First off, how awesome would it be to title all of my Thoughtful Thursday posts with lines out of classic 80’s songs?

Secondly, thanks for all the well-wishes. I have a drug resistant form of strep so it’s been a tough week and a half. I’m finally starting to see some improvement. Hopefully, by this time next week I’ll be back to my (ab)normal self.

Third, on to today’s topic for discussion!

fantasy and science fiction book reviewsOne of the benefits of the internet is it allows you to tap the minds of lots of people to make decisions. Information spreads quickly on the internet, and you never know what is going to be the next big hit that goes viral. Lots of big companies are taking advantage of this capability to do crowdsourcing. I want to use this capability to do a giant, on-line version of what I like to call The Bookstore Game.

Anyone who has worked in a bookstore has faced this situation: A customer walks in and says, “I just finished Hugely Popular Book and I loved it!  What else do you have like it?”  The fantasy genre has a lot of breadth, with at least a dozen different sub-genres.  I want to see if we can add some depth to the pool.

fantasy and science fiction book reviewsYour mission, should you choose to accept it, is this:  Pick a book, something that has come out in the last four or five years by one of the big names, and then recommend a book by a lesser known author that scratches the same literary itch for you. Let’s see if we can share our information, so the next time we walk into a bookstore, we can say, “A friend told me to read…”

I’ll start by saying, if you loved Charles de Lint’s The Mystery of Grace, you should read Terry Windling’s The Wood Wife.

Leave a comment and we’ll enter you into a drawing to win a copy of Kelly Meding’s Three Days to Dead.  If you are not familiar with her work, Random House is serializing some of her short fiction, so go check that out here.  Or, if that book doesn’t float your boat, we’ll let you sort through our stacks and choose something fun for yourself.

Author

  • Ruth Arnell

    RUTH ARNELL (on FanLit's staff January 2009 — August 2013) earned a Ph.D. in political science and is a college professor in Idaho. From a young age she has maxed out her library card the way some people do credit cards. Ruth started reading fantasy with A Wrinkle in Time and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — books that still occupy an honored spot on her bookshelf today. Ruth and her husband have a young son, but their house is actually presided over by a flame-point Siamese who answers, sometimes, to the name of Griffon.