the wish-list so far

[kaigou]

my local librarians are either going to hate me, or just stare at me with blank expressions. also, this numbering is in order of addition to the wish list, not in order of preference. ETA: bold = interlibrary/local; italic = not available; # = local library; underline = author avail but not that title; neither = read/reading.

1. The Hell Screens — Alvin Lu
2. Death of a Red Heroine — Xiaolong Qiu
3. The Eye of Jade: A Mei Wang Mystery — Diane Wei Liang #
4. The Midnight Palace — Carlos Ruiz Zafón
5. The Age of Dreaming — Nina Revoyr
6. Southland — Nina Revoyr
7. Feng Shui Detective — Nury Vittachi
8. Moonrise, Sunset — Gopal Baratham
9. Shadow Theatre — Fiona Cheong
10. White Teeth: A Novel — Zadie Smith
11. Life and Death are Wearing Me Out: A Novel — Yen Mo
12. Nervous Conditions — Tsitsi Dangarembga
13. Wizard of the Crow — Ngugi wa Thiongo
14. The Heart of Redness: A Novel — Zakes Mda
15. Running in the Family — Michael Ondaatje
16. My Name Is Red — Orhan Pamuk
17. Salt and Saffron — Kamila Shamsie
18. Burnt Shadows: A Novel — Kamila Shamsie
19. The Skull Mantra — Eliot Pattison
20. The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium & Discovery — Amitav Ghosh
21. Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was — Angélica Gorodischer
22. The Dervish House — Ian McDonald
23. The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad — Minister Faust
24. The Alchemists of Kush — Minister Faust
25. The Devil's Whisper — Miyuki Miyabe
26. Chinatown Beat — Henry Chang
27. Babel-17/Empire Star — Samuel R. Delany
28. The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years — Chingiz Aitmatov
29. The Mistress of Spices: A Novel — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
30. My Soul to Keep — Tananarive Due
31. Brown Girl in the Ring — Nalo Hopkinson
32. Cast in Shadow — Michelle Sagara
33. Racing the Dark — Alaya Dawn Johnson
34. Salt Fish Girl — Larissa Lai
35. Fatal Remains — Eleanor Taylor Bland #
36. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel — Sijie Dai
37. Mama Rocks the Empty Cradle — Nora DeLoach
38. The Walking Boy: A Novel — Lydia Kwa
39. When Fox is a Thousand — Larissa Lai
49. Warchild — Karin Lowachee
50. The Hero's Walk — Anita Rau Badami #
51. Miss Chopsticks — Xinran
52. The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up — Yiwu Liao

I have no idea whether 'Minister Faust' is a real name or pen name, but it's a freaking brilliant name any way you look at it. It's a name that demands you do great, if kinda crazy, things.

If you can think of any other SF/F works, or any of these titles make you do the "if you like that [story description] you may also like" routine, please feel free to rattle off the "also likes" you've got.

Comments

[staranise]

Minister Faust is a freaking awesome dude. I haven't read anything by him, but my wee tiny local SF con ran a "what now racefail huh?" panel that was set up in a really clueless manner, and it was three white ladies and him. He pretty much came out of it as a gracious cluebrick to the head, gaining at least one spontaneous round of applause from the audience. I was basically vibrating on the edge of my chair from surprise, delight, and the suffused glow of Win for the whole time he spoke.

[kaigou]

Well, anyone who can come up with a book title (or even book idea) like The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad is freaking kickass in my book, but it's also a pleasure to hear he's someone worth seeing in person. (Not to discount him, but a lot of writers are witty/interesting on paper but mumble or pontificate or just steamroller in person, and that gets tiring.) When I get back into con-going again, I'll have to keep an eye out for the ones he's attending!

[haya5h1.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Azania

aww. Awesome nom de plume with extra aplomb, though.

[kaigou]

Absolutely. Puts to shame the boring NdPs like, oh, "Jake Smith" or "L. Jones" or even the ridiculous ones that try for first-in-the-alphabet like "A. Akron" or whatever. I mean, there's NdPs, and then there's NdP'ing with style.

(All made up, btw, rather than snark at specific examples.)

[kellicat]

Karin Lowachee has also written a fantasy novel called The Gaslight Dogs and it's well worth your time. The setting is different and it explores the interaction of different cultures. The novel alternates between a young Ciracusan captain and a young woman from an Inuit-based culture. It's set in a fantasy world that reflects the conflicts between white settlers and First Nations people in our own world.

Michelle Sagara writes high fantasy under the pen name "Michelle West" and her high fantasy novels are among my favorite epic fantasies. She's written two complete series (the Hunter duology, the Sun Sword series) and is in the process of writing a third (The House War series). Her writing can be a bit difficult to get into in the Sun Sword series (especially in The Broken Crown, the first book in the series), but it's worth persisting through it. One aspect of her writing that I appreciate is how she writes lots of female characters in different roles and with differing types of strength, and showcases more than one woman as a competent leader.

If you're looking for good science fiction, run don't walk and get your hands on some of Octavia Butler's books.

[kaigou]

I didn't include Butler's work since I figured that would be an entire month of reading in itself! ... so I was focusing on futuristic (at most), closer to contemporary, but a lot of magical realism seems to have filtered in. I'm holding off on fantasy works -- though Gaslight Dogs did look really interesting, and the library has that, too -- since I wanted real-world stories, for the first go-round.

The joy is that my library turns out to have so much, I don't have to worry about blowing it all on only a few titles. I can do a round of contemporary, mystery, and some magical realism, and then move into strong SF/F. Yay.

[kellicat]

I didn't include Butler's work since I figured that would be an entire month of reading in itself!

And that would be a bad thing how? Seriously though, it's probably best not to read all of her novels at once. I'd recommend starting with her short story collection, or Wild Seed for her science fiction and Kindred when you're interested in dark fantasy. The one novel I wouldn't recommend starting with is Fledgling. It's lighter and a lot less developed than her other novels.

If you're focused on contemporary, I have to warn you that Cast in Shadow by Michelle Sagara is medieval urban fantasy, not contemporary urban. You may want to wait until you're in the mood to read SF/F to read it.

If you're interested in magic realism, The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto is a good book to pick up. It's about a Japanese family that immigrates to the Canadian prairies and how they cope or not cope with their lives. The narrator's a daughter of the family who gets involved with a strange pregnancy with a kappa. It may be weird, but at least it doesn't have the words "samurai" or "geisha" anywhere near the title. I know you have a large pile of books to read (yay for good library systems!). Just thought I'd throw another one out there.

[kaigou]

It wouldn't be a bad thing. It just wouldn't be what I'd had in mind when making the list: to read authors who are new-to-me. I read Butler in college; she hasn't been new-to-me in a very long time. [ETA: my previous response was mildly flippant. I've always intended to read more of her works.]

I have a fuller list that marks the genres for each. When given free rein, I tend to gravitate towards mysteries and magical realism (all the better if at the same time). But there are other titles in the list that just sounded intriguing in some note or detail, so I figured I'd stick 'em in there.

I looked at Goto's works, and read excerpts where I could (thank goodness for the Amazon "look inside!" which is no longer half as annoying as it once was)... and while The Kappa Child sounded interesting on-screen, my mind was wandering before I'd finished the first page. That's the difficult part about dismissing a work when you're reading the translation: is it just the translator's style (or imposition of style) and the original is considerably more lively? There are plenty of people who can translate, but very few who can translate well and write well, it seems. And then there are the times I've read a translation, didn't like it for some stylistic point, and a bilingual friend's response was, "that's very accurate to the original." Well, then, eh?

[Also: the use of "samurai" or "geisha" in the title is the kind of thing -- per my other post -- that one uses if one is not Japanese. It's like some kind of Westerner-cred, to signal to Westerner-readers from Westerner-author. Not all the time, sure, but when the author's last name is Williams or MacPherson, it's more likely a signal, at least in my book, so to speak.]

[nagasvoice]

Samuel Delaney's book On Writing is certainly not fiction, but it's really impressively interesting. He teaches English. You will acquire a huge wishlist just from what he says about his examples of different things.