raven | in which I demand people tell me what to read

Snow, snow, slush, ice, more snow. I stood on the top of Divinity Road for quite some time and looked down, watching the people edge up step by step. No one, I noted, was even trying the return journey. I didn't risk it. I did get home eventually, having abstracted myself from an incomprehensible lecture on equity when it seemed suspiciously dark around the blinds. (Sitting there, in the break, eating an orange the lecturer had given me the beneficial interest in - he believes in learning by doing - I said, thoughtfully, "In Goa, it's probably twenty-five degrees. The sea is lapping gently on the shore."

"You," someone said, "are an exquisite form of torture.")

The Mousehole is - or was, now - without power or heating, so escaping seemed the order of the day, and now I am warm and dry and feeling better disposed to the world.

So! Dear internets: recommend me books. I am trying to make 2009 the year I get into reading for pleasure again, and so far it's going pretty well - have read five books this year so far, which is the same as I read the previous six months, I'm sure - but, like all worthwhile enterprises, it needs a steady supply of raw material.

So! I trust your taste. Feel free to recommend me anything you like. But, this is what I like, for reference:

-Science fiction and fantasy. Well, I write fanfiction on the internet, this one's pretty much a given. But I'm not fond of hard SF, barring Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, and they maybe aren't hard SF, I don't know. (I like Excession and The Player of Games, love The State of the Art, really really love Look To Windward and have never made it through Consider Phlebas. I have had

magic_doors' copy of Matter for donkey's years, and brought it up for the express purpose of returning it, but still haven't read it because I FAIL.)

I have also read a lot of Asimov and Clarke, and like some of the former and lots of the latter, but generally speaking, I like the lighter things. I like Connie Willis and Douglas Adams and Ursula Le Guin's YA stuff. Anything that has aliens or ghosts and doesn't take itself too seriously is good by me.

-Twentieth-century offbeat stuff. I like random things like The Bell Jar and Breakfast At Tiffany's and the various books that begin Fear and Loathing.... I really love the Beat writers. (I went to City Lights in July and about died;

gamesiplay can attest to this.) Anything, I am embarrassed to admit, that you might wish to describe as "cool", or dystopian: I love Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 and even Utopia itself is growing on me with sufficient distance, though I don't count it as fiction.

-Bestellers. Well... what an independent bookshops calls bestsellers, bearing in mind it won't stock a lot of the stuff that a supermarket might stock. Book-club books, shall we call them? Working in a bookshop, I read The Time Traveler's Wife and My Sister's Keeper and The Lovely Bones and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen as they first came out, and liked all of them. I do like this sort of thing, but find it hard to think of a common denominator beyond "they sell well to women in their forties".

-Chick-lit. I love chick-lit, but good chick-lit, and there's not a lot of that around. Bonus points for NRI chick-lit, a narrow subgenre that I absolutely lap up. (Mostly, it's terrible. This isn't a problem.)

-Non-fiction-wise, well, I do read it, but I don't like biography or history, which narrows my choices a bit. I like popular science, travelogues, books on language and linguistics, but again, prefer the lighter touch.

-My favourite book of all time is Three Men in a Boat. I feel I should mention it, considering it doesn't fit in any of the above categories.

So. Please recommend me books! It is much appreciated.