[Here are this month’s great recommendations from staff member Christopher Jennings Penders. Click on a title to place a hold. You can find previous Chris Picks through the “What to read” link at the bottom of this page or type “Chris Picks” into the search bar on our homepage.]
Gary Braver
Gary Braver and I have been friends for several years now. He even wrote a glowing review of my book Arrivals and Departures.
I have read many of Gary’s books:
Elixir
Flashback
Skin Deep
Tunnel Vision
And his latest:
Rumor of Evil
Each one is a page-turner. For personal reasons, I resonate mostly with Tunnel Vision because it deals with a topic I intimately believe in.
Ben Mezrich
I discovered Mr. Mezrich upon reading Bringing Down the House about the college students who beat the odds at casinos. Another non-fiction book of his that I enjoyed was The 37th Parallel.
Jack Finney
Time travel fiction is another one of my favorite sub-genres. It can be wildly entertaining and obsessively read. Time and Again and From Time to Time are two of Finney’s books about time travel that are not to be missed!
Ben Bova
Ben Bova is one of my favorite “hard” science fiction writers. By hard science, I mean that he writes science-fact-based fiction. Bova has written books about every planet in our solar system. If pressed against a wall, I’d have to say that Mars is my favorite planet book. Everything he writes is worth reading, however.
Charles DeLint
I recall being introduced to Charles DeLint in the late 1980s and early 1990s through Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. DeLint always appeared in these year-end books.
DeLint writes about a fictional town in Canada called Newford. I’ve read several of his Newford books and each one is better than the last. DeLint has populated his town with a set of characters and in each book, a different set of characters takes precedence, yet all the townspeople show up in every book. The Newford titles (in chronological order) are:
The Dreaming Place
From a Whisper to a Scream
Dreams Underfoot
I’ll Be Watching You
Memory and Dream
The Ivory and the Horn
Trader
Someplace to Be Flying
Moonlight and Vines
The Newford Stories
Forests of the Heart
The Onion Girl
Seven Wild Sisters
Tapping the Dream Tree
Spirits in the Wires
A Circle of Cats
Medicine Road
The Blue Girl
The Hour Before Dawn
Widdershins
Promises to Keep
Old Man Crow
Dingo
Muse and Reverie
Juniper Wiles
Juniper Wiles and the Ghost Girls
I haven’t read the whole series, but those I have read have kept me in rapt attention and I highly recommend them. Mr. DeLint also writes stand-alone books and I’ve read several of those as well.