…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.
The Mouse and His Child, by Russell Hoban. I was finally able to track the book down in grad school via the internet after having seen the film as a five year old and never forgetting it. It was truly one of those haunting things you are talking about…
I have A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Eric Frank Russell, and I’ve read it once, and damned if I can get myself to pick it up and read it again. Just something about that book.
With some books, they’ve had their impact, and couldn’t have a greater one. That is definitely an ‘impact’ kind of book. I’m like that with Rendezvous with Rama.
I’ve been long haunted by “The Leaves of October” by Don Sakers. Somehow, it made a lasting, strong emotional impact on me.
I cant remember the title or the corect spelling of the Author’s name. I belive she is from India or Pakistan. Her name is somthing like Bikardi Mukaji. The novel was written while she attended the Iowa Writer’s workshop at the UofI. The story delt with the aftermath of war in the life of a young girl who survived a genoside in her homeland and was addopted by a family in Iowa. Very haunting book.
One of mine is the short story by Vonda McIntyre that became the novel Dreamsnake. IIRC, the title is “Of Wind and Grass and Sand”, or something similar. It was in one of the SF mags, I think Analog, but I may be wrong. Circa 1974 plus or minus.
I was going to say that there were 3 children’s books I felt that way about that I hadn’t been able to find, but this thread reminded me of them and I did a search — and Amazon The Evil Empire now has them! So I ordered them. So I’m no longer haunted. 🙂
As for Big People books — I don’t get rid of them unless I’m positive I’ll never want to read them again. I learned early when I lost those children’s books to my younger sibs and they destroyed them. (And then my teenage brother went through my SF/F books one day and ripped off all the sexy covers. I found them in his dresser drawer. Jeez, did he think I wouldn’t notice?! It was the one time my mom didn’t interfere when I perpetrated violence upon his person. (Mild violence, for those who are worried. 🙂 This is a PG-rated thread…))
Sometimes violence is salutary even for the recipient. You may have saved him from a life of crime.
My brother surreptitiously read all my SF books back in the ’60’s. 40 years later he thanked me for introducing him to the genre.
I used to do that with my father’s magazine. Carefully slide the wrapper off, skim the editorial and the letters, maybe some of the story, slide the wrapper back on before he got home … and have him pick it up, slide the wrapper off, and start making remarks about ‘eye tracks’ all over it. (I still read it, but the wrappers went away years go, and there’s no one to make remarks about ‘eye tracks’ all over it.)
I have two generations of this, because of being read to and then reading to the kids. If they’d do something about it, I could be into a third round by now. The first time round, my Mum used to read Winnie the Pooh stories to me every afternoon – and some of my parents’ adult friends used to drop in about then so they could listen too! However, that wasn’t the book that haunted me: that was The Water Babies. Even when I was small I could feel a real difference between Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, and began to understand the universality of The Golden Rule – which, incidentally I have a handy sheet that gives the wording of the Golden Rule referenced to the scriptures of all the major religions. Sadly, the book’s language and structure is rooted in the Victorian age, and you couldn’t do a Princess Bride act with your grandchildren without considerable translation and Redaction.
For my kids, one of the go-to books was Roald Dahl’s The BFG: I can remember my wife reading it out loud to the kids on a long train journey from Exeter to London, in one of those trains where there were kind of banquettes for four people with seat backs high enough not to see over, and when we were getting to the end of the journey saying to the kids: “shall we stop now or do you want another chapter?”, whereupon, before the kids had a chance to reply, adult voices drifted over from the neighbouring seats saying “we want another chapter!”
In SF terms, early books I had to go back to include James Blish’s Cities in Flight series -even if the interstellar navigation was done with a sliderule – and Clarke’s Childhood’s End, both of which I read (started on, in Blish’s case), sometime around 1962. The Blish books were the first time I could see the purity of construction, that said: for space opera, I need anti-grav, longevity, and ftl comms to make the story work in less than millenia with consistent characters; no extraneous wonders and industrial magic. Childhood’s End hit me over the head with the idea that SF could be about what humanity is, not just what whizzy gadgets the future might hold – which I’ve held onto long enough to get to CJ’s books …
Is anyone familiar with a toddler’s board book about a kitten that goes wandering from the farmhouse kitchen and has various adventures in the out-of-doors, till at last it comes back to nap in the cozy kitchen again?
The board pages are die-cut in the shape of a cat — the back cover is the full silhouette, and as one moves forward in the book the pages are smaller; tho cover is just the head, so the whole book is sort of a 3D sculpture of a curled cat. Some of the adventures are fantastic, as when the kitten speaks to the great whales that cruise through space. I think I recall on that page that the starry background is the flamboyant stars of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, and back home in the farmhouse kitchen the chair cushion at the table is a fabric printed with those stars.
I bought this little book at the gift shop in the De Cordova Museum in Lincold, Mass., back in the late 90’s, and gave it away as a baby present, and lost the info about it. Sure would like to be able to find another one.
Silly uneditable comments – the De Cordova Museum is in LincolN, Mass.
For years and years I was haunted by Secret Lives, by Berthe Amoss. (Girl grows up idolizing her deceased mother as a tragic and romantic figure — then she learns that her mother wasn’t so admirable as all that, and that the aunts who have cared for her weren’t as silly as she thought.) I remembered the story but I couldn’t think of the title to save my life. Then someone on this Goodreads group helped me find it.
These days I am mostly haunted by short stories, as they’re harder to find. Actually, this is probably a good place/time to ask about these:
(1) It had a sort of post-war feel: women in an office building were leaning out the windows to watch a ticker tape parade to celebrate the end of the war and the return of the army.
After a while, they notice something: there are lots of machines, but no soldiers. Someone finally says “But where are all the men?” But they only see machines. It had a very eerie feel.
It was in my 8th grade English textbook; I would have read it in 1993 or 1994 or thereabouts. I think it might have also had “The Red Pony” in it … but I’m not sure.
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(2) The protagonist connected several adult toys into a circuit and by using them for their intended purpose (s)he was able to travel into the near future. (I’m trying to keep this family-friendly, and no, I am not making this up.) It was in an anthology, possibly one with a pink and yellow cover, and I read it around 2000.
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If anyone can identify either of these, I would be extremely grateful.
(2) sounds thematically like Philip Jose Farmer, who occasionally did sex-oriented whimsy…but I’m far from sure. He once did one about an explorer trapped in a plant (vegetable sort) that kept reproducing everytime he kicked it trying to get out.
I remember the Wizard of Glass, but am not sure that was its title– I even had bought a copy of it, but gave it away. I think the writer was a contemporary of Michael Swanwick. The protagonist was trying to create a glass eye to protect against a particular monster that stalked the farmsteads near her village.
I have several books of that type. I 5th grade, my school librarian handed me a fantasy novel I devoured, but could never find again. All I remember is that it had one of those burnt orange library bindings, and the title began with a ‘G’. There was a scene where exposure to sunlight turned the evil witch queen into dust that blew away.
Another series I discovered in Australia, while spending a summer going around the country. It was about truckers who transported goods on interdimensional roads. The opening scene for the middle of the trilogy is of one of these truckers getting a flat, and having to put in for repairs at a way station, essentially a log fort.
I’m wondering if that isn’t Star Truckers or Space Truckers…It came out in the 1980’s or 90’s, possibly from Ace, and I can almost remember the writer’s name. Oddly enough, I recommended Don Wollheim buy it—I’d turned it up as a random submission in DAW’s slush pile, which I was reading because I was a guest at the company, and just poking around. Don didn’t find a place for it, though—not every publishable book gets bought every time; and then it came out from Ace, I think, the next year or so. There was a movie in the 90’s which may or may not have been made from the book.
That trucker series sounds like The Skyway Trilogy by John DeChancie. Starrigger, Red Limit Freeway and Paradox Alley.
De Chancie was the writer I was trying to remember. However Starrigger was done by Jeffrey Carver, who also has a line of e-books. It’s quite possible too, that de Chancie changed the name of his book after I read it in manuscript at DAW. I used to clear out the slush pile at DAW on my visits, just go through looking for pearls and ideeing the definitely-nots [“I saw this UFO on my fishing trip”] to clear some shelf space. It’s the only book I ever took to Don [Wollheim] with a ‘you should buy this’. He declined it [sometimes publishers have too many of a certain kind of book on hand]—and it immediately sold at Ace. So I felt my judgment of the book was decent. 😉
Yep, I believe that is a different Starrigger. Definitely the edition I have the first book of this trilogy is referred to as Starrigger (I don’t have the first book, a friend of mine once found a copy in a secondhand store, and kept it for himself – he did let me read it.)
I think I have the Carver Starrigger too, but my book collection unsorted itself while I wasn’t looking.
For years LeGuin’s The Author of the Acacia Seeds was on my list of wonderful-but-impossible-to-find stories. I don’t know where it was originally published, but I found it in a 1975 Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, a paperback, which was not a very easy to find source. But eventually it got anthologized in the author’s own Compass Rose, which made it a little more accessible. WONBERFUL story!
The first Sci-fi book I vaguely remember reading was from my 4th grade classroom’s bookshelf and in 5th grade I went back and couldn’t find it. As I emotionally/imagistically remember it, it was about a boy who climbed into a space ship/rocket maybe with a chimp and they went somewhere, presumably to another planet where the boy is put in a zoo like he were a chimp and fed banana pellets. Shades of Planet of the Apes, but I swear I a) never read it and b) hardly knew the movie plot for years. I suspect, however, that I have conflated two or more books.
By the way, that same year I read a paperback by Anne Terry White, The First Men in the World, about human evolution. Right then and there I decided to become an anthropologist. And I am. In fact, I just returned from teaching my regular Intro to Cultural Anthro evening class a few minutes ago. The book absolutely drew me in. About 8 years ago, I found it in my local library’s kids room, still on the shelf. It was written in 1953. None of its anthro theories or hominid classifications are accurate any more. I was both appalled as I re-read it and as deeply caught up in the draw of its words. Superb writing and none of it valid any more as concepts. But the book made me who I am now.
I don’t see how you manage to keep books in the basement.
I started retaining SF in college, so everything was paperback.
Even if the cover didn’t stick to the next title, all the pages turned to a brittle, yellow unreadable sheet.
Oh, that’s too bad. Our basement is half finished living space, and very dry, despite the fact I run the sump from my marine tank down there, evaporating a gallon a day. It’s sunk in glacial till that caps quite a lot of flood basalt (a mile thick in some places) and water just doesn’t stay in that soil…which is why we pulled our lawn in favor of xeriscaping in front. I also run a dehumidifier down there, because of the books, and get that gallon back. But as far as damp walls, that, I don’t have, thank goodness. I had a friend in OKC, which does have underground water quite close to the surface, and they had to run a sump pump constantly just to keep the basement unflooded. So I’m very grateful this one isn’t damp.
My very first SF book, I won’t count all the Jules Vernes I read as a kid, was a French one that my brother had on his shelf. It must have been required reading for a class, because my brother does not buy books! The title was something like Solis and it was about radioactive waste that humans were getting rid off by sending it to space and some of it had made it to the sun and triggered a chain reaction: the sun was dying, the human race had a few months to find a way to survive. I think that one of the themes was space pollution, because that’s what it made me aware of. I wonder if my brother still has that book, I haven’t thought about it in a long time! Might have been written in the late 70’s or the 80’s. That’s one of the few French SF authors I’ve ever read, so it’s memorable just for that!
Mmm. I immediately thought of Solaris [Stanislaw Lem] but different plot: in that case a sentient planet.
I read the creepiest sci-fi short story in eighth grade, about a girl named “Precious” and a boy (name forgotten) both of whom had some sort of mind-powers and terrified the crap out of their respective parents. The boy came over one day to visit Precious and discovered she was afraid of bugs. He wandered off, and a few minutes later, a giant bug ran up to Precious. She screamed and stamped it to a pulp. The boy did not turn up again, but the parents found something very nasty on the soles of Precious’s shoes that evening…
I can’t remember the author, nor in what book it was published (it had a white cover and green title text, I believe), but I can’t forget it!
Also, I wish that Pat O’Shea had been able to finish the sequel to The Hounds of the Mórrigan… but, alas, it was not to be.