Our survey of my bookshelves with suggestions for where to start reading different writers has this week reached the interesting letter L.
These are personal recommendations. I don’t read everything, not even everything starting with L. If you read authors I’ve forgotten, neglected or never heard of, please add them in comments so that this can be as useful as possible. Also, if you disagree with me (or with each other) about where to start, please don’t hesitate to comment and explain your reasoning.
My L shelves begin with R.A. Lafferty, and the best place to begin Lafferty is with the collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, or one of his other short story collections. You know how you sometimes get medication that says “do not exceed 4 tablets in 24 hours”? Lafferty is like that for me. The best way to read him is to keep a collection on your bedside table and read one story every night.
I’d be surprised if anyone else has anything by George Lancing. The name was apparently the pseudonym of Bluebell Hunter. I own The Mating of the Dragon in a wartime paper economy edition. It’s a historical novel about Imperial China. Lancing wrote other novels, some in this series about Tzu Hsi, and I’ve always kept an eye out for them but never found them.
Andrew Lang wrote a lot of Victorian collections of fairy tales. Start with the Blue Fairy Book if you want to know what kind of fairies and elves Tolkien was rebelling against.
Justine Larbalestier is an Australian writer of YA fantasy with a very SFnal sensibility. Start with Magic or Madness.
D.H. Lawrence—actually, I only really like his travel writing. I can heartily recommend Sea and Sardinia. Sons and Lovers is better if you think of it as a Victorian novel.
Mary Lawson is a Canadian feminist writer that I discovered through a friend. Start with Crow Lake.
Harper Lee—To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the few books I was assigned as school reading and didn’t subsequently loathe.
Tanith Lee—start with Drinking Sapphire Wine.
There are lots of good places to begin with Ursula K. Le Guin, but I would suggest The Left Hand of Darkness or A Wizard of Earthsea.
Fritz Leiber—again, a lot of potential places to start, but I notice Our Lady of Darkness is in print.
Stephen Leigh—definitely Dark Water’s Embrace.
Madeleine L’Engle—I’m sure most people start with A Wrinkle in Time, and it probably is the best place.
With Doris Lessing, I think the best place to start is The Golden Notebook. If you like it, you can find other books of hers that are doing the same thing as the whatever bits of that you like most. I find Lessing a much better mainstream writer than an SF writer. If you want to read something SFnal of hers, I’d strongly suggest reading the Martha Quest books, which begin with Martha at 12 in Rhodesia before WWII, and five books later end up with her living on a Scottish island in the seventies after WWIII, all in seamless realism even as they outrun the time she was writing.
Ira Levin was a thriller writer who constantly skated the borders of genre. This Perfect Day is dystopia a book I read so young I can’t have a detached view of it. The Boys From Brazil is a really surprisingly good book that makes a great comparison to Cyteen.
C.S. Lewis—I know there are people who argue by internal chronological order, but you really want to start reading the Narnia books with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is not the creation of the world but the introduction to the world. You will care more about the creation when you have come to it in publication order. His SF novels begin with Out of the Silent Planet.
S.N. Lewitt—Cyberstealth is fun standalone planetary SF, and in print, so start there.
Megan Lindholm—start with Wizard of the Pigeons or Assassin’s Apprentice for her Robin Hobb books.
Kelly Link is a short story writer and editor who has been producing some of the most notable short stories in the genre over the last decade. Start with her collection Magic For Beginners.
David Lodge is the person people think of when they talk about mainstream novels in which college professors commit adultery. You know the joke about T.S. Eliot influencing Shakespeare? Now you don’t need to read the book. My favourite of his is Nice Work, which has a female professor and a businessman and steps a little outside his comfort zone. Lodge is a very successful writer, and he can be really funny, but he’s also a sad example of someone who doesn’t have anything to write about.
Barry Longyear—start with Enemy Mine.
Alison Lurie is an American feminist writer—start with Imaginary Friends, which is about a UFO cult, and would be just like SF if the aliens were real.
Scott Lynch—The Lies of Locke Lamora.
Elizabeth Lynn—start with the terrific and World Fantasy Award winning Watchtower.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
I second publication order of the Narnia books. As for Lewis’s other novels, I like Till We Have Faces better than Out of the Silent Planet/Perelandra/That Hideous Strength.
Also in my L section is Ring Lardner. Just start with a collection of his short stories. Three stories that come to mind for me are Haircut (chilling), A Caddy’s Diary, and Ex Parte (this one hit my funny bone, maybe because I’d been looking at a Crate & Barrel catalog just before I read it).
Margo Lanagan wrote Tender Morsels, a retelling of Rose Red and Snow White that might be filed under the ya section. But in addition to the abortion, incest, and rape (in the first chapter) it’s about how adults grow up too.
Would Sharon Lee and Steve Miller fall under L? I enjoy their light romantic space opera, starting with Agent of Change.
Jane Lindskold I would recommend Changer, which I remember as a convention of mythological characters in New Mexico.
I first read Larbalestier (which I’m still learning how to spell) as the editor of Daughters of Earth, a retrospective of feminist sf of the 20th century. For her own work I’d recommend Liar, which has a very unreliable narrator who spun my head around.
I would start with How to Ditch Your Fairy with Larbalestier, though I think Liar is an even better book. It’s engaging, light, and stand-alone. I mean, I like Magic or Madness too, but that one is very clearly the first book of a trilogy, more than a stand-alone. I’m also exceptionally fond of the AU in HtDYF, as I don’t see nearly enough modern fantasy books where it’s clearly Not Our World but also clearly modern, without being a soup of every supernatural critter under the sun.
Drinking Sapphire Wine? Really? Why on earth wouldn’t you start with Don’t Bite the Sun, the book to which Wine is a sequel?
I couldn’t agree more, however, about reading the Narnia books in publication order. I think the Narnia books are the poster child for favoring publication order over internal chronological order.
For Jane Linskold, I’d suggest her excellent Firekeeper series, which begins with ‘Through Wolf’s Eyes.’ Great stuff.
For Mercedes Lackey – I think “Arrows of the Queen” and the two following books – ‘Arrow’s Flight’ and ‘Arrow’s Fall’ – are a good introduction to her Valdemar books and that entire world. They’re a bit simple, but the characters I find to be very likeable, and if you enjoy this trilogy you will probably like the rest of the Valdemar books as well.
(Some of you may note they obviously made an impression on me…).
Mur Lafferty – I think the only thing she’s got in print so far is ‘Playing for Keeps,’ which is a really fun twist on the superhero genre. Both it and her other books are available in podiobook form on podiobooks.com. She has another book, a series actually, called ‘Heaven,’ which is an interesting exploration of the afterlife, with various mythologies woven in.
@Kvon (2): Agent of Change is Lee and Miller’s first book, but Conflict of Honors is an equally valid, and maybe better, place to start. Or start where I did, with Local Custom. Balance of Trade would also work well, I think.
re: D.H. Lawrence … I would actually encourage folks to read Justine … labyrinthine yet brilliant prose.
I don’t know how you can have skipped Keith Laumer. His Retief books are pretty much where scifi humor started. And its a fabulous parody of the State Dept as well.
Lindholm…the first couple of Wolf books were good til she moved locations and then they got bad. I did enjoy some of the Hobb books too.
Fritz Leiber wrote some early sword and sorcery stuff. If you can find any, since he seems fairly forgotten.
If you want to go a little more mainstream, I do highly recommend a lot of the early Ludlum books. The first Bourne book is still where I would begin.
Ursula Leguin I would also do Left Hand of Darkness.
And finally, I think everyone should read some HP Lovecraft. I would start with Call of Cthulu.
I know the vast majority will completely disagree with me, but I hated Left Hand of Darkness and despite it’s labelling, I found it to be very anti-woman. I found Wizard of Earthsea and its two sequels to be similiarly anti-woman but to a significantly lesser extent. The LeGuin book I liked was Lathe of Heaven, dated but very enjoyable. It was the first LeGuin I read, but given my experience with everything else, I’m very hesitant to read anything else by LeGuin.
I second Laumer, but I would choose _A Trace of Memory_ as a good place to start, only because that was the book my father used to introduce me to sci-fi.
Stephen R. Lawhead writes good historical fantasy, and I’ve always enjoyed his books. I started with _The Pendragon Cycle_, which is his strongest.
Delving into children’s/YA, Lois Lowry’s distopia, _The Giver_, is amazing. I did not like either of the companion books (_Gathering Blue_ or _The Messenger_).
Murray Leinster was often ahead of his time in terms of concepts and ideas (maybe not so much plotwise) and introduced ideas to the field that have since become mainstays. I would start with a short story collection (preferably one containing “First Contact”). I also found The Forgotten Planet a lot of fun.
Stanislaw Lem, ah Lem! Hard to say where to start, but start you must. The Star Diaries, The Futurological Congress, The Cyberiad, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub are probably all good places to start and are all worth reading, but many probably started with Solaris.
I made my biggest reading mistake with LeGuin. You see, I strongly dislike infinitylogies, something modern fantasy if prone to. And everything everyone told me about Earthsea simply made me postpone reading it (most people tried to sell it to me in terms of similarities to all the fantasy stuff I didn’t like). I actually owned the books for more than a decade before reading them I was that afraid of being disappointed by one of my favourite writers. After reading them I could only come to one conclusion: I should have read them years before.
@Beket: can you please elaborate on the anti-woman thing because I just don’t see it. If you want anti-woman, read A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony or something like that. But LeGuin? Anti-woman? Colour me confused.
Depending on what you like, I can see starting Ursula leGuin with “The Disposessed” instead of “Left Hand of Darkness”. Obviously if you read the Earthsea books, you start with the Wizard.
@11: Some people consider it very significant that The Left Hand of Darkness used male pronouns and the word “man” exclusively. I don’t agree, but I know that opinion is out there, and it’s the only reason I can think of to call that book anti-woman.
@7
That was Lawrence Durrell, not D.H. Lawrence.
By the way, I thought The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence was an excellent book to start (and perhaps end) with. It’s a solid, emotionally lucid novel about love, families and social class. Best of all, it doesn’t make itself obsolete by trying to shock its contemporaries, the way Women in Love and others by him do.
I have no idea how Left Hand of Darkness is normally viewed other than the label “feminist” is slapped on it. This is just my view of it based on my reading. (Please note that I am not saying LeGuin is anti-woman but that I found her texts to be so.. and I do not believe that was her intention).
Winter (the world of LHOD) is a world that is ostensibly without gender (except for 2 days of the month when it can go either way), they are supposed to be neutral, neither male nor female. Yet throughout the entire book, via language, they are in fact “male”– “his” “he” “him” “sire” “Man” “brother” and I think even “son”. So it doesn’t matter if they’re supposed to be neutral, they become male via language. One theme of the book (my interpretation) is how wonderful it is to have a sexless society, just look at the problems we DON’T have. But given the masculine language, that idea becomes “look how wonderful it is to have a male only society, just look at the problems we don’t have because there are no women.” This idea is almost stated outright at times when the idea of male pride comes up; since there are no women, there’s no male pride, and therefore all the stupid things men do because of male pride, ie to impress women, do not occur, from mere male competition to all out war (the idea of male pride comes up several times when they’re pulling the sledge across the glacier).
Then there are scenes where the narrator (male human) encounters individuals in the female state, such as in the transport when he’s been captured. A “female” tries to get close to him and even touches him, and he is repulsed. Later, in the camp, when the narrator learns that the prisoners are given drugs so they don’t go through Kemmering (sp? the monthly sexual state), he describes them (the prisoners) in a negative way as being fat and reminding him of women. And even when his companion across the ice (sorry, can’t remember “his” name) goes through Kemmering and becomes female (although he is still referred to in the masculine), there’s this whole thing about not touching. The idea of physical contact– physical intimacy– between this man and this “woman” becomes repulsive, when from the rest of the text, I got the impression during Kemmering everything was “free love.” As long as these two are male, they can lie side by side but the moment one becomes female, there’s something repulsive about it.
All in all, I came away thinking this book is saying that the ideal human is male and that the female state is an undesirable state. I realize that the majority of people have a very different view of this book, that they come away with very different ideas, but this was my reading of the text.
That said, if you want to make the argument that this is a world of same-sex marriage, I might buy that.
I first read the Chronicles of Narnia as a set that was boxed in internal chronological order. When I reread them a few years later in publication order, I found myself disappointed that I hadn’t been introduced to them that way, as I think that The Magician’s Nephew is a much less enchanting introduction and really cheapened The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe for me.
Although I started LeGuin with “The Left Hand of Darkness” and read “The Lathe of Heavan” shortly thereafter, I’d recommend starting at the actual beginning, “Rocannon’s World.” I know it’s hard to find, but too many people seem to have forgotten it and it still deserves an audience.
For Lovecraft, I would recommend “The Call of Cthulhu,” too, but then I’d move to “In the Walls of Eryx.” An unusual recommendation, I know, but I think it represents the direction Lovecraft was moving before he died… into more solid science fiction. It has easily become my favorite Lovecraft tale. The “Black Seas of Infinity,” a good collection of Lovecraft stories, has both “Cthulhu” and “Eryx” in it, as well as several other of Lovecraft’s better known tales.
For Lem, I started with “Fiasco” simply because it was the only work of his my local public library had on its shelves. I enjoyed it, but am glad I hadn’t read it when I was younger.
And, finally, I’ve been waiting for “L” to arrive so I could sing the praises of “The Lies of Locke Lamora,” a terrific story by Scott Lynch of friendship, loyalty, and revenge… one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read in the past few years.
Rocannon’s World can be found in an omnibus called Worlds of Exile and Illusion, which also contains the next two Hainish novels (Planet of Exile and City of Illusions).The ISBN is 978-0312-86211-4.
@15 That’s a totally different reading that mine. I mean totally.
I don’t think Genly’s repulsion towards the Gethen in kemmer has to do with a rejection of the female. Rather, I think the use of pronouns has to do with Genly being a man and so having everyone default to being a male even if they are not (this is a very subjectively written novel) and I think Genly sees kemmer as a change in the person so they become something they weren’t (ie someone whom he doesn’t know) but ultimately, he becomes closer to Estraven after seeing Estraven in kemmer. Like much of LeGuin writings, this is a very complex work and there’s no clear cut and easy answers.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, the story is told by Genly Ai, a male from Terra (our future Earth). He is constantly perplexed by this genderless society, and is frequently tripped up by his need to fit what he sees into male/female boxes. He is a victim of his own limitations until he learns to accept the Gethenians on their own terms.
Some of Genly’s sexism seems oddly dated today, but I think it’s a mistake to confuse the viewpoint of narrator with that of the author.
Talia@5
Yes, I think reading ‘Arrows of the Queen’ will tell you whether you want to continue or not. I’d also add that the troubled gay teen hero in ‘Magic’s Pawn’ et seq was less of a cliche when he was written.
Seconding the idea to start Tanith Lee with “Don’t Bite the Sun” over “Drinking Sapphire Wine.” If those are the only two choices. No idea where I’d start if her whole library is included!
I second starting Jane Lindskold with “Through Wolf’s Eyes”, although some of her earlier standalone novels are also worth a mention. “Brother To Dragons, Companion To Owls” is one I really enjoyed.
I enjoyed Holly Lisle’s Secret Texts series. Start with the first, Diplomacy of Wolves.
Most of my “L” collection is Lackey, and I agree with the previous posters who’ve said start with the Arrows trilogy. Loved them when I was a kid, still love them now. Some of her later stuff devolves into pure fluff, but it’s readable and enjoyable fluff, so I don’t really mind.
For Mercedes Lackey, I got into her through Bedlam’s Bard and her “urban elves” series (with several different co-authors). I think it’s some of her best and most creative work.
Jo – need to give more love to the Robin Hobb books. Agree that Assassin’s Apprentice/Farseer series is both superb and best place to start, but the Tawny Man series (same locale as AA but 15 years later) and Liveship Traders (same world but much farther to the south) are very strong as well. Fitzchivalry Farseer is one of my favorite characters in all of SF/F literature – heroic, funny, flawed, touching.
Rob
@19 As I stated earlier, I do not believe LeGuin is anti-woman. The text, in my reading, is. The author’s viewpoint is irrelevant– Death of the Author.
@18 My point exactly– that intelligent people can read the same text and come to completely different views of it with each view still being perfectly valid. I am not trying to convince anyone to view Left Hand of Darkness as I do, but to point out to people who’ve never read it that they too might have the negative reaction that I did.
Isn’t there a 2nd edition of LHoD where Le Guin revised the pronouns to gender-neutral? with an introduction by her about why? Or was it just an essay I read by her where she regretted her decision for that book?
For anyone disturbed by the implicit sexism in her books from the 70s I recommend her books from the 90s and later. In many ways her more recent Earthsea books are her answer to the sexism in the earlier ones. Personally, I prefer her recent work, and would suggest starting with Lavinia, Tales from Earthsea, or Gifts (continuing on with Voices and Powers).
Re Left Hand of Darkness…some of the later essays by LeGuin (Is Gender Necessary, in The Language of the Night) lamented her lack of consciousness in regarding the neuter pronoun=male; and then the lack of any good alternatives. I’ve seen paragraphs where she tried to use all feminine pronouns, and one where she tried to use made-up pronouns, and neither flowed very well. Blame our language, and her times. She also went back and retconned what was going on with the lack of women mages in Earthsea.
For Tanith Lee, I’d start with “The Birthgrave.” Truly an amazing read, imho
Another Lem recommendation for people who are more into modern hard/posthuman SF in the mold of Peter Watts or Alastair reynolds – _The Invincible_. If you want proof that Lem way was ahead of his time (as well as being adept at so many different styles), all you have to do is read this short novel written in the 60’s about self replicating machine life. I only read it a year ago and I was blown away.
Helen Lowe is a new author, but I enjoyed her novel “Thornspell”, which also got some good pro reviews.
Le Guin wrote a short story, Winter’s King (anthologised in the The Wind’s Twelve Quarters where she uses feminine pronouns and masculine titles, which is an interesting re-look at Winter.
For my part, the bit where my disbelief suspension failed with Left Hand of Darkness is seeing Genly Ai as a diplomat; his lack of attention to nuance (and by “nuance” I mean, asking himself the question, “Could this be a police state, by any chance?”) is just staggering.
As a result, I’d go with Wizard of Earthsea .
Late again this week.
Jay Lake: I won his first two, very odd steampunk novels Mainspring and Escapement. They were enough for me to keep an eye out for more.
Sterling Lanier: He is best known as the editor who got Dune published, but he was also a writer in his own right. Try either Hiero’s Journey or some of the Brigadier Ffellowes stories.
Kieth Laumer: Seconding or thirding here. You can dip into the Retief stories just about anywhere, but you should probably stay away from the very latest of them. Laumer suffered a stroke late in life and his writing suffered. Try the Bolo stories if you like milSF. And he wrote a lot of other shorts, too.
Sheridan LeFanu: Typically classed as a Victorian writer of ghost stories, his tales were a lot more. Carmilla is a must read. Not only was it a major influence on Bram Stoker for Dracula, it has a number of strongly sexual subtexts that are very unusual for its time.
Fritz Leiber: I agree with Jo’s suggestion of Our Lady of Darkness. The Fafhrd and the Mouser stories are something of a must for fantasy fans. But Leiber was also an excellent writer of short stories. Any collection of his is worthwhile.
Murray Leinster: Seconding here, too. His stuff isn’t easy to find. Look for the Med Ship stories.
Jonathan Lethem: Surprised nobody’s mentioned him yet. His first couple of books were as much SF as they were mysteries. Start with Gun, with Occasional Music.
Frank Belknap Long: Best known as a writer in the Cthulhu mythos, he also wrote several other things as well as SFnal/horror poetry.
Barry Longyear: Definitely Enemy Mine, but try to find the original novella. I think it is better than the novel-length expansion.
Lovecraft: Call of Cthulhu gets the love, but his best works were probably The Shadow Over Innsmouth (which scared the crap out of me when I was 12) and At the Mountains of Madness (someday del Toro will make this movie and it will be awesome).
Brian Lumley: British horror writer who got his start doing Cthulhu pastiches. Not quite as good as Ramsey Campbell, but not bad either. Try some short stories first.
David Langford’s hilarious mimetic novel The Leaky Establishment, which is probably out of print.
Start with Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series! Anthologies of these short stories have been going in and out of print recently so you should be able to find them at a decent book store or online. Swords and Deviltry is the first one in the series, and contains Ill Met In Lanhkmar, which one a Hugo AND a Nebula. Swords Against Death is next, and it contains a lot of really excellent sword and sorcery stories. This would be a great one to start with – you don’t need any back-story from the first volume to understand it, and every short story in the book is excellent. Swords In The Mist comes after that. This collection contains two of my favorite short stories of all time – The Cloud of Hate (short, and amazingly well written) and Lean Times In Lankhmar, IMO the best short story Fritz Leiber has ever written. Fritz Leiber is the guy who invented the term “sword and sorcery” and if you like the genre, he’s a must read!
Willy Ley, a German-born science writer and space advocate. He was an early member of Verein für Raumschiffahrt but unlike a certain other well-known member of the VfR, chose to leave his native Germany rather than become a boot-licking, slave-using servant-of-the-Nazi-war-machine paper-clipped SOB. Ley did write some SF under the name Robert Willey but what I’d recommend is his non-fiction like Exotic Zoology and whatever collections exist of For Your Information, his long-running non-fiction column in Galaxy.
Ley spent much of his career popularizing space travel but he died on 24 June 1969, about a month before Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon.
There’s also Edward Llewellyn-Thomas, who wrote SF under the name Edward Llewellyn. He was a competent mid-lister whose career lasted from about 1979 to 1986, cut short by Llewellyn-Thomas’ death in 1984. Most of his SF was set in a world where a widely useful chemical was discovered to have an unexpected side-effect: while it was perfectly safe for adults, it left any female offspring they might have after being exposed to it sterile. This was discovered after most of the population was exposed.
Start with The Douglas Convolution. The usual “old timey SF” warning applies, I think.
Some more: Jack London. Start with “To Build a Fire”, to get an idea of what “The Cold Equations” could have looked like in the hands of a better writer.
Barry B. Longyear. Start with Manifest Destiny if you can find it, Sea of Glass if you’re not feeling depressed enough or maybe his It Came From Schenectady. His mainstream novel, St Mary Blue, is also well thought-of.
Sergey Lukyanenko. Night Watch and the books that follow have been translated into English.
For the most part, what everyone has already said, but for Mercedes Lackey, I have to disagree with what’s already been posted. Rather than starting with the Valdemar books or the urban elves, both of which I find extremely uneven, I would start with one of her fairy tale re-tellings. I think the best one to start with is “The Serpent’s Shadow,” which I find one of the most effective attempts to integrate all the fairy tale tropes in a world that isn’t explicitly a fairy tale universe. Some others that might work are “The Fire Rose,” “The Black Swan,” and “Firebird.”
Stanislaw Lem – I started with ‘The Cyberiad’ and it remains a favourite. ‘The Tales of Pirx the Pilot’ is a good introduction to his world. I would not recommend starting with ‘Solaris’, great though it is.
John le Carre – if you haven’t read ‘The Spy Who Came In From the Cold’ and you’re interested in spy fiction then that’s a must. Otherwise ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ is a great novel and a great introduction to le Carre’s humourous cynical world.
LeGuin is pretty much my favorite author (not SFF author — author), so I could go on for a long time. I’ll restrict myself to putting in a plug for “Four Ways to Forgiveness,” in which she wrestles with freedom, slavery, colonialism, the role of tradition, trivial stuff like that, in a really moving way.
For my money, she did indeed fail to solve the pronoun problem in LHOD, but mostly because there is no satisfactory solution (in English, at least). It’s definitely worth reading the anthology version of “Winter’s King” before and/or after it. To me, that’s an unavoidable flaw, but not enough to spoil a wonderful book. I respect those who disagree.
The two best things about Earthsea are, first, the incredible language and prose style and, second, the low bodycount. The original trilogy contains only one not-very-pitched battle (a Viking-style raid on Ged’s home village), and I’m having a hard time thinking of anyone Ged actually deliberately kills. (He certainly pushes another character to his death in “Tombs,” but it’s pretty clear he was only trying to get free of the man, and the event obviously disturbs him). Eternal proof that you don’t need piles of bodies or a great warrior as a hero to write good fantasy — not if you can write like Le Guin, anyway.
Where to start: For SF fans, I’d actually dive into “The Dispossessed”. High fantasy lovers — “Wizard of Earthsea” forever.
S
My favorite Lovecraft is actually “The Thing on the Doorstep.” How can you not like a story that begins, “It is true that I have just spent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer[.]” and then goes on to make you believe it?
Lewis and Narnia: Publication order, definitely; or at least The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first. Apparently Lewis later insisted they should be read in chronological order, but the author is sometimes wrong. (Reading The Magician’s Nephew and The Horse and His Boy next, before Prince Caspian, works fine too, as I can attest from my son’s reading this spring. He blazed through the whole series within a few weeks, starting immediately after finishing Harry Potter.)
Tanith Lee – Volkhavaar would actually be my first recommendation. To me there is something perfect and timeless about it, with the quality of a folk tale and yet not. I think The Birthgrave might have been where I started with her, but I can’t much argue with Don’t Bite the Sun as a suggestion. (Incidentally, that and Drinking Sapphire Wine are now published in a single volume.)
Lewis: Agree with all those who say publication order. It’s not clear, I think, that he did in fact insist otherwise; he just said ‘Yes, that’s fine’ to a boy who wanted to do it the other way. Or so I have heard.
One reason for this is that TMN is clearly written for people who are already familiar with the world – indeed, right at the beginning it says ‘this is a very important story, because it is the story of how the comings and goings between our world and Narnia began’. And throughout the book there are passages where you are clearly meant to go ‘Aha!’ – as where a fragment of a lamp-post is dropped on the earth and takes root, or where wood from a tree originating in Narnia is used to make a wardrobe. These don’t work if you haven’t read TLTWTW already.
But also, TLTWTW is, I think, a rather different kind of book – it has more of a dream-like quality about it. From Prince Caspian onwards, the series turns into a much more conventional fantasy with worldbuilding. If you try to read TLTWTW in the light of that, you come up against annoying questions like ‘What is Father Christmas doing there?’ and ‘Where did Mrs Beaver get a sewing machine?’ which I think aren’t so problematic if you take the book on its own terms, as being about a weird world where anything might happen.
I agree with those who say Till We Have Faces is his best adult book, but I would suggest you don’t have to take the cosmic trilogy as a whole. Out of the Silent Planet is fun – you can’t ignore the religious element, but you can keep it at arm’s length, saying, ‘OK, that’s part of the premise for this story.’ Perelandra is much more theological, and I can’t imagine it appealing to people who don’t like that sort of thing. I found That Hideous Strength unreadable.
A comment the whole gender neutral pronoun discussion. Science fiction writer, Allen Steele introduced a race of genderless aliens in his book, _Spindrift_. Steele used the invented pronouns “heshe” and “hisher” to refer to these aliens. While I appreciated what he was attempting to do, I found them both very distracting.
Twelve of the Andrew Lang fairy books are available as free ebooks at manybooks.net — but not The Blue Fairy Book. Yet.
@45: A lot of authors have attempted to do that, including Greg Egan in Diaspora, I think it was. IMO, the only author to play with pronouns really effectively was Samuel Delany in Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand.
A young adult author who hasn’t been mentioned yet: Louise Lawrence. Calling B for Butterfly is an interesting story about a group of kids who survive an accident in space. The Warriors of Taan also made an impression on me as a child. I
As well as the pronoun thing in “Winter’s King”, people having problems with that in tLHoD might also want to try “Coming of Age in Karhide” in the collection Birthday of the World.
The British edition of the Lee comtaining “Don’t Bite the Sun” and “Drinking Sapphire Wire” is called Drinking Sapphire Wine and that’s what’s on my shelves. I linked to my post which had the US cover of the book containing both which has a different title. But it’s both of them as a whole thing I meant.
“Coming of Age in Karhide” is well done, although probably not to everybody’s taste, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you haven’t read the novel. “Winter’s King,” I think, can potentially stand alone (I read it prior to LHOD, in fact).
S
The mention of Louise Lawrence reminded me of Hugh Lofting, not Dr. Doolittle, which I could never get through, but The Twilight of Magic and of Hilda Lewis’ The Flying Ship . Lewis is no relation to CS Lewis, AFAIK. TFS is about some English kids, one of whom buys Frey’s ship in one of those shops that turn up in fantasies. It takes them through space and time, to ancient Egypt, and William the Conqueror’s England (from which they bring back someone for a while). If she ever wrote anything else, I’ve never run across it.
I also read (and reread) This Perfect Day early enough that I can’t really be objective about it. I can still recite the jingle, and the namebers of a couple of the main characters. There was something special about that book; I tried Rosemary’s Baby because I wanted more by the same author, and that was just creepy.
As for the proper order of reading Narnia, I agree that publication order is the right order for anyone reading the books for the first time; but back when I was 13 or 14 and on my umpteenth reading, I decided that from then on I was going to read them in chronological order, and that’s what I’ve done ever since.
8. johntheirishmongol :
A little sorting out: Jane Lindskold (the Changer series and the Through Wolve’s Eyes series) and Megan Lindholm (the Windsinger series, and Robin Hobb’s real name) are different writers.
I’ll put in a nice word for the Windsinger books. Not only do they have a somewhat unusual excuse for the main character getting into trouble (she’s a carter, not a mercenary, but when one of her jobs is a live wizard divided into five packages, things happen) but it’s the only thing I’ve seen which gets into how political weather magic would be.
I started Tanith Lee with The Dragon Hoard, which was not a bad move except that I’ve never read a Tanith Lee book since that I loved half as much. (And if you want to start with something typical, that will tell you What A Tanith Lee Book Is Like, this isn’t the one to go for.)
There’s an argument, although perhaps a somewhat esoteric one, that the publication order of the Narnia series *is* the internal chronological order: it’s the chronological order of the frame story. The catch being that the frame story is only implicit, so most people don’t consider it. But whoever the narrator is, and whoever he’s talking to, in LWW he’s clearly addressing somebody who’s never heard of Narnia, and in TMN he’s just as clearly addressing somebody to whom he’s already told the story of LWW.
On the use of gender-neutral pronouns in SF: I have a fondness for Erese (“I gave er the ball. The ball is now es. E can do what e likes with it.”), which I’ve come across at least two different writers use and I don’t know who originated it. But that’s “fondness” at least partly in the old sense that implied foolishness: the first time I read a story that used Erese it took me most of two pages to realise it wasn’t just badly typeset, which was amusing but is no basis for a workable system.
More writers:
Norman Lindsay. The Magic Pudding, no question.
Dave Luckett. A Dark Winter. A take on post-Tolkien fantasy with an interesting twist on the cliche fantasy elves and goblins, and a dark overlord with actual goals beyond Being Evil and Going Muahahaha A Lot. It’s become (perhaps inevitably) the first book of a trilogy, but it was written as a standalone so reading it doesn’t commit you to continuing; and that’s just as well, because book 2 is just about impossible to find these days.
LS Lawrence. Eagle of the East. Historical; no fantasy elements, but it’s definitely speculative fiction: it’s the story of a group of people whose fate is lost to history, beginning at the point where the historical record ends.
I’d like to break a lance for stand-alone Mercedes Lackey, in case new readers don’t want to start with a series: I really like her contemporary urban fantasy Sacred Ground(released in 1995) for the way Native Americans are portrayed. I can’t vouch if it’s all correct, not being Native American myself, but she wrote this book at a time when you still had loads of stereotypical writing on Native Americans in genre fiction. And it has a female competent heroine, with a romance in the background as an afterthought. Also a great grandfather/trickster character. For me it ages well on rereads and it is standalone.
If I’m not mistaken, Andrew Lang was mostly the editor, not the author, of the Fairy Book anthologies. A lot of the stories are reprinted verbatim from earlier English collections and anthologies, some are translated from other languages for the first time, and some are adapted or abridged for children from older sources; but my impression, from Lang’s introductions to the later books, is that his collaborators did most of the rewriting and translating. The earlier books didn’t have detailed credits on who adapted or translated each story; most of the later ones do. For Lang’s own writing, I’d recommend the short story collection In the Wrong Paradise, which is availble from Project Gutenberg. He also co-authored a cool Egyptian historical fantasy with H. Rider Haggard, The World’s Desire, which was reprinted as part of Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy line and is now availble from PG. PG also has The Blue Fairy Book, which some earlier poster said wasn’t availble online; and many if not all of the Fairy Books are available from librivox.org as well.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, one of the strangest books ever written. John C. Wright had a short series of posts on it on his LiveJournal a few months ago, if I recall correctly, which might give you an idea whether you want to read it. It starts out slow and has a cryptic ending (and the middle is mostly cryptic too), but I like it a lot and have read it two or three times. It’s also available from PG, but is not too hard to find as a used Ballantine paperback.
For Ursula Le Guin, I’d suggest starting with The Lathe of Heaven.
I’d second the recommendation to start R.A. Lafferty with one of his earlier short story collections. Of his novels, I think Past Master is the best of the ones I’ve read.
L has got a lot more going for it than IJ or K, doesn’t it? But M, ahead, will be even longer… Buckle in, this’ll take a while.
Mercedes Lackey – Yes, there’s still MORE places to start for her. She had a pagan-witch series that started with _Burning Water_, a series set in the Hundred Kingdoms where fairy-tales-come-true are an important part of Fate that starts with _The Fairy Godmother_, and a series about dragons and their riders that starts with _Joust_. All of which are totally unrelated to Valdemar, for people who are sick of Valdemar even before they try it.
Also, I have to mention the Lackey & collaborations: Lackey, Flint, & Freer have a series starting with _The Shadow of the Lion_ set in a magical Renaissance Venice, Lackey & Gellis have a series starting with _This Scepter’d Isle_ set around Elizabeth I, with classic elves involved (and Wikipedia thinks they’re prequels to her SERRAted Edge series with, variously, Dixon, Shepherd, Lisle, and Hoyt), and Lackey & Mallory have a high-fantasy pair of series starting with _The Outstretched Shadow_.
(I’ve actually been leaving out authors who did most or all of their work in specified RPG settings. Lackey has some of those. If there’s _any_ interest I can mention them too. Some authors, that’s all we ever get from…)
Andrew Lang – there were twelve of the Colored Fairy Books that I know of. Blue, Brown, Crimson, Green, Grey, Lilac, Olive, Orange, Pink, Red, Violet, Yellow; almost any of them works as a starting point, but the Blue Fairy Book is the first chronologically, yes.
@46 – No, manybooks.net seems to have only eleven total, and as you note is missing the Blue. Project Gutenberg, last time I looked, had the Blue, but not the Olive…
Tanith Lee is another one where there’s STILL more places to start not mentioned yet. _Night’s Master_ is the first book in her Tales of the Flat Earth, a lushly baroque archetypal-very-high-fantasy magical setting. Night’s Master is Azhrarn, first among the five Lords of Darkness, and master of Wickedness, who lives in the Underearth with a plethora of lesser demonic spirits. Death, Delusion, and Fate are three of the other four. (The fifth is never shown explicitly, but can be figured out from clues along the way…) Ferazhin Flowerborn, Sivesh who Azhrarn loved and who later became Simmu the immortal, Zorayas the great queen, Shezael and Drezaem the half-souled, and others all appear in this first book… as do the gods of Upperearth, the voiceless Eshva demons who can communicate through attitude and posture better than humans could ever dream of doing, the Vazdru who are the Demon Lords (subordinate to Azhrarn), and the demonic Drin, small and ugly and artificers of items of the most astonishing beauty. And THEN we get into the second half of the book, where Azhrarn falls in love with the Comet’s Daughter … okay, as you can see, the setting has unduly influenced me, and while not everyone likes this sort of thing, I recommend you at least try it.
Fritz Leiber – You can also start him with _ChangeWar_ or _The Big Time_. (FORGOTTEN? nevar! He, and/or Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, was one of the influences on early Dungeons and Dragons, among others.)
Murray Leinster was a pseudonym for Will F. Jenkins, and start him with any of _A Logic Named Joe_, his _Best Of_ collection, or the _Med Ship_ collection, all of which are recently published and edited by Flint, so they’re much more findable now than they were five or ten years ago.
John Levitt is a recent addition who has a series about urban sorcerors and their ifrit-disguised-as-small-animals familiars which starts with _Dog Days_.
I’m sort of surprised NOBODY else mentioned Jacqueline Lichtenberg and/or Jean Lorrah. Together and apart they wrote nine different books in the Sime/Gen setting; science fiction, after an unspecified apocalypse has mutated Earth’s population into the Gen, who look human but generate ‘selyn’, an energy field… and the Sime, who have tentacles on their wrists (four main and two recessed), which they use to consume the selyn from Gen with about once a month, which USUALLY kills the Gen dead. Add in various psychic-ish powers that selyn can power (as well as a type of lamp), the existence of “channels” who are Sime who can take selyn from Gens safely and feed it to other Simes, and the rebuilding after said apocalypse, and it’s an interesting and evocative setting. (And note that the Need for selyn outpaces all other biological needs, including sex, and that there’s nuances about whether a Sime/Gen pair is same-sex or not, and that the fifth ‘transfer point’ for drawing selyn is usually on the lips… and suddenly you’re way deeper into A Whole Nother Kettle Of Issues as well.) The internal chronology is complicated, but start with either _House of Zeor_ or _First Channel_.
Jean Lorrah also wrote a wizardry/psychic-powers series of her own, which I found entirely readable, and which involves the clash of cultures between the psychic Roman-like civilization and the Savage Empire that has the wizard-like powers, starting with _Savage Empire_.
James Lileks is off-topic for almost ANY topic … but you’ve _got_ to see his stuff. He has a website at lileks.com which includes the Institute of Official Cheer, home of (among other things) the Gallery of Regrettable Food, Interior Desecrators, a deconstruction of the Art of Art Frahm, and various other humorous and mocking looks at old magazines, advertisements, attitudes, etc. He’s published a few books with material from the site, including _The Gallery of Regrettable Food_, _Gastroanomalies_, _Interior Desecrations_, and _Mommy Knows Worst_; you can start with any of them, or with the website.
Jane Lindskold I first encountered when she was collaborating with Roger Zelazny on a couple of his books near the end of his life. But she is quite acceptable as a fantasy author of her own. In addition to the starting points already mentioned, you could start with her most recent series, Breaking the Wall, which begins with _Thirteen Orphans_, and tells of a set of families exiled magically to Earth about a century back.
Holly Lisle – Another multistarter author. You can also try _Fire in the Mist_, or _Sympathy for the Devil_. Or any of her standalones…
Denise Little I don’t have any actual novels by – but she’s become a prolific _editor_ of anthologies, which I have quite a number of. (Nowhere near as many as Greenberg, of course.) They tend to be fairly good-quality selections, and you can start with any of them whose subject matter appeals to you.
Marjorie M. Liu has recently started an urban-fantasy series about a huntress with her own personal set of demons who live on her skin during the day, which begins with _The Iron Hunt_.
Hugh Lofting wrote the Doctor Dolittle Series as his main claim to fame. They’re definitely fantasy, even the ones involving visits to the Moon – and they start, unsurprisingly, with _The Story of Doctor Dolittle_. (Which, like Mary Poppins, has had abridged or expurgated versions published which adhere more closely to present-day standards for talking about native races or foreigners. Project Gutenberg has the original texts, I believe.)
Anne Logston wrote a long series of books about Shadow, an elven (“elvan”) thief, starting with _Shadow_.
Frank Belknap Long has been mentioned above; the two books of his I have are both story collections, _The Dark Beasts_ and _The Early Long_. Of the two I’d say go with _TDB_ first.
Barry B. Longyear – Disagree strongly; start with _Circus World_, a fixup novel of several short stories set on the planet Momus, in an … unusual … society. You could also try his _The God Box_, a standalone novel.
Jack Lovejoy is obscure enough that he has no Wikipedia page. He wrote, among other things, a time-travel-and-wizardry novel _Magus Rex_. (He also seems to have one series among his books, which starts with _Creation Descending_, about which I know naught.)
Brian Lumley was mentioned above; he’s more horror than fantasy or SF, but there are distinct elements of both in his Necroscope series. Harry Keogh can talk to the dead; he is the Necroscope. This is a very rare psychic power. There is also an organization of psychic spy-types for each of the major powers – UK, Russia, etc. – and a cabal of EXTREMELY nasty vampire-type monsters. And a couple of wormholes that lead to a parallel version of Earth that’s tidally locked to the sun, with a Sunside and a Starside; the vampires came from there originally and live, naturally, on Starside. One of the benefits of being dead is being able to continue your research without being _disturbed_ every day, and Harry gets the benefits of this when M”obius (yes, THAT one) teaches him how to access the M”obius Continuum, which allows teleportation and time travel… The series starts with _Necroscope_, and has spread into 16 volumes so far (with the usual stop-in-the-middle-for-a-prequel-trilogy and other horrors of internal chronology). He has also written several-many Cthulhu-mythos novels.
–Dave
Maud Hart Lovelace: Life in a small town in Minnesota in the beginning of the 20th century. If you’re a child, start with Betsy-Tacy or Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, read through the series until you bounce off one (the high school books in particular have a major jump in subject and reading level from the elementary school ones), wait a couple years, and try it again. If you’re an adult, start with Emily of Deep Valley, and then go back and read the Betsy-Tacy books. Or start by reading Betsy, Tacy to a child.
Out of genre, I am fond of several nonfiction works of the half Indian writer William Least Heat Moon. (His father is Heat Moon, his older brother is Little Heat Moon and….)
Blue Highways is his first and best known work, a Travels with Charlie but without the dog and limited to the lesser travelled highways of America. I really like the quirky Prairyerth, apparently a term used to describe a very deep map, and he creates such a map with a single county in Kansas – describing the history, politics, ecology, geography, economics, arts, etc., in a single huge but sprightly written volume.
Rob
Mary Lasswell- wrote comic novels in the 40’s and 50’s about Mrs. Feeley, Mrs. Rasmussen, and Miss Tinkham, three ladies of a certain age who enjoy beer, food, and helping others. Start with Suds in Your Eye or High Time.
Jennie Lindquist, children’s books about Swedish immigrants in New England: start with The Golden Name Day or The Little Silver House, then read the other. Track down The Crystal Tree if you’re a completist, but if you can’t find it, it’s not the end of the world.
Anyone have suggestions on Grace Lin? Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a wonderful book, but as I haven’t read anything else by her, I don’t know whether it’s typical.
Belatedly adding Glenda Larke, a writer based in Malaysia, who has written two unrelated trilogies and is working on a third. The first begins with The Aware, the second trilogy with Shadow of Tyr and the third trilogy which is just starting begins with Last Stormlord .
The Aware is set in an archipelago where there was magic, and is presented at least in part as the memoirs of someone involved in the events of how the magic disappeared. I remember getting partway through book 2 & thinking “the author isn’t going to do that is she? Could she pull it off? [/i]” and she did do it, and pulled it off. She’s aware of genre tropes has characters going by Blaze and Flame, and gets away with it.
The second trilogy in a completely different setting – vaguely ancient Roman – and goes rather differently from what I expected. When a main character discovers betrayal and goes off home to deal with it the rest of the story is not completely about that, although it does get some page time.
And the third is in yet another setting, an extremely arid land where Stormlords are needed to bring water. But the last Stormlord is dying. I got dehydrated reading it.
The author is very aware of natural environments and writes them well. That’s part of what makes her books and worldbuilding convincing for me.
Tanith Lee has an endless variety of books to indulge in. I note that someone has already mentioned “Night’s Master” as a good place to start. That is a fabulous way to begin, as the “Tales from the Flat Earth” series is absorbing, a masterful example of Tanith Lee’s phenomenal writing ability and eminitely re-readable.
Also, the “Blood Opera” series- her vampire trilogy- is worth a very honourable mention. Not only is her take on vampirism original, the sheer usage of language is breathtaking. Her characters are fascinating, and the underlying themes useful for any English major writing a paper. ^^
I’d also point to the “Books of Venus” and the “Books of Paradys” as excellent reads. While the “Books of Paradys” are not as linear in storytelling as the “Books of Venus,” the stories within are extremely fascinating. The “Books of Venus” are Tanith Lee’s twist on Venice, Italy, and my favourite has to be “Saint Fire.” Characterization, for Lee, is not just a necessary aspect of writing. It is an art form, and one she has fully perfected.
I *highly* recommend *ANY* of Mistress Lee’s writing.