Book hunting

(NON FICTION READERS...that's both 'people who read only non-fiction' and 'people who don't read much, period'...WILL WANT TO SKIP THIS ENTRY


I must confess to an eccentricity.
Another one? Jeesh.
Yes, another one. I read the same books, the same authors over and over.
Not consecutively, you understand...I'm not that nuts. But my reading tends to cycle through probably fifty or so books. Some drop out of heavy rotation, others get added; but by and large my reading list is pretty static.
I don't know why I do this. It's not like I have forgotten how the damn novels end. I guess it's because generally, I'm not a risk-taker. I don't like risk: it tends to explode in my face and leave scars. This seems to extend all the way into mundane things like the books I choose to read.
Also, I'm kind of picky.
I've tried reading quite a few historical novelists. Pierre Berton (dry). Wilbur Smith (bloated). Clavell (boring!)Edward Rutherford (enjoyable, but dense as hell: you need a free year or so just to get through one of his tomes.)
So when it comes to history, I tend to stick with Gary Jennings. His only flaw, to my mind, is that his books tend to peter out after eight or nine hundred pages. But oh, the journey! Jennings sets his novels against the sweep of human history, but never loses sight of individual lives. Nor does he shy away from sex and violence, recognizing them as constants in whatever era he's tackling. Not for the squeamish or prudish, but highly recommended.
I never could get into fantasy--not your standard fantasy with gnomes and ogres and such, anyway. I'm a human being: I like my characters to be human too. (Sacrilege alert: I've tried three times to get through The Lord of the Rings and failed each time. There are only so many songs in Elvish one can be expected to slog through. Likewise Narnia just strikes me as stuffy; doubtless not its fault but a product of its age.) The closest I've come to fantasy, thanks--much thanks--to my friend Jen, is Guy Gavriel Kay. The later books of his career scatter a soupcon of fantasy, but are based largely in our history; he is a storyteller par excellence.
Everybody really should read Spider Robinson; it would make the world a much better place. His books manage to be lighthearted in tone yet full of Deep, Meaningful Thoughts. His overarching philosophy, one I enthusiastically endorse, is shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased. Spider's literary parents were Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon; Heinlein is another author whose books I devour.
Robert Sawyer is another sf writer whose books I (mostly) love. He mixes up hard science and humanistic storytelling as few others can. I occasionally lament his politics, which are slightly to the left of Stalin's, and his total inability to accept religion in even its mildest form really does mar his attempts at spirituality. Geez, never thought I of all people would say that! But he is easily the best we have here in Canada and he demands to be read.

Other authors on the list are, of course, J.K. Rowling (it'll be really interesting to see what she does after she's finished with Harry Potter); Greg Iles (he's written well in a variety of genres, but specializes in dramatic, brooding mysteries); Pat Conroy (a master craftsman with language and writer of some of the most poignant fiction imaginable); and last but far from least Dan Simmons, who has won awards in every literary field he's tried; his horror and speculative fiction are especially superlative.
Then there are the one-offs (too many to list here) and the writers who publish so infrequently they almost escape memory (Thomas Harris comes to mind). He's due out next month with the story of Hannibal Lecter's childhood and I must say I'm, ahem, licking my chops.

Any of the authors cited above I will buy sight unseen and know I'm getting more than my money's worth. Anyone else is, well, a risk.

One icon whose books I still read, but who has fallen off my must-get list, is Stephen King. I used to be--well, his number two fan (little Misery in-joke, there) and can still quote you chapter and verse on several works, most notably The Shining and The Stand. I owe Stephen King a huge debt of gratitude and about a third of my fiction-writing style. But most of his recent work, while still almost compulsively readable, lacks a certain flair that used to all but ooze off the page.

Anyway, I've been trying lately to expand my circle of authors a bit. In all but one case I've failed miserably. I tried picking up Labyrinth by Kate Mosse on the advice of its back cover, which claimed it was 'Dan Brown for people who think' or something like that. It may well be a good story, but it takes so long to get going I threw it aside in frustration. You want a good timeslip novel, read Diana Gabaldon. No Holy Grail, just one of fiction's great love stories between a resourceful heroine and a dashing hero that will set any straight woman's juices to simmer.

I thought I'd hit paydirt with Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash was wildly uneven, but quite entertaining; The Diamond Age was great until the brick wall about fifty pages from the end. I thought I'd try Quicksilver. I put it aside after one volume. There's no doubt Stephenson can write, but in my opinion his greatest gift is making me feel really, really stupid.
A colleague of Eva's lent me Dune and I'm struggling to get past the opening chapters. I feel like I'm drowning in politics forty pages in.
The surprise--picked up on a whim a few weeks ago--was Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. Great book. It'll nose its way into my rotation. It's hard to classify: if the late Douglas Adams had ditched about half of his drugs and turned his attention to African fairytales, he might have come out with something like this. I laughed out loud many times.
Could I find American Gods, its sort of prequel, today? I could not. Nor could I find much of anything I was hunting for. I did stumble across a memoir by Conroy and the second of a Sawyer trilogy, so all was not in vain. But Eva was considerably luckier. Our search through the used and new bookstores in town today yielded a veritable treasure trove of five or six novels, all of which she'll have read by Monday. Guaranteed.

She, too, reads in a giant cycle. We share Heinlein, Robinson, and Rowling, but beyond that our tastes diverge wildly. Her favourite authors right now are:

--Linda Howard (a perennial here, she's loved her forever)
--Diane Mott Davidson
--Maryjanice Davidson (hey, two Davidsons makes it easy in bookstores)
--Janet Evanovitch
--Tamar Myers
--Joanna Fluke
--Kelley Armstrong

I've read one Linda Howard and found it a tad estrogenated for my tastes; the others, excluding Armstrong, I'm content to leave to her. Three of the above write culinary mysteries, a genre I've never really understood (The butler in the library with the candlestick! But first he brought out this delicious meat loaf, and here's the recipe!) The others seem to specialize in kick-ass female characters of various persuasions. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but I'm not a female, kick-ass or otherwise...

Anyway, any fiction recommendations out there? I'm-a-gonna keep trying. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a library for?