Lloyd Alexander’s The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha is another retelling of an old tale (said to be a Sufi parable) on the life-is-a-dream theme; but in this retelling it takes on a resonance of wistful loss which I find oddly evocative.
Thomas Aquinas (this one's going to be unpopular!): he is one of those philosophers whom one should read rather than read about. There's been lots of garbage written about "Thomistic" this and that, but I think Thomas himself is a beautifully modest approach to systematic thinking. He modelled himself on Aristotle - a great student of that great teacher. With my Methodist upbringing, I had never suspected that the existence of intellectual systems of Christianity until I ran across Thomas. I am not at all a "Thomist" - much more sympathetic to Balthasar - but I admire this great pioneer.
Hans Urs von Balthasar: A brilliant and luminous Christian author, orthodox and innovative. The page count of his works is large, but the breadth and depth of his thought is vast. To crudely paraphrase the beginning of The Glory of the Lord: Much theology has been based on only two of the three transcendentals, i.e. truth and goodness. But what of beauty? And he goes on to construct a rich theology of beauty.
Ben Barzman’s Echo X is a classic SF/fantasy work by a screenwriter, who never wrote any other book that I have found. There is a sweet hopefulness in this book, as in many fantasies of the late 50s and earliest 60s, which I quite like. Barzman was apparently a Communist Party member, and the naivete of this book gives some insight into the American generation where that was common.
John Barth's Sotweed Factor is a riot, and one of the great books of the 60s. Lost in the Funhouse has some moments I cherish - especially the story of Proteus, with nested quotes - a syntactic rollercoaster.
Greg Bear is a constantly innovative SF writer, and I’ve started to watch his work with more and more respect.
Darwin’s Radio is the first SF I’ve seen with real depth in the biological
speculation ("bi-fi?"), and I can’t imagine a more deserving Nebula winner.
Songs of Earth and Power is a deep fantasy with a musical foundation.
Moving Mars was ALSO a Nebula winner, and has some fun play with speculative physics and ideas of self-assembly.
Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man are strong stories about the power of will, and its limits.
Norman O. Brown, Love's Body: what, you thought there were no literate American intellectuals in the 50s?? This book is deep, grounded in immense learning, and worth rereading. Life Against Death is also deep and worth reading.
Richard Bradford’s Red Sky at Morning is a sweet and raucous coming-of-age story, set amid a clash between masculine and feminine, Southern and Southwest, Anglo and Hispanic.
Terry Brooks’ Magic Kingdom For Sale: A lawyer (of all people!) finds spiritual redemption when he buys the throne of a down-at-the-heels magical kingdom. Far richer than most of his better-selling stuff.
Lois Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan books have action equal to Peter Wimsey's patter, and dialogue almost so. She dominated the Hugo Awards in the 1990s, and did a lot to revive the SF genre. More recently she has brought out an astonishingly fine fantasy, The Curse of Chalion, which has real moral and spiritual depth to it (and is a rattling good story).
Orson Scott Card is a fabulously prolific genius, whom I think will be read for centuries to come (if centuries do come). Ender's Game is a fine story with a deep underplot - the power of playful creativity, and the potential dangers of that power? Hart's Hope is one of his first books, with some awkwardness, but filled with numinous opalescence. Lovelock shows the self-liberation of a brilliant slave.
Lewis Carrol: Alice and Through the Looking Glass carved a new dimension in storytelling, and are still rich and wonderful.
Geoffrey Chaucer is a very readable great poet from a very different world. Example: when Troilus dies, and rises up out of his body, he looks down and... laughs hugely!
G.K. Chesterton has a great understanding of how fluid the foundations of our culture are - and his willingness to consider rather than assume those foundations gives his political and moral writing a thrust which is hard to deflect. On the comic side, that same awareness makes The Man Who was Tuesday a revolutionary power which is hard to match.
Rob Chilson, Men Like Rats is one of the best SF visions of survival in a future whose mechanics are truly incomprehensible. (Think how difficult it is to portray incomprehensibility comprehensibly.)
Arthur C. Clarke, Fountains of Paradise: perhaps his finest work, which is saying quite something.
James Clavell’s Tai-Pan and Shogun: Both deep appreciations of very foreign cultures, both very interested in will and balance, both great reads.
Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture: I need to find my copy of this and READ it again. We sometimes forget how ancient Christianity is.
Margaret Craven’s I Heard the Owl Call My Name is a very sweet story of self-discovery in the face of death.
Dante’s Commedia: the greatest fantasy ever written, and arguably the greatest poem. The Purgatorio is far richer than the Inferno, and the Paradiso richer yet.
Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall is a classic fantasy, aimed at one of the deepest male desires: the chance to BUILD something. Many people do not understand the strength of this goal &emdash; the more common fantasy goals are love, exploration, conquest, or power &emdash; but building is a strong goal too, for some of us. Part of the long-standing appeal of the Aenead is that Aeneas suffered many things dum conderet urbem, until he should found a/the city). See Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard books for a recent and raucous exemplar of this subgenre.
Emily Dickinson
Peter Dickinson, Tulku: When I learned that this book had won the Carnegie medal (the main British award for children's literature), my respect for the Carnegie medal immediately went up! AK is another fine one - a powerful tale of a boy's coming-of-age, with a rare feel for the importance of security in troubled times. Peter Dickinson is married to the very fine fantasy writer Robin McKinley: what a pair of minds!
Gordon Dickson, Way of the Pilgrim: perhaps the rarest of SF postulates is an encounter with a race both morally and technologically superior.
No government is disinterested. See Milovan Djilas' New Class on how this applies to bureaucratic government.
John Donne
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment: Dostoevsky is serious about the dangers to those who trust their thoughts, and gives us some hope for redemption.
John Dryden's Fables are the best translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses I have seen; both Dryden and Ovid deserve to be better known. If you have trouble taking these sexy stories seriously, think of Mozart as an analogue.
Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals is one of the funniest books I've ever read; his excellence at Brit-farce and his love of animals may both relate to a slightly alienated worldview which I find sympathetic.
Michael Ende, Neverending Story: a fun fable, which becomes much deeper halfway through. (What do you do AFTER you get your heart's desire?)
The Federalist papers: want to see what the American Constitution means? (It wasn't written to be a mere plaything for lawyers.)
Richard Feynman, Lectures on Physics: Not just freshman physics, but an immensely fruitful exposition of ways to think. Worth rereading every decade!
Pat Frank, Alas Bablyon (1959): This isn’t, in hindsight, a very thoughtful book, but I have some particular fondness for it, since it so well illustrates the world I grew up in: Southern liberalism, with acute perception of boorish Yankees and of "trash," during a time where many bright children did not expect to live to adulthood.
The Flashman books, by George MacDonald Fraser, are politically incorrect to the point of being unspeakably naughty - and those who have plodded through pompous tomes will enjoy his exposés of Victorian England and its characters.
Dorothy Gilman, The Tightrope Walker: a wonderful book, and her best by far; a thriller with depth, about escaping into life.
Gombrich, Art and Illusion: you may not know this if you haven't studied art history - I ran across it by merest accident - but it has some fascinating insights on perception.
Kenneth Grahame's Reluctant Dragon is a nice parable for lonely dragons, and The Wind in the Willows haunts me - I think the Piper at the Gates of Dawn somehow seals and glorifies the small pleasures of the book.
Andrew Greeley is a remarkably prolific best-seller, who occasionally turns out a gem: The God Game has some real depth to it, and Angel Fire is vast fun. Many of his best books show an appreciation of grace, and of womanly graces, which I find very attractive. It's easy to write about, or to see, reasons for despair; much tougher to write convincingly about people getting better. I've just recently read some of his prose, and am more impressed by the brain behind the books than I had expected. Some of the points which are belabored endlessly in his books - e.g. the feminine aspects of God - are presented in a much more nuanced way in his writing.
Moses Hadas was a fabulously literate classicist, yet another jewel of the generation which taught in the 1930s. His book on Hellenistic Culture is a fine introduction to this too-little-understood part of our past, and his Ancilla to Classical Reading is a fine introduction to Classics generally.
Robert Heinlein was a man of ideas more than a prose stylist, and wrote many brilliant works over a very long career. Double Star: growth from the world of aesthetics and pride to the world of ethics and honor. Friday is a beautiful story (about surviving loss and collapse) with a bittersweet ending. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: Not only about freedom, but also about its deeper corollary, loneliness. Job: a non-Christian theological fantasy with some depth. Time Enough for Love: a story of a life as story. Citizen of the Galaxy: filiation leading to duty.
Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is very good black comedy, and deceptively innocent. It came out in the early 60s, just in time to be a really good Vietnam novel (no, it isn't set in Vietnam).
Gilbert Highet was a wonderfully genial and fabulously literate writer; The Classical Tradition is probably his magnum opus, but Poets in a Landscape and several others are also very fine.
Douglas Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach is a wonderfully playful study of recursion and incompleteness.
I never realized that I liked A.E. Housman, until I tracked down the source of a Roger Zelazny title in A Shropshire Lad:
FROM
far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.
Now -
for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart -
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
Speak
now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
I take my endless way.
Werner Jaeger, Paideia; and Christian Paideia.
Samuel Johnson is not only a source for Boswell's sententiae, but a very gifted and moral writer himself: check out the preface to his Dictionary, or his essays in the Idler or the Rambler. His prose may appear ponderous in our less Latinate era, but you will find that you quickly acclimate.
Diana Wynne Jones is a stunningly brilliant and prolific fantasy writer: She doesn't write ANY bad books, and her best are worth rereading many times. She writes different books on a variety of levels; For example, I would say that Christopher Chant and Archer's Goon are easier, Howl's Moving Castle and Time of the Ghost is more sophisticated, and Deep Secret is very sophisticated indeed.
Cartoon books: The Pogo collections by Walt Kelly have some wonderful humor in them, and I've loved them since the 1950s. Some other favorites in this genre are Caldwell, Running a Muck; many of the New Yorker collections; Charles Addams; and the earlier Eyebeam books (by William Hurt). Of course, Calvin and Hobbes are both favorite role models for me!
Rudyard Kipling: beyond Kim and the Jungle Books, there is some real depth to this Nobel winner.
R.A. Lafferty, Past Master: St. Thomas Moore repents from his own satire; the best fishing tale ever, and also a thoughtful and provoking miserific vision. 900 Grandmothers and Strange Doings are two collections of some of the funniest stories ever written - if you have a VERY robust sense of humor!
Keith Laumer wrote many books, of which a few are very good indeed: Night of Delusions and Time Trap, for example, are a mad whirl, sort of like a ball's view of juggling.
Tanith Lee, The Silver Metal Lover: seems to me like a really interesting mixture of the devastating impact of a girl's first love, fused with some interesting SF background.
Ursula Le Guin, The Wizard of Earthsea: a Taoist fantasy world with an interesting tranquillity and coherence. She later prostituted her own work by writing a crudely emasculating sequel, but this first book is very good (and the other two originals are pretty good too).
C.S. Lewis: Perelandra shows, among other things, an escape from watery ambiguity to concrete resolution. The mystic vision is (in several senses) divine. That Hideous Strength is a fascinating attempt to bring fantasy into the gritty modern world - not successful at everything, but wonderfully successful at viewing modernity through ancient eyes. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is probably my favorite of the Narnia books, but The Last Battle is the darkest and deepest. (Remember Roonwit's last words.) The Great Divorce shows how damnation can be understood as a choice not to grow.
The Limits of Art (ed. Huntington Cairns) is a large collection of short literary excerpts in translation AND in their original-language versions (and with a snippet of contemporaneous praise), which beautifully illustrates the Italian saying "Tradittore, Traduttore!"
Margaret Lovett's Great and Terrible Quest: A really odd children's fantasy book, by an established juvenile author who broke out of all her molds.
George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind is a beautiful and amazing love poem to Death.
Andrew Marvell: wrote fragile poems for a shattered world.
Patricia McKillip, Forgotten Beasts of Eld shows, perhaps, how the capability for love hides within the capability for hatred, and how the possibility of good implies the possibility of evil.
Helen MacInnes (who was Gilbert Highet's wife!) wrote many entertaining action fantasies with a moral foundation. The historical context of Cold War and Nazis is slipping into the past, but the issues of fear, courage, and betrayal are always with us. I am especially fond of While Still We Live, which was one of her very first books, and which introduced me to the history of Poland.
Walter Miller, Canticle for Leibowitz: a builder, a wrecker, a builder again...
Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind: mindbending.
Molecular Biology of the Cell: A group of Cold Spring researchers, building on J.D. Watson's fine expository model (in Molecular Biology of the Gene), produced another beautiful masterpiece of exposition.
Elaine Morgan, The Descent of the Child: a thoughtful discourse on human evolution. The evolutionary theories described in her Aquatic Ape Hypothesis are fascinating and well worth reading.
E. Nesbit was a real pioneer in writing juvenile books which are not condescending - my favorites are Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet.
Niven/Pournelle: Larry Niven seems supersaturated with ideas - sort of like an overheated champagne bottle - and the more systematic thinking of his frequent coauthor Jerry Pournelle seems to be a fine synergy. Their Lucifer's Hammer is a fine disaster novel, reviewing how much of civilization lazily rests on material wealth - and what would we do if we all lost it? Oath of Fealty is an even finer example of thoughtful sociological extrapolation. As with many of Pournelle's books, this works out some serious ideas about safety and honor when things fall apart. Many of Larry Niven solo works are also great fun: check out Protector or A World Out of Time.
Warren Norwood is a very fine SF/F author who never got the sales he deserved. True Jaguar is a strong fantasy firmly based in Mayan mythology. The Windhover quartet is a quirky and very interesting fantasy in which a great deal of the underplot is about loss, dreams, memory, and mortality - I can't articulate this theme very well, but it calls to something deep.
Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins is a very sweet and very sad book about loneliness and survival.
The Oxford English Dictionary is a great collection of the English language - I occasionally pick up a volume and just start reading. There is nothing like it for those susceptible to the intoxication of words.
Robert C. O'Brien, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
The Odyssey is the oldest surviving science fiction - and whoever wrote this, it was NOT written by the same person who wrote the Iliad, as should be obvious to any person who reads Greek and appreciates poetry!
Let's Kill Uncle, by "Rohan O'Grady", is a hilarious black comedy which may appeal especially to those of us who do not recall childhood as idyllic.
Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia Great Gilly Hopkins
Jill Paton-Walsh was a fine juvenile author &emdash; see e.g. Fireweed, a story of lost love between lost children in blitzed London &emdash; and has now broken into the non-genre market.
Gary Paulsen, Hatchet is a wonderful book on daring to survive, and how the real world isn’t always nice to us. It is one of the more bracing books you could give to a whining preteen.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: what is "quality"? I think this is a great introduction to philosophy.
Alexander Pope appeals to me both as poet and as satirist - try his Epistle to Arbuthnot. Like Mozart, he is an artist whose grace improves with familiarity.
Paul Preuss, Broken Symmetries: a fine example of the most difficult SF subgenre, fictional science. (You try inventing some unknown-but-plausible physics!) Many of his other books are worth reading too.
Homer Rogers, Uncommon Sense: This is an introduction to Christianity which assumes nothing - those who are curious to see the intellectual coherence of the classical Christian worldview will find this to be a great introduction.
Dorothy Sayers' mysteries improved over time, but the later ones are very fine. The completion of the sonnet in Gaudy Night seems to me to be the most beautiful turn of literate romance I have ever read. ("Lay on thy whips, O Love....")
James Schmitz was an "original," who (like Heinlein, but in a very different style) showed a great appreciation for women. The Demon Breed is not only about will, but has some interesting undercurrents of female versus male. The Tale of Two Clocks is also very fine, in a rather less childish way. The Witches of Karres is wildly fun space-opera, suitable for young readers but not (at all) namby-pamby. Many of Schmitz' shorter works are being reprinted again in a paperback series, which is very much worth buying.
Shakespeare is a poet of many colors - but what resonates most for me in is the awareness of loss, or of the passing of an age. For example, in The Tempest and As You Like It the ugly sins of the modern world are fixed (for a time) by a visit back to the Golden Age, and Hamlet and Lear both are set in revolutionary collapse. I have understood this strain much better since I learned (from TLS) that Shakespeare was a member of a Catholic radical group in his youth. (The group disappeared about the time that Edmund Campion was caught by the secret police and tortured to death.) From this point of view, the "seacoast of Bohemia" in Twelfth Night is almost like a shipwreck into the modern world.
Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape doesn't seem to be well-known in the US, but is a side-splitting farce in the British style.
Charles Sheffield is an SF writer who just keeps getting better. An example would be The Godspeed Drive, which is a story of renaissance.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Cordwainer Smith wrote fantasy with dreams and poetry; the oddest possible mixture of oriental literary models, surrealism, and Christianity.
Thomas Sowell
Christopher Stasheff's The Warlock in Spite of Himself, and Her Majesty's Wizard are rich fantasies. Be warned though, many of his other sequels are the flimsiest of fluff.
Neil Stephenson, Diamond Age: fine stuff, full of meat: education and technology as equalizers. Snow Crash is also great fun with many twists.
Rosemary Sutcliff writes young-adult action stories set in the Britain of the third through sixth centuries AD. The storytelling is excellent, the history is accurate (as far as I can tell), and the stories are bracing: these are excellent books for children born into a darkening age.
J.R.R. Tollkien: I've read the Lord of the Rings more than a dozen times, and now I delight to hear my children reading it; for many of my lost generation this book was a step towards commitment and morality. The Hobbit is softer than the trilogy, but partly about growing out of cuteness and English comfort. Leaf by Niggle: a quirky but charming heaven.
I'm sort of embarrassed to admit it, but I like dipping into Toynbee's Study of History. The range of his examples is audacious, and I enjoy tagging along.
Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a great classic of a younger America, with an alienation in it that appeals to me.
Roberto Unger, Knowledge and Politics: fine, thought-provoking, and well annotated with many entries into political philosophy. His later writing moved into parodies of the "Critical Legal Studies" movement (a stupidly deconstructionist law school fad).
Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses: a liberating book of tears.
Vernor Vinge, Fire Upon the Deep: fabulous hard SF! or more precisely several fabulous hard-SF subplots smashed together.
Cynthia Voigt: Homecoming and Dicey's Song are stories of an abandoned family, where the oldest child shepherds siblings to safety and filiation, and then has to learn to live herself. This is a rich pair of books, which strike a lot of chords for me. Solitary Blue: want to know what emotional abuse is? or what boys do instead of crying? This is a tough read, but a good one.
Jearl Walker, The Flying Circus of Physics: Immense fun!
Evangeline Walton did a fine retelling of Mabinogion stories: The Children of Llyr, Song of Rhiannon, Prince of Anwyn, and Island of the Mighty.
I loved T.H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose, especially the scholarly sideline - I couldn't resist buying a set of DuCange just to look up trifarium!
Roger Zelazny's best (and most "literary") writing is in his short stories: Check out The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, Four for Tomorrow, Frost and Fire, and Unicorn Variations. Many of his movels are immense fun too, full of thought and images: Check out Doorways in the Sand, This Immortal, To Die in Italbar, Eye of Cat, or (my favorite) Roadmarks: "Perhaps I too am a dragon, only dreaming I am a book."
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