Jim's comments

Jim's comments from the Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library group.

Note: Jim is no longer a member of this group.

Mawgojzeta wrote: "I rate according to how I read them (as separate books or as an omnibus) . Not sure why - simply had to make a choice. "

Ditto. I've been known to get lazy though.

I've read some of Morressy's books, too. Loved "Graymantle" & the others. I read one SF book of his, "Under a Calculating Star" that was even better, though.

I'm reading The Curse of the Mistwraith by GR author Janny Wurts. Really good so far. Complex world.

Janny Wurts has several series. I'm starting to read one right now. I've read a couple of her stand alone books & the trilogy she did with Raymond Feist. All excellent, so I expect the same from this. It's the beginning of her Wars of Light and Shadow : Ships of Merior series. 9 books total. They're being reissued, I think & the last one is due out this year.

Thanks for telling us about him. I ordered Out Of The Ashes from PaperBackSwap. Are the Devil books horror? Looks like he covered several genres.

I love Fantastic Fiction. I copy their lists, paste them into notepad (which removes links & covers) & print them out with authors that I have a lot of books for. Makes it easier to keep track of what I have & need.

The link there for Johnstone is:
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/j/will...

If you become a fan of an author here on GR, you get links to their blogs & updates on their writing progress.

I took Kernos' remark about 18 - 40 being a young adult as a joking reference (young-adult vs. 'young adult' or youth) nothing to get bent about. I know I tend to think anyone under 35 or so, down to 18, is a young adult, too. Since I have a kid over 25, my perspective of 'youth' has aged...

When it comes to classifying YA novels, they're hitting a huge comprehension range, too large to ever do well at it. It might be 'only 6 years' but that period probably has more growth in it than any other period in our lives except the first few years after birth. It's the range from comic books to Hustler, grade school to college or the Army. Lots of firsts; jobs, loves, cars & living on our own.

Each one of those firsts is a huge change on our perceptions. Depending on environment, hormones & opportunities, the emotional age can vary way more than the chronological ages. We're not as well protected, so can make some horrible, stupid choices & take the full consequences.

I'm never happy with any classifications of books & this one less than most. Even the broadest, such as fiction-nonfiction, have gray areas. Books like philosophy & religion/mythology can go either way. I keep some historical fiction in with my 'factual' history books because they often portray the 'truth' every bit as well.

Some books that are classed as YA, I read before I was 13 & understood just fine. Others I've read as an adult, decades apart, & still get something different out of them. All Quiet on the Western Front is a good example. My attitudes when I was 15, 25 & 45 were remarkably different on that subject.

I don't think it's bad to have a YA category, but I think any adult that blindly shoves a book at a kid because it is YA should have their head examined. "Hardy Boys" worked for me at 13, but not at 18. "The Outsiders" worked for all 6 years, but that's a rarity, not the rule.

In the 'Authors mentioned in this topic', I didn't see Janny Wurts listed. She should be. I'm reading The Master of Whitestorm right now & it's fantastic. One of those books that makes me wish for a lot more reading time - NOW! Also, I really like her art work. She did the cover art for a lot of her books. She has them on her web site:
http://www.paravia.com/JannyWurts/websit...
Well worth browsing through.

Terence wrote: "...Jack Vance, Galactic Effectuator. It's two novellas about Miro Hetzel, a private eye in Vance's Gaean Reach. Typical Vance so ..."

Thanks, Terence! I just read this the other day on your recommendation. It was good.

Oh! I hadn't heard. I'm very sorry to read about it.

I remember when my wife picked up Pawn of Prophecy from the library in the early 80's. Queen of Sorcery came out shortly after we read it, so we read that too. For most of a decade, we read one book per year, finishing the Belgariad & moving on to the Mallorean. We'd have to re-read the previous books every few years as we'd forget details.

Two of my kids liked those series as well & I had to replace my original paperbacks of the Belgariad. The originals were too well read & fell apart. I think my favorite by him was the Elenium trilogy, though. His writing was very entertaining.

Gone, but not forgotten, are Karl Edward Wagner's books. While some of his Kane & Conan books are readily available, I noticed today that In a Lonely Place, a bunch of his horror short stories, are about unavailable. On Amazon, there are 4 hardbacks available for $100 or you can get the mass market paperback for $156! Ouch!!! I picked it up for $2.25, I think. Luckily, I still have it.

Some old books are coming back as ebooks, thank goodness. An old favorite Man of Many Minds is a free PDF or you can get it as a Kindle book, which is cool.

Don't get me wrong, I really do like Ellison's writing. The first book of his that I read (about 40 years ago) was I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream & I think the title story is one of the best, most chilling stories I ever read. High praise.

He is, IMO, the grand master of the short story. That he can write them so easily (In the display window of a book store upon request!) is yet another point in his favor. While I'm sure a lot of dreck was produced, I've read some of those stories & they're excellent.

His Partners in Wonder books are excellent & introduced me to many authors I would never have read otherwise.

good points. The first is one of my favorite Outer Limits episodes (Robert Culp?) & the second one of my favorite Star Trek episodes, although I read somewhere that Ellison wanted that to be credited to Cordwainer Bird. It was extensively re-written for Star Trek by others.

While I'll agree he has man-woman relationships, he's a bit too dark for me to think of him as a romantic writer. Happy endings aren't for him.

I never would have thought of putting 'romance' & 'Harlan Ellison' in the same sentence. Is it just me?

Maybe I'm too scarred by I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream or A Boy and His Dog, two of my early favorites by him.

How heavy do you like the sex/romance? The McCaffery stuff is pretty clean & has more SF & action than romance. I prefer it.

Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series starts off with some & gets into it pretty heavy by the 6th book or so. Her Merry Gentry series is into it by the 2d book. I'd call them both fantasy, since they have magic, but your definition may vary. (We've had some discussions on that topic!) I still read both, but find the sex distracting & kind of feel ripped off on the story/action end.

A GoodRead's author, Rowena Cherry has some very heavy panting in her book Mating Net. It's available very inexpensively as an ebook to try. It wasn't my cup of tea, but you may like it. I'd call her stuff SF since it has an alien race & spaceships. Email her through her profile here for where to get it. She's a nice lady.

Restoree by Anne McCaffrey is an SF/Romance novel. I think it was the first one I ever read by her. Her The Ship Who Sang series is a kind of romance, too. No physical grappling since the ship is run by a woman who is physically incapable & piloted by men who are more than capable - makes for lots of tension, though.

No problem. Enjoy. If you look at a listing of her books, "Survivor" & "Wild Seed" are in that series, but I don't feel they really added to the story & kind of stunk. (I hear she hated one of them too & never wanted it republished.) The suggested reading order I gave you is not the published order, but the story's chronological order.

More about her here:
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/b/octa...

I really liked Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark & Patternmaster read in that order. I didn't care for a lot of her other books. These 3 were great, though.

That's a tall order, Werner. There are a lot of good ones out there & fantasy flows across a lot of sub-genres for me.

Anne McCaffrey is one of the first & best I ever read. Her romance/SF fantasy Restoree was an early one I read & then I really liked her Pern books, which are SF/Fantasy.

Laurell K. Hamilton's early Anita Blake series are among my favorites in the Paranormal Romances, but I may like Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson even better.

Patricia A. McKillip Riddle Master trilogy might be my favorite straight fantasy, at least the one that I think of off the top of my head.