Great Works of Genre Fiction

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Ken Egan on February 10, 2011 at 10:24am

SciFi: I, Robot--Isaac Asimov; Stranger in a Strange Land--Robert Heinlein; Left Hand of Darkness--Ursula K. LeGuin; Ender's Game--Orson Scott Card

 

Mystery: Maltese Falcon--Dashiell Hammett; Red Harvest--Dashiell Hammett; The Last Good Kiss--James Crumley (Montanans are crazy about mysteries--bet we can extend this list dramatically!)

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jason Neal on February 10, 2011 at 2:51pm

Thanks Ken! Good additions. Does it say something about your reading preferences—or the current state of genre fiction—that the average age of these books is 53 years?

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Ken Egan on February 10, 2011 at 5:31pm

Yes, Jason, it says I'm old, I mean, classic.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jason Neal on February 10, 2011 at 5:35pm

You're "classic," and your reading preferences are "vintage."  I like that!

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by elizabeth orvis on July 13, 2011 at 5:27pm

Also by Asimov the Foundation Trilogy.

 

Also, David Brin's Uplift series.

 

 

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by David Abrams on February 11, 2011 at 6:56am

My genre reading is mostly confined to mysteries.  Once every two years, I might dip into a by-the-numbers western (and then, it's usually L'Amour).  Science-fiction?  It's pretty much out of my world.  I probably haven't read the *right* writer yet to really turn me on to the genre (I don't really think of Ray Bradbury as a sci-fi writer, though some would make the argument to put him in that camp, I guess).

 

So, my favorite works?

 

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie (if you put a pearl-handled revolver to my head and forced me to choose Dame Christie's finest, I'd have to go with this one; but really, there are easily 15 or 20 other books by her which I could list here)

 

The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard (but any of his early western novels are just as good)

 

Horror?  Yeah, I'll say it: King is King.  Again, hard to choose among his greatest hits, but I'd have to say I've always thought The Stand was his masterpiece.  It's been many years since I read it, though, so a re-evaluation is probably in order.

 

Looking back at the ratings I've given books tagged as "sci-fi" in my Library Thing library, I gave 4 stars to I, Robot.  So, I guess until another contender comes along, that's probably my "favorite."  I'm very serious when I say I'm open to suggestions for a good, gripping, not-too-techie science fiction novel or short-story collection.  I haven't read Douglas Adams, C.J. Cherryh, Octavia E. Butler, China Mieville, Heinlein, Pohl, or Clarke.  Where to start?

 

Romance?  Same story--I just haven't read enough to have a favorite among them.  I guess the last novel I read which would fall into the unblurred boundaries of the romance genre was Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.  But I've got plenty of "vintage" romances in my collection, including works by Temple Bailey, Kathleen Norris, Faith Baldwin and Maysie Grieg.  Are any of those worth cracking open?

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jason Neal on February 11, 2011 at 9:12am

Thanks David.  I know what you mean about King.  I ate those books up when I was younger--The Stand, The Shining, Firestarter, The Dead Zone, Christine...just about everything he wrote up until 1985 or so.  Now I'll occasionally flip through his newer works while browsing the bookstore, and I have to say I find them almost unreadable.  I'm sure that has a lot to do with how my own reading prefs have changed, but I've also heard several people say that the more recent novels really don't compare to his old stuff.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by David Abrams on February 11, 2011 at 9:24am

Jason,

 

King certainly has his weak moments (Dreamcatcher, anyone?), but overall I think he gets a bad rap from most critics.  I need to re-read his earlier works (like you, I was a faithful fan until Christine...then I got busy with all my undergrad reading) to get an even better perspective, but I think he's doing some interesting work these days.  Don't discount his recent novels--there is some good quality writing to be found there.  I'd rank Desperation, Duma Key and Under the Dome as high as his earliest works.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jason Neal on February 11, 2011 at 9:38am

Good to know. I'll give one of those a try. I know there are a lot of fans of the Dark Tower series as well.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Kim Anderson on February 13, 2011 at 10:56pm

Okay, here I go. I'm a huge genre fan, at least of scifi/fantasy and historical fiction. So:

 

Sci/fi--Anything by China Mieville but particulary Perdido Street Station, a great novel, and, his most recent, The City and the City; Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson; also the classic A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle and the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. The L'Engle was one of the formative books of my youth (I'm Meg) and the Pullman is astonishing--I read it with my children and it kept us talking about religion for a solid year.

 

Historical Fiction--Obviously, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel; ANYTHING by Dorothy Dunnett, she has two great series, The Lymond Chronicles and The House of Niccolo; and CERTAINLY the Baroque Trilogy by Neil Stephenson. 

 

For mystery I have a particular fondness for Peter Hoeg--Smilla's Sense of Snow, and, more recently, The Quiet Girl.

 

But genres are tricky to define. How do we define historical fiction, anything set in the past? Similarly mystery, lots of great novels have a "mystery" at their core, but many of the good ones get elevated to "literary fiction" and so do they then rise above the genre, or can we make a list of "great literature" that are actually written within the confines of a genre? And then we have to define those confines. 

 

David, you absolutely must read China Mieville. And I've literally never read Stephen King, but Under the Dome is on my reading list--good?

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jason Neal on February 14, 2011 at 9:28am

Thanks for the additions, Kim.  Clearly I have a lot of catching up to do.

Your point about the fuzzy distinctions between genre and "literary" fiction is well taken. Maybe we can evolve this discussion to include "Great Works of Literature That Employ Genre Conventions and Nobody Considers Genre Fiction" (e.g. Moby Dick).  Time certainly changes how we think about these things, too.  Case-in-point: Charles Brockden Brown, who I'd never heard of until a friend of mine recently wrote his Ph.D dissertation about him.  These days Brown is considered an important early American writer, but for nearly 200 years he was largely ignored (not forgotten, but certainly not celebrated)—basically because he wrote morbid, freaky horror stories.

And another thing!  (Kim, you've opened a can of worms.)  It seems to me that a lot of "non-genre" fiction these days can all too easily be categorized based on subject matter and convention.  Seriously, since Rabbit, Run, how many "East Coast, Middle Age Angst" novels have there been?  And of course there's a crapload of semi-autobiographical "Growing Up Under Difficult Psychological Conditions" novels.  I'm sure we could come up with several more categories.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jason Neal on February 14, 2011 at 11:43am

It's Valentine's Day.  Where's the Romance?

• ▶ Reply

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next ›
• Page