…is that most everybody has a book they read that just haunts them: they can’t remember the title, or they can’t remember the author, or it’s a book that appeared and vanished, and you really liked it, but nothing else by that author ever appeared.
Maybe the collective wisdom of WWAS can identify some of these.
I’ll give you a book I read, the author of which I can’t remember, and, being me, I don’t really remember the plot—but I really liked it. It was called The Wizard of Glass, and the premise was that, in the hands of a wizard, a piece of glass matching the eye color of a creature could control it. It exists, I think, somewhere in my library, which has moved 7 times…and is still largely in boxes in the basement.
Another series that had promise was Raum, by Carl Sherell. He always seemed so sad, as a person. He wrote about of all things a lord of Hell, and made him quite interesting. I used to convention with Carl (and try to cheer him up)in Kansas City; he had all kinds of publisher troubles; and then quite suddenly he died. It was very sad. You can still get the book from Amazon.
In between wholesale murder of facial tissues, I’ve been thinking about this question. There are *so* many books that have meant so much to me over the years that it’s hard to really put my finger on one. Among the most important: Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time – girls could be scientists! Lloyd Alexander’s Taran series – pigboys could be princes! and Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogin retellings. I think my love of ancient Egypt was spurred by a book mentioned here in an earlier thread (and I’ve shamelessly ordered a copy to see) Mara, Daughter of the Nile.
But it finally hit me that the book that really made a difference – the one that taught me that words were magic, and I could be part of that magic by reading *myself*, was a kid’s picturebook of Edward Lear’s Owl and the Pussycat. Feels silly – but it’s true.
A book found! Yes, “Mara Daughter of the Nile” by Eloise Jarvis McGraw (who also wrote Oz books) is the long-lost book that started me on my life-long love of all things Ancient Egyptian. I reviewed it at my librarything: http://www.librarything.com/work/book/65500787
Your readers rock! I looked for, but couldn’t find, the thread where this was mentioned, but thank you! to whoever it was.
The story whose name and author I can’t remember was one I mentioned in your other book thread. It was about 2 kids in the future reading a print book and marveling over how old-fashioned it was. I think the story appeared in a scholastic magazine for grade-schoolers, back in the sixties.
More recent (80’s?) was Patricia McKillip’s Riddle Master trilogy. Kept me and one of my sisters on tenterhooks waiting for each book to come out. I still remember waiting 16 months between book 2 and book 3, and the huge smile I wore when I brought book 3 home and showed it off! I still love that story.
maybe “The Fun They Had” by Asimov 1951?
it was in one of my middle school anthologies…
OK, it was high school, so late 70’s or so. Main keyword: “Combat Augmentation”. A continuum of parallel universes, some very close in nature to our own, and some very far away. Many explored, and some at war with each other and with us. Our hero had been modified with this combat augmentation. There were five levels. As he willed himself to higher levels, time slowed down and he sped up. He could only maintain the highest level for a few minutes, as it was very physically exhausting. Basically a agent, up against other agents from other Earths, and even an intelligent reptilian species who had infiltrated and conquered several, all flitting back and forth from one universe to the next. I have a vague image of the paperback cover, guy in a trench coat, maybe, on the steps of some public building… This one has been driving me nuts for years trying to find it again. My copy is long since lost, and Google just doesn’t seem to be able to find it with any search terms I can come up with. Unfortunately, an unrelated computer game used the ‘combat augmentation’ idea, so that’s all you get from Google. Basically pulp sci-fi, but I’d love to find it again, especially since I’ll bet the writers from Fringe must have read it too… I seem to remember there were a series of several books, but I had only read the first (that may be wrong, memories invent themselves if you go too far back for too long ;^)
Mmm. I thought for a bit maybe Agent of Vega, but that involved psyonics.
just found my princess bride book – the war of the end of the world by Mario Vargas Llosa. a tome about a real happening in Brazil at the end of the 19th C, and I never finished it when I read it in my 30’s, but fascinating …. perhaps I have more time for it now.
And congratulations to Senor Vargas Llosa for his Nobel Prize for Literature. Aunt Julia and the Script Writer was my introduction and an early favorite.
Thanks to all I have managed to track down via Google a book whose name and author I forgot years ago. The Tokaido Road by Lucia St.Clair Robson. It’s set in feudal Japan, in some ways very Machimi. I don’t know how accurate it is, but it sure is fun to read.
Today (finally) i bought H.Kuttner “Fury” (obviously translated to italian): it was haunting me from the beginnings, when i first read an autobiographic intro by Marion Zimmer Bradley…