Books

Dune — Frank Herbert, 1965

Ecology as the engine of politics. Water discipline, Fremen culture, and a universe that outlawed thinking machines. The world-building is the achievement.

Ender's Game — Orson Scott Card, 1985

Children trained for fleet command inside simulated war. Battle school tactics are the fun; the twist reframes the entire book.

Speaker for the Dead — Orson Scott Card, 1986

Three thousand years later and a different genre entirely — xenology and moral repair instead of combat. Card has said this is the book he actually wanted to write.

I, Robot — Isaac Asimov, 1950

Nine linked stories that invent the Three Laws and then spend the rest of the book finding the cracks in them. Robopsychology as detective work.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams, 1979

Earth demolished for a bypass by page ten. Deadpan absurdism, infinite improbability, the number 42. Quotable to the point of contagion.

Sphere — Michael Crichton, 1987

A craft on the ocean floor and a crew that can't trust its own minds. Closed-room thriller; the manifestation premise does all the work.

Congo — Michael Crichton, 1980

Expedition thriller after industrial diamonds, opposed by gorillas that were taught to kill. Pre-Jurassic Crichton — technology versus jungle.

I actually really liked this one.

Jurassic Park — Michael Crichton, 1990

Cloned dinosaurs, chaos theory as narrative structure, and a systems failure with real engineering rigor behind it. Malcolm's monologues survive better on the page.

I read it before the movie came out. Everyone loved the movie — it never captured the book.

Shōgun — James Clavell, 1975

An English pilot wrecked in 1600 Japan learns a civilization from the bottom up. Language, hierarchy, and honor as survival mechanics. Twelve hundred pages that move.

Tai-Pan — James Clavell, 1966

Hong Kong founded in 1841 as a business proposition. Trading houses, opium, rival dynasties — commerce conducted as warfare.

Couldn't tell you whether I like this one or Noble House more.

Noble House — James Clavell, 1981

The same dynasty in 1963: one week, a liquidity crisis, and a dozen deals running at once. Structurally the most operational book Clavell wrote.

Couldn't tell you whether I like this one or Tai-Pan more.

The Pillars of the Earth — Ken Follett, 1989

A cathedral takes decades and outlives the people who start it. Construction logistics, church politics, famine, and a genuinely hateable villain.

I've read a lot of Follett. This is the one that stands out.

The First Man in Rome — Colleen McCullough, 1990

Marius and Sulla claw their way up the late Republic. Exhaustively researched, glossary in the back, politics as a contact sport. First of seven.

I really liked this one.

Katherine — Anya Seton, 1954

Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt in fourteenth-century England — the affair that eventually put the Tudors on the throne. Seton worked from primary sources.

Recommended to me during genealogy research, after I found out John of Gaunt was an ancestor.

A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin, 1968

Magic as true names, and the cost of using them. Short, spare, moral — the anti-epic. A boy's pride looses a shadow he then has to go and meet.

I read all three and liked all three. These first two are the best.

The Tombs of Atuan — Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971

Almost entirely underground and almost entirely two people. A priestess raised to guard a labyrinth has to work out what she is apart from it.

A Spell for Chameleon — Piers Anthony, 1977

Xanth #1: everyone gets exactly one magic talent and the hero appears to have none. Puns as load-bearing structure. Spawned forty-odd sequels.

The first one. I went on to read something like twenty of them.

the Dragonlance Chronicles — Weis & Hickman, 1984

A D&D campaign turned into a trilogy, and it works. Raistlin is the reason — the best morally compromised wizard in the genre.

I really, really loved these. Read a lot of them.

the Vampire Chronicles — Anne Rice, 1976–

Vampires as immortal aesthetes with taste and grievances. Louis confesses in Interview; Lestat spends the next several books rebutting him. Memnoch turns theological.

I always really liked Anne Rice. Read straight through to Memnoch the Devil.

Communion — Whitley Strieber, 1987

Presented as memoir, not fiction: a horror novelist writing his own abduction account straight. Sold enormously, and fixed the grey alien in the popular imagination.

Siddhartha — Hermann Hesse, 1922

A seeker leaves every teacher he finds, including the Buddha, because the thing can't be handed over. A hundred and fifty pages, reads like a parable.

Something my son and I have been talking about lately.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull — Richard Bach, 1970

A seagull who cares about flight for its own sake, and gets exiled for it. A fable about mastery as vocation — barely a hundred pages, half of them photographs.

My dad read it to me on a boat trip. My son's copy is waiting for him.