Fiction: Inherent Vice --- Thomas Pynchon The Great and Secret Show --- Clive Barker Jurassic Park --- Michael Crichton The Mothman Prophecies --- J

Fiction: Inherent Vice --- Thomas Pynchon The Great and Secret Show --- Clive Barker Jurassic Park --- Michael Crichton The Mothman Prophecies --- John A. Keel (1) The Wind in the Willows --- Kenneth Grahame Ender's Game --- Orson Scott Card All Quiet on the Western Front --- Erich Maria Remarque The Drought --- J. G. Ballard The Dead Father's Club --- Matt Harris Children of Men --- P. D. James The Islanders --- Pascal Garnier Silence of the Lambs --- Thomas Harris Inherit the Wind --- Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee The Butt --- Will Self Inside Outside --- Philip Jose Farmer The Panda Theory --- Pascal Garnier Fanshaw --- Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter --- Nathaniel Hawthorne This Census-Taker --- China Mieville The House of the Seven Gables --- Nathaniel Hawthorne The A26 --- Pascal Garnier The Blithedale Romance --- Nathaniel Hawthorne The Weird --- Edited by Jeff VanderMeer & Ann VanderMeer (2) Front Seat Passenger --- Pascal Garnier Non-Fiction: The Wealth of Networks --- Yochai Benkler Field Notes from A Catastrophe --- Elizabeth Kolbert What Ever Happened to Modernism? --- Gabriel Josipovici Escape Velocity --- Mark Dery What We See When We Read --- Peter Mendelsund (1) Author described as non-fiction, publisher hedged bets and labelled in as such, supposedly. (2) If only this book could be picked by Subterranean or Centipede press so it'd be a better printed and bound book than Tor ever seems to want to do. I always recommend Ballard, even when not wanted. Relevant quote: A story by J. G. Ballard, as you know, calls for people who don't think. One begins with characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws. Furthermore, in order to be the protagonist of a J.G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education. In this way, when the world disaster — be it wind or water — comes upon you, you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything about it but sit and worship it. Even more further, some force has acted to remove from the face of the world all people who might impose good sense or rational behavior on you, so that the disaster proceeds unchecked and unopposed except by the almost inevitable thumb-rule engineer type who for his individual comfort builds a huge pyramid (without huge footings) to resist high winds, or trains a herd of alligators and renegade divers to help him out in dealing with deep water. Algis Budrys, Galaxy magazine (December 1966) I'd recommend Pascal Garnier for anyone who likes sickly dark humor + surrealism + noir + a kind of Ballardian-air. Also Pynchon. Hawthorne might be the stand-out this year, in the sense of his works' subtle, implicit ability to question the authorial mode, the nature of the text itself, and the instability of it. In non-fiction I'd recommend Dery's Escape Velocity; It's from the 90s but still deals too presciently with many of the issues around the near-religification of modern electronic technology. And Josipovici if you lean toward depressive jolts of existential anxiety (it deals mostly with the arts, but I think there's a broader life applicability).