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Work InformationWhat Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Greatly enriched my "to-read" list! ( ) Reading this was exactly like sitting down with old friends to talk about books. You argue, you wave your hands, you pour yourself another cup of tea. You say “oh, YES, this book!” and “oh, no, my list of books to read just got longer, did you have to...” and “hmm, this doesn’t sound like my kind of book.” I think I will happily re-visit these essays in the future - for the sheer pleasure of a conversation with a fellow book lover. Each of the chapters, originally blog posts, takes up a book that Walton has just re-read, and suggests an idea about it. The idea, often as not, has little to do with what makes the book great. Many of the books are not great. And these aren't essays, just notes: Walton takes no trouble to examine her ideas from various directions, or put them in context. She makes her point, either at the beginning of the post or at the end, and lets it sit there without examination. Sometimes, when I haven't read the book myself, it's impossible to discern exactly what she's talking about. She mentions many times in the early chapters how the Singularity has taken over science fiction to its detriment, but she never defines what the Singularity is. Those who know are probably better served by this book than I am. So this collection serves poorly as an introduction to books, and series of books, that the reader hasn't read. It certainly doesn't match its title. All this said, if you're willing to put up with some frustration, there are many interesting points on offer. I loved the chapter on James Blish's Catholicism-themed A Case of Conscience, in which she yields her forum to an actual Jesuit to explode the book's surprisingly unorthodox theology. And in a collection of posts this big, there are exceptions to all the complaints I've made. A few of the chapters, such as one about the mental toolkit that SF fans develop for reading SF, do qualify as essays, and a few others, such as most of the chapters on Delany, really do explain what makes the books so great. I respect Walton's mind; I just wish she'd written an actual book instead of gathering a loose collection of online columns and putting them together under a title that misrepresents them. no reviews | add a review
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"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"-- No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.0876209Literature English (North America) American fiction By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Speculative fiction Science fiction History of American science fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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