Night Watch is terrible. I don't know if something went wrong with the translation, but the prose is dumbed-down to the point of unreadability and the dialogue is extremely cumbersome. Boring characters with less than one dimension each, young-adultish in the worst way possible. Can't recommend King Rat either, even if it's by Mieville, for reasons given here.

I can highly recommend Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Sparsely written, but intriguing and--to me at least--creepy, and I'm not chilled often by books. Also, check here if you'd like to see my reviews of some stuff. Off the top of my head, I'd suggest Song of Kali, Behold the Man and Lilith's Brood. Oh, and Tricia Sullivan's Double Vision: something that reads at first like chick-lit, but it's not really. Alternate reality, creepy implications, in the vein of Dick except with a female protagonist.

Me too. I enjoyed Neverwhere, but American Gods did NOTHING for me, which sharply decreased my geek cred.

I...I couldn't get past the first chapter. Probably kind of why I liked King Rat - I haven't been glutted enough on that stuff to be sick of it. I did, however, come upon moments where I distinctly felt like I *wasn't* the target audience--that I was too old, suburban, and un-hip to get it. But it was only moments. Francesca Lia Block's entire Weetzie Bat series practically screamed, "Hey, suburban mom, put this book down, 'cause you aren't cool enough to read it."

I'm reading right now Cory Doctorow. I finished Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom which combines disneyphilia and next-gen internet-based culture and really liked the worldbuilding in it. I'll probably start Eastern Standard Tribe in a few days. Both are out in ebook format under creative commons license--you can buy the print book, but the ebook is free in the wild, and Doctorow is doing it to see what happens and why and how it's used. I'm curious as hell as to how it'll turn out. He says if you like the story and want to tip him as the author, to buy a hard copy for a library, school, or shelter. It's a fascinating and unusual blend of marketing, sales, and...something else.

I always recommend William Gibson - especially his two latest, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Wired culture with a good foundation of good old-fashioned mystery. I also fell in love with John C. Wright's Orphans of Chaos trilogy. It's part YA, and part math-geek overload (the geometry sent me running to wikipedia more than once), and the heroine wears an aviator hat and goggles, which is nothing short of awesome.

I'm struggling my way through Twilight and having a hell of a time with it. I'd think that it'd be right up my alley--vampires, romance, bosom-heaving angst, pretty people. Instead, the writing is like chewing tinfoil and I'm getting absolutely nothing from the characters, but a whole lot of "wow, this author has Issues." (which is awful, because I try very hard not to project author onto creative work, but this just screams it). Anyway, I have heard from several people that Michelle Marr's Wicked Lovely is the book (or one of the books) that fulfills the potential Twilight fails to.

I'm however currently in love with Ellen Schreiber's Vampire Kisses teen series. The heroine is an outcast goth girl obsessed with vampires and her adventures dating a boyfriend who's a real vampire. The series and the heroine both have a slightly screwball feel that shows neither the author nor the heroine takes herself too seriously, yet the series has a recurring theme of Raven realizing that her romanticized notions may not resemble much of the reality. I like her because she grows up and becomes more self-aware through doing typical stupid-teenager stuff (whereas Bella from Twilight doesn't). The series is adorable, but older teens might find it a little light.

Twilight is just...weird. The writing is bad. To quote another LJ user, it's "strategery bad" - there's so much bad writing in there that I'm honestly, truly surprised it made it past the desk of any editor or agent. I mean it's basic writing stuff--show, don't tell, weak verbs, run-on sentences, pages and pages of "talking head" dialogue, overly florid purple prose the kind of which hasn't been seen in even the most torrid of bosom-heaving historical romances since the mid-80's.

And that's not even going into the "message" because Lord knows I'm a hypocrite when it comes to that--there's nothing I resent more than people hyperventilating over impressionable women having their expectations twisted by reading romances, or kids having their delicate constitutions corrupted by reading Harry Potter. Yet at the end of every chapter of Twilight that I've made it through, I've renewed my resolve to first, teach my daughter karate and install motion sensors in her bedroom, and second, if she ever brings home a boy like Edward, I'm gonna need a shovel, a shotgun, and an airtight alibi.

I'm fighting my way through it to see if I catch what got so many people to buzz about it. And what exactly about it makes people say, "I know it's cracky and bad writing but I couldn't help but like it." My theory is that Meyer either tapped into some really painful, truthful, or nostalgic aspect of adolescence that just about *everybody* gets and wants to relive through the safe lens of fiction, or that her main character is such a cipher that it's far too easy to relive the theme of wish fulfillment using the main character as a proxy for the reader.

So far, up to chapter 12, I'm just not feeling any of it, but maybe that's because the actual plot is nowhere to be found yet. I hear the movie is better than the book because it's funny to watch Robert Pattinson make the constipated faces that viewers are supposed to believe are intense and brooding.

However...if you *do* read it, you have to post a review. Or at least, a reaction.

The Last Wish and Blood of Elves suffer from massive translation problems, but they are just... nowhere as bad. Not dumbed-down, not shallow: the spotty transition from Polish to English could not rob Sapkowski's characterization and depth and unusual handling of fairytale elements (if you haven't read them or played the game, I recommend both; the books are some of the very few modern sword-and-sorcery done right). With Night Watch, I suspect there were never any to begin with.

American Gods is worth reading only for Wednesday, IMO. Shadow sucks and sucks and sucks.

Oh. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. I'm not sure what it is about this book, but it's one of the two that changed the way I write (the other being Perdido Street Station) and the memory of reading it has taken on a sort of glowy, happy-making quality for me. I was told that Zelazny genuinely believed in the Buddhist philosophies he wrote about, and it shows: he didn't just throw in Hindu deities and Buddhist concepts just to sound "exotic." LoL is funny and tragic and philosophically charged without being pretentious or bogged-down. Like Dune, one of those rare novels that manages a messianic figure right.

I couldn't finish it. In fact, got only a few chapters through. Admittedly, my tolerance for terrible writing is not as high as it once was, but there's something about Night Watch that grated. It's so primitive.

The only thing I remember about it is that I hated that woman-turned-owl, Olga, so very very much. Also, that I was disappointed: I was hoping to read about an interesting setting. As it was, the book could've taken place in a generic American urban place and it would have made not a whit of difference. What a waste.

Heh, I hate it when that happens. When I was a teenager I remember reading a whole bunch of Dean Koontz books, that I just devoured, but when I was done I couldn't remember anything specific about the whole lot of them, or why I even enjoyed them. I stopped reading them because I ended up buying the same book twice, and not realizing that I'd already read that story until about 100 pages in - which is pretty sad, lol.

It's almost better for a book to be memorably bad, than totally forgettable and generic like that.

I recommend pretty much anything by Barbara Hambly...even if she doesn't hit the mark every time, she's one of the more original fantasists I know. There's also "Bride of the Rat God" (Chinese mythology meets 1920s Hollywood, with results similar to the takeaway place in Ankh-Morpork), the Benjamin January books (awesome mysteries set in 19th-century New Orleans with an insanely intricate caste system based on degrees of blackness/freedom/etc.), and the Sunhawk (?) books, which are just good solid fantasy with a nice romance running through them.

Outlander's enjoyable if you like historical romances. I'm told the sequels degenerate pretty badly. Philip Pullman I'm not terribly rational about, so I'll just hush there... :-) Watership Down is great, and I've conceived a serious literary crush on Joe Hill. Heart-Shaped Box rocked IMO...there's definitely a Stephen King-ish feel, but updated, and it's got some neat themes running through it. Which is good, because spooks and gore with nothing backing them up bore the hell out of me.

In nonfiction, I seriously adored "Becoming a Tiger" (short version: spectrum of animal intelligence between instinct and learned behavior)by Susan McCarthy, which combines good science with howlingly funny writing. Especially the aside on John Lilly and his dolphin-fanboying.

In the YA department, you might or might not like Diane Duane's Young Wizard books, especially the first three. They predate Harry Potter and have a lot more meat to them IMO.

More if I think of something...

Jeffrey Eugenides's books are awesome--his other one, Middlesex, is really good.

I also recently got hooked on George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Fire and Ice" series, which starts with A Game of Thrones and goes up to A Feast for Crows.

I also like Christopher Moore, who wrote Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Friend, along with a slew of other funny books. Another funny guy is Mil Millington, who's written Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About and A Certain Chemistry/

I used to like Chuck Palahniuk, but he's gotten too gross for me. Survivor is his best one, I think.

The Dress Lodger is also good, and Memoirs of a Geisha. Ian McEwan's books are good too, especially On Chesil Beach, Atonement, and Saturday.

For young adults, I liked the Tillerman series by Cynthia Voigt. I've only read Homecoming and Dicey's Song, but I really like them. I also love the Indian in the Cupboard series, and Gary Paulson's books, like Hatchet and Brian's Winter. There was a period of time where I was really into survivalist books, which probably explains why I like Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins too. I also like AVI's The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. I know it's trashy and terrible, but I also like Killing Mr. Griffin. I like almost anything by Lois Lowry, especially the "Giver trilogy," which includes The Giver, Gathering Blue, and The Messenger.

For non-fiction, I really liked Stiff by Mary Roach, and Stradivari's Genius.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head!

Ooo--ooo--I totally forgot to post this before. If you can stand to read ebooks, Random House is giving away nine of 'em free at Fictionwise.

I've got Free Range Chickens and Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death on my FW bookshelf, along with The Whiskey Rebels.

Good luck with that, btw. I never do that sort of thing. I just read what happens to fall in my lap. At the moment that happens to, oddly enough, be Crystal Shard, along with Gone For Soldiers - if that's not the oddest combination of novels I've ever read together I'm not sure what is.

Oh, and don't worry too much about your geek cred. Personally, I thought American Gods was really, really good (though it took me awhile to think that) - but then again, I didn't like Serenity (though I loved Firefly). So everyone has their own tastes.

I really enjoyed Mother of Demons by Eric Flint (it's a free ebook on baen.com so you can read a few chapters without buying), about humans in a colony ship crashing on a world where evolution favored molluscs (but not so different after all). I really liked the pacing and humor in it, one of the few books with multiple viewpoints I enjoyed.

As for kiddie books, I'd recommend the Tiffany the Witch series by Terry Pratchett. Also Maurice and His Amazing Rats.