arch. There is nothing worse than somebody self-consciously trying to be literary when they're writing pulp. Compare her approach to that of Vance. Or, on second thoughts, don't, because it'll only encourage her if you buy a copy.
• I tried to get interested in Kate Elliot's Crown of Stars series, but it just seemed like a poor man's ASOIAF, and the "it's like Europe but not quite Europe" motif is really unimaginative. Avoid.

Anyway, nowadays my visits to the Fantasy & SF section in the book shop usually leads to profound dismay at all the crappy trilogies purporting to be "a must for Tolkien fans everywhere" (or whatever) and the proliferation of "Dark Fantasy" (a psuedonym for "Twilight with the serial numbers filed off"), so I tend not to bother any more. I may be missing out on all kinds of wonders. Somehow I doubt it, though.