Day 13: Describe one underappreciated book EVERYONE should read.
This is a difficult one. Everyone? I am well aware how different everyone's reading tastes are, so instead I will offer two.
Tell The Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt quietly slipped into the bookshops and libraries earlier this year with the minimum of fuss, but really deserves to have been noticed. It's a quiet sort of story about a teenage girl coming to terms with the death of her beloved uncle. It is a thoughtful, very honest story about family, loneliness, art, unrequited love and growing up, with a family portrait as the centrepiece.
Redshirts by John Scalzi is a must-read for Star Trek fans, or indeed anyone familiar with the trope of the expendable extra whose only function in a story is to die horribly in order to give a sense of peril to the plot. This is their story. The tagline on the front cover reads: "They were expendable... until they started comparing notes."
Warning: this book causes idiotic giggling. Read in public at your own peril! Redshirts is a wonderful parody, "recursive and meta" and completely annihilates the Fourth Wall. I'm not sure if it's objectively good, or whether I enjoyed it because I stumbled upon it at the same time I found myself inadvertantly and bewilderedly falling in love with Star Trek, but it is very clever and the most fun I've had from a book in a long time.
Thank you for sharing not one book but two. Out of these it is Tell The Wolves I'm Home that appeals to me.
ReplyDeleteIt's a really beautiful book. Oddly, just after I named it as an underappreciated book, lots of fellow bloggers started talking about it, so hopefully it'll get the attention it deserves.
DeleteHahah I'm going to put Redshirts on my wishlist. I love the red shirted characters and wondering when they'll die.
ReplyDeleteIt is so much fun! This book's all about what happens when the redshirts start getting suspicious. So funny. I embarrassed myself giggling while reading it on the bus.
DeleteI bought Redshirts yesterday SPECIFICALLY because of this post. As soon as I saw it I thought, "AHA, this is the book Katie said was hilarious!" and INTO the basket it went. I think I might take it on holiday next week! Congratulations... :P
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