Reading Profile

I love wildly creative books. Whether the creativity comes in the form of writing style, structure, or scope of the story, I love books that can bring me a new and different experience. My favorite genre is science fiction, which I love for the creative ideas about the future of human society that authors imagine. I also like some fantasy, poetry, literary fiction, and occasionally historical fiction, but I'm open to just about anything as long as it's beautifully written or explores big ideas. My biggest reading weakness is my preference for fiction over nonfiction - it takes a really good nonfiction book to pull me away from novels.

To give you a sense of what I like best, here are some books that I haven't been able to get out of my head ever since I read them:

• The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar - a lush, poetic book written with an abundant love of language. The book plays with the idea of stories and legends and how they shape our lives, and even though it lacks the overt magic of most fantasy novels, the beautiful language gives the story a sense of mystery that is never fully explained. This book is everything I've ever wanted fantasy to be!
• The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin - a science fiction novel exploring a utopian society in which the concept of ownership doesn't exist. It examines how our need to possess things affects every aspect of our lives, including our relationships with others.
• Abarat by Clive Barker - this book has little concern for plot, and focuses instead on exploring a colorfully imagined archipelago that consists of twenty-four islands, on each of which it is perpetually one hour of the day/night. The book is illustrated by the author, and the brilliant oil paintings throughout bring the world to life - without them the book wouldn't be half as good. (This book is where the background image for this blog comes from!)
• Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake - an odd story of a winding, crumbling castle that seems to go on forever and its idiosyncratic inhabitants who thoughtlessly follow ancient customs and rituals, the meanings of which have long been forgotten. This is another book that is amazing entirely because of the beautiful language it's written in.