SF Signal: The American Library Association's Reading List Awards

The American Library Association's Reading List Awards

The American Library Association's first Reading List Awards (winners as DOC link) for genre fiction includes many SF/F/H titles as chosen by a coucil of "ten librarians who are experts in readers' advisory and collection development". The list (with special distinction given to the first title listed in each category) goes like this:

SCIENCE FICTION

In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor, 2007)
Spook Country by William Gibson (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2007)
Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon (Pyr, 2007)
Phytosphere by Scott Mackay (New American Library, 2007)
Brasyl by Ian McDonald (Pyr, 2007)
Thirteen by Richard Morgan (Del Rey/Ballantine, 2007)
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor, 2007)
The Last Colony by John Scalzi (Tor, 2007)
One Jump Ahead by Mark L. Van Name (Baen, 2007)
Axis by Robert Charles Wilson (Tor, 2007)

FANTASY

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (Daw Books, 2007)
Territory by Emma Bull (Tor, 2007)
White Night by Jim Butcher (ROC/Penguin, 2007)
Kushiel's Justice by Jacqueline Carey (Warner, 2007)
The Devil You Know by Mike Carey (Warner, 2007)
Acacia by David Durham (Doubleday, 2007)
Book of Joby by Mark Ferrari (Tor, 2007)
First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde (Viking, 2007)
Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay (ROC/Penguin, 2007)
Daughter of Hounds by Caitlin Kiernan (Roc, 2007)
Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch (Bantam Spectra, 2007)
City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers (Overlook, 2007)
A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear (Tor, 2007)
Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik (Del Rey, 2007)
Making Money by Terry Pratchett (Harper, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic, 2007)
Children of Hurin by J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
In the Cities of Coin and Spice by Catherynne Valente (Bantam Spectra, 2007)

HORROR

The Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill (William Morrow, 2007)
Imago Sequence by Laird Barron (Nightshade Books, 2007)
Shadow Coast by Philip Haldeman (Hippocampus, 2007)
20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill (William Morrow, 2007)
The Missing by Sarah Langan (HarperCollins, 2007)
Baltimore, or the Steadfast Tin Solider by Mignola, Mike and Christopher Golden (Spectra, 2007)
The Taken by Sarah Pinborough (Dorchester, 2007)
The Terror by Dan Simmons (Little Brown, 2007)

[via Locus Online]

Scott Lynch's Red Seas Under Red Skies is very very good, and reaches the quality of his The Lies of Locke Lamora. It's better by not having the need to insert the back-story and jump between plot-lines, but on the other hand it feels slightly less... err... imaginative or original. And I'm still not sure whether I really liked the ending, or whether I was disappointed by it.

Crossing this list with books/authors/series I read, it seems like a pretty decent recommendations list. Apart from the Tolkien (I strongly dislike everything the apparently money-grabbing family of JRR released with his name after he died) all the authors, books, and series I read there, I liked.

Posted by Yaron on Monday January 28, 2008 at 12:56 PM