Tag Archives: Jo Walton

To Do List: What Makes This Book so Great

What Makes This Book So Great
What Makes This Book so Great by Jo Walton

Title: What Makes This Book so Great
Author: Jo Walton
Published: 2015
ISBN-13: 9780765331946
Publisher: Tor Books (Macmillan)

Publisher’s Blurb:   As any reader of Jo Walton’s Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic re-reader of books. In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor.com. Now this volumes presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field’s most ambitious series.

Among Walton’s many subjects here are the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by “mainstream”; the underappreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field’s many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read.

Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely readable, engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers.

I’ve not read most of the books Walton reviews in the collection, and that didn’t stop me from enjoying what she had to say.  Where we differ is about reviewing vs. literary criticism.  While Walton is correct, one does not need academic training to review a book.  But, there is a place for a more formal, rigorous critical look at SF/F.

More to come, but I must return to my notes first.

New to the Stacks: Hugos

An Informal History of the Hugos by Jo Walton

An Informal History of the Hugos by Jo Walton
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – 1960 Nominee
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi – 2010 Winner
The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber – 1965 Winner
A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke – 1963 Nominee
This Immortal by Roger Zelazny – 1966 Winner
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber – 1958 Winner (I apparently have two copies)
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny – 1968 Winner
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin – 1970 Winner

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber
This Immortal by Roger Zelazny
A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke
The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

 

New to the Stacks: Hugos and Theory

On Moral Fiction by John Gardner

On Moral Fiction by John Gardner- read
They’d Rather be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley  ~ read
A Case of Conscience by James Blish –
The Iliad and the Odyssey by Alberto Manguel
The Big Time by Fritz Lieber
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak
What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton – read

They’d Rather be Right by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley
A Case of Conscience by James Blish
The Iliad and the Odyssey by Alberto Manguel
The Big Time by Fritz Lieber
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak
What Makes This Book so Great by Jo Walton