Some Books I Loved

 **Delightfully meta fantasy.  Our heroes are pretty certain that they are in a fairy tale, and just hope that it has a happy ending** "In time to come, when the magic is draining so far out of the world that a vampire can be banished by crossed sticks and a sprinkle of water, when all that we do and say here will be spoken of in the brightest daylight or the darkest, wildest night without fear of bringing anything to pass, wise men will debate why there is any pain or suffering at all, and will say many foolish things and a few wise ones about it, but is it not enough for us to say 'pain has come this way,' and let it be?  We do not yet belong to the gray, dull generations, or to times without meaning, or to times when meaning drains even from stories." Though more well-known for his more traditional science fiction, in 1996 John Barnes decided to write a fantasy novel, and what came was a charming, unique, and delightful little piece of fantasy that has stuck with m...

 **The stories that The Iliad and similar epics left out.  The stories of the women of the war** Sing, Muse, he said, and I have sung. I have sung of armies and I have sung of men. I have sung of gods and monsters, I have sung of stories and lies. I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain. I have sung of life after death.  And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we? And so here we are, hearing stories that have gone untold for millennia--the stories of the women of the Trojan War.  This book is, simply put, a masterpiece The framing device for th...

 **Legitimately one of the most astoundingly brilliant and absolutely brutal works of satire I've ever read** This book is dedicated  to all Caucasians in the great republic  who can trace their ancestry  back ten generations  and confidently assert that there are no  black leaves, twigs, limbs or branches on  their family trees. OK SO.  Let's talk about this book.  Written in 1931, but could have been published today as a period piece set in the 1930s.  Hell, with a shockingly small number of changes, could have been *set* today.  That's how good of a book this is Let's start at the beginning.  This book, set in then-modern times of Prohibition-era America, is one of the first ever works of Afrofuturism as it imagines a technology that allows Black (or, presumably, anyone) Americans to undergo a treatment that renders them white.  Completely indistinguishable from someone of European descent, these newly white Americans a...

 **Classic spy novel, but it it still cracks me up that a lot of readers don't get that this book is satirical** Satire is, in all seriousness, probably my absolute favorite form of art.  It is noble, it is fun, and it is a lot harder than most people credit it.  Or at least, good satire is.  Sure, you can parody the tropes and broad brush strokes of some other art form and call it "satire", but to me in order to truly excel it requires intelligence and thought and knowledge of the subject material.  In many ways, a truly great satire is a lot harder to create than a straightforward piece of art (as Wilde possibly apocryphally said, "you can fake being serious, but you can't fake being witty") And at a level even above that is those works of satire that manage to simultaneously be a really good iteration of what they are satirizing.  These works truly have my absolute highest respect:  "Shrek" is actually a wonderful fairy tale, as is "Dealing...

 **Simply put, some of the best children's fantasy out there.  And with an all-time great main character** Long before "Shrek" came along, Patricia C. Wrede's fantastic (and funny) Enchanted Forest chronicles was playfully mocking the tropes of Western fairytales--while simultaneously being a fantastic story of magic and adventure Amusingly, even fans that grew up with the series might not realize that Book 4 "Talking to Dragons" was actually the first  book written, published a solid 5 years before "Dealing with Dragons", the first book in chronology and now considered the first book of the series Apparently, Jane Yolen (I don't know if you all know her name, but in addition to being a very well-respected editor, to me she'll always be the author of the truly fantastic "Commander Toad" series of children's books) wanted a short fantasy story.  She told Wrede, "well, what about the mother character in 'Talking to Drag...

 **A vision of near-future America that is chilling, but also so obvious that I'm almost wondering why we don't do this already** I'm tagging this as "Dystopia", but frankly it's close enough to what we have now that it barely counts.  Or at the very least, brings up some pretty bleak questions about current American society.  Which is, obviously, the whole point that the author is trying to get at Set in near-future America, the "specfic" idea is that the country has added a new feature to the insurance system:  After your claim is rejected, your final appeal has been denied, you have one last option:  A duel to the death versus a representative of the insurance company And of course, these fights are broadcast on live television.  Because, duh, America.  The fights are shown in bars across the nation, people gamble on the outcomes (if this book had been written only one or two years later as sports gambling has truly taken over the industry, I guar...