Recommended Reading

Contemporary poetry collections

  • Robert Bringhurst--The Beauty of the Weapons (earthy and intellectual both, and an evocative voice)
  • Jorie Graham--Errancy (sometimes far too abstract but can capture intellectual passion like no one else. No, she's not a relation)
  • W.S. Graham--Collected Poems (a master of addressing the the issue of communication. He's not a relation, either)
  • Linda Gregg--Too Bright To See, Chosen by the Lion (emotional intensity and clarity of phrasing & vision)
  • Robin Skelton--Timelight (intense and beautiful evocations of time & place)
  • Some other recommended poets (not an exhaustive list, ask me some other time for that): Ai (esp. Sin), John Barton (esp. Great Men), Wendell Berry (Collected), Frank Bidart (esp. Desire), Roo Borson (esp. A Sad Device), Marilyn Bowering (esp. Autobiography), Olga Broumas (esp. Beginning with O), Anne Carson (esp. Glass, Irony and God), Carolyn Forche (esp. The Country Between Us), Louise Gluck (esp. The House on Marshland), Beth Goobie (Scars of Light), Joy Harjo (esp. She Had Some Horses), Richard Hugo (esp. The Right Madness on Skye), Brigit Pegeen Kelly (esp. Song), Erin Mour? (esp. Furious), Harold Rhenisch (esp. Dancing With My Daughter), Gail Tremblay (Indian Singing in 20th Century America), Bronwen Wallace (esp. The Stubborn Particulars of Grace), Jan Zwicky (esp. Songs for Relinquishing the Earth)

Highly recommended novels

  • Keri Hulme--The Bone People (brilliant evocation of entangled lives)
  • Frederick Buechner--Godric (the life of a reluctant medieval saint in his own words)
  • David Malouf--An Imaginary Life (a beautifully written imagining of Ovid's exile to the Black Sea, where he meets a wild child)
  • Eva Figes--The Seven Ages (a midwife from the Dark Ages to the modern era)
  • John Crowley--The Translator (a young American poet meets a Russian ?migr? poet)

Favourite fantasy/SF novels

  • Peter Beagle--The Innkeeper's Song (powerful story)
  • Jonathan Carroll--Sleeping in Flames, Bones of the Moon (both of these shook me up)
  • Angela Carter--Heroes and Villains (my favourite of her many devilishy dark & amusing novels)
  • John Crowley--Little, Big (or nearly any other of his beautifully written novels)
  • Charles de Lint--Memory & Dream, The Onion Girl, Forests of the Heart (de Lint's mature work is delightful--magic realism at its best)
  • Candace Jane Dorsey--Black Wine (evocative tale of three generations of women)
  • Alan Garner--Red Shift (dynamite slim YA novel that is hard to figure out the first time through but that shakes me to my toes)
  • Elizabeth Hand--Mortal Love (what happens to those who meet a woman out of myth?)
  • Robert Holdstock--Mythago Wood, Lavondyss, Celtika (the deep dark stench of the primitive psyche)
  • Guy Gavriel Kay--The Fionavar Tapestry (yes, one of the dreaded trilogies! Lots of people dislike the Tolkein similarities. I love how Kay pushes all of the myths to the edge of metaphor, and involves real people in real human/mythos development), also The Sarantine Mosaic which consists of Sailing to Sarantium, and Lord of Emperors and any other books of his
  • Ellen Kushner--Thomas the Rhymer (a powerful retelling of the ballad)
  • Jonathan Lethem--Girl in Landscape (eerie, shadowy, fascinating)
  • Meredith Ann Pierce--The Darkangel Trilogy (oh no, another trilogy and this one has vampires! Beautifully written, sparse & evocative)
  • Kim Stanley Robinson--Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, Antarctica (powerful, future visions on the political scientific & personal levels)
  • Geoff Ryman--Air (a village woman in Central Asia meets a world-wide wireless Internet)
  • Jack Womack--Random Acts of Senseless Violence (dark, alarming, human)
  • Jane Yolen--Briar Rose (only Jane Yolen could pull off this combination of the Sleeping Beauty story with a tale of the Holocaust. Stunning)
  • Emma Bull--Finder, War For the Oaks (punk elves!)
  • Greg Bear--Songs of Earth & Power (dark & complex)
  • Marion Campbell--The Dark Twin (prehistory comes alive & human)
  • Lisa Goldstein--Tourists (the tale of a strange city)
  • Parke Godwin--The Last Rainbow (St. Patrick meets the pagans)
  • Richard Grant--Rumors of Spring (the abused environment strikes back)
  • Patricia A. McKillip--Ombria in Shadow, Winter Rose, Song for the Basilisk (medieval, powerful tales of magic, beautifully written)
  • Patrick O'Leary--Door Number Three, The Gift (intelligent, evocative SF and fantasy, respectively)
  • Phillip Pullman--The Northern Lights series: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, (intriguing story that keeps changing shape and ultimately becomes a response to Milton's Paradise Lost)
  • Thomas Burnett Swann--The Forest of Forever (very '70s but it's stuck with me since I first read it then. Dryads and minotaurs and centaurs oh my!)
  • Sherri S. Tepper--The Gate to Women's Country (yeah, she's got an axe to grind--so what?), also The True Game series (delightful!)
  • Paul Witcover--Waking Beauty (dark, and perhaps a little too chaotic, but well worth reading)

Other recommended mainstream fiction

  • Pat Barker--Regeneration / The Eye at the Door / The Ghost Road (psychiatrists and poets and WWI--stunning)
  • Robertson Davies--The Deptford Trilogy (dark and clever)
  • Bernard Epps--Pilgarlic the Death (rural, almost Faulknerian)
  • Eva Figes--Light (beautiful tale of Monet)
  • Timothy Findley--Not Wanted on the Voyage, Headhunter (Not Wanted is a retelling of Noah & the Arc, Headhunter is what happens when Kurz and Marlowe step off the page into future Toronto)
  • Kaye Gibbons--Ellen Foster (a young foster child tells her story. Simple, gutsy)
  • Janet Turner Hospital--The Last Magician (not sure she quite got this right, but a fascinating underworld tale)
  • Zora Neale Hurston--Their Eyes Were Watching God (beautifully told in black dialect, Hurston was an anthropologist writing about her own people--wonderfully done)
  • Barbara Kingsolver--Animal Dreams (my favourite of Kingsolver's novels)
  • Doris Lessing--The Four-Gated City, Memoirs of a Survivor (the futuristic weirdest stuff)
  • Toni Morrison--Beloved (dark, beautiful)
  • Salman Rushdie--Midnight's Children (Tristam Shandy set in India at Independence--complex and strange)
  • Geoff Ryman--Was (brilliant!)
  • Sheila Watson--The Double Hook (a fable of glory, fear and coyote in a rural village)
  • Jeanette Winterson--Written on the Body, The Passion (dark, weird, messy, obsessive)
  • Tim Winton--Cloudstreet (a novel that sneaks up on you)

Recommended children's lit

  • David Almond--Skellig, Kit's Wilderness, Heaven Eyes (unique voice and vision--a little dark)
  • Laurie Halse Anderson--Fever 1793 (realistic historical novel)
  • Franny Billingsley--The Folk Keeper (magical)
  • Joy Chant--Red Moon and Black Mountain (regular kids arrive in a terrifying and beautiful world)
  • Susan Cooper--The Dark is Rising series (great use of myth, wonderfully conceived & written)
  • Diane Duane--series of Wizard books (great fun)
  • Monica Furlong--Wise Child, Juniper (great hedge-wife stuff)
  • Neil Gaiman--Coraline (weird and wonderful)
  • Alan Garner--The Moon of Gomrath, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service (brilliant children's author. Scary, wonderful. Owl Service is a retelling of a myth from the Mabignogian. Mythologically complex.)
  • Diana Wynne Jones--Fire and Hemlock, The Time of the Ghost, The Homeward Bounders, The Power of Three, pretty much anything by her (wonderfully inventive worlds and magic, human characters)
  • Annette Curtis Klause--Blood and Chocolate (very realistic-feeling tale of young werewolves)
  • Ursula Le Guin--The Earthsea series (I still love these, and the new ones)
  • William Mayne--Earthfasts, Cloudfasts, Cradlefasts, It, A Game of Dark (dark, dark, dark)
  • Robin McKinley--The Door in the Hedge, Beauty, The Blue Sword, The Hero and the Crown, Deerskin (magic!)
  • O.R. Melling--The Druid's Tune, The Singing Stone, The Hunter's Moon, The Summer King, The Light-Bearer's Daughter (Irish-Canadian author. Regular kids wind up in Celtic Ireland in the first two, in the rest teenagers get caught up with the Sidhe)
  • Garth Nix--Sabriel, Lirael (travels beyond the wall into death--utterly magical)
  • Pat O'Shea--Hounds of the Morrigan (children tangle with mythological figures)
  • Elizabeth Marie Pope--The Perilous Gard (set in Renaissance England, the Sidhe again)
  • Susan Price--The Sterkarm Handshake (time travel to the time of the English/Scottish border raids--dark and adult)
  • Sherwood Smith--Crown Duel, Court Duel (great characters fighting for the good of their country--they think)
  • Jane Yolen--The Magic Three of Solatia (delightful fantasy)