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Olivia Laingâs Reading Piles Are Far From Organized
Credit.Jillian Tamaki
April 29, 2021
âThere are something like 15,000 books in our house,â says the author of âEverybodyâ and other books, âincluding pretty much every poetry pamphlet published in the 20th century. Itâs a problem.â
What books are on your night stand?
Seed catalogs, and a book that says on the cover âBear I love you, bite my head offâ (on closer inspection itâs called âBear,â by Marian Engel).
Whatâs the last great book you read?
âIn the Cut,â by Susanna Moore. Vicious, idiosyncratic, stylish, erotic, frightening. Itâs a noirish feminist thriller about a woman who witnesses a murder. Up there with the great New York novels.
Screenshot: Lucasfilm
When I was nine, on a weekly trip to the local Toys R Us, I glimpsed my hero in miniature: Leia Organa, in her Boushh disguise, hanging on the racks alongside the other Star Wars action figures. I hemmed and hawed over whether to ask my parents to buy her before deciding that it didn’t make sense because I already had Leia that is, the classic Princess Leia action figure, complete with real fabric for her signature white dress. But by the time we were back at Toys R Us the next week, and I had decided I would add this figure to my collection, Boushh had disappeared. Someone else had taken them home. I was bereft; in the early-Internet era of 1998, I couldn’t easily order it online even eBay was relatively new back then. It would be a decade or more before I would come across another Boushh figure; at the time, I was more and more convinced that I had dreamt that such a toy even existed.
Last year, I was so inspired by the various Best Of, Must Read, Smashing Science Fiction and Fantasy lists I encountered around the net that I decided to make my own book list, books chosen entirely on the basis of merit and significance to the field . People enjoyed the first list so much that I perpetrated sequels. I posted a number of lists, each twenty books long, each selected entirely on the basis of merit and significance to the field (ahem). Here, at last, the quintessence of Nicoll lists, comprising the books I would most heartily recommend. Each entry is annotated with a short description that I hope will explain why I picked it.
As a writer, I spend a lot of time worrying about people who don’t exist. Like all those bright-eyed young heroes traipsing off to their first adventure. Sure, they look strong and noble at the start of their story, but what happens to them after they win the battle, defeat the great evil, and save the world? Do they all ride off into the sunset or board a ship to the Undying Lands? Are they okay?
I wrote my new novel,
The Bone Maker, because I couldn’t stop wondering about what would happen to those once-brave-and-strong heroes if they were called to save the world again. In