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"Okay, here goes. Barbie's idea. It's like, that people.... Well, that everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds.... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.
"Isn't that a weird thought?"
— Neil Gaiman, Sandman: A Game of You
I read avidly, mostly science fiction and fantasy, but also general fiction, non-fiction (mostly science and computing), role-playing game rules, graphic novels, and the occasional classic, poetry, or magazine. I review every novel that I read, and those reviews you can find on my review page. Here are various other pages about books that I've found interesting.
For purchasing books, I strongly recommend Powell's Books, as mentioned on my page about on-line stores. There are also links to some other pages I found good resources for my book reviews listed on my review notes page.
This was an on-line zine about science fiction and fantasy literature, primarily featuring book reviews. It has unfortunately ceased publication, but the old issues and reviews are still available and worth reading. The reviews here are conventional magazine reviews, without numeric ratings and frequently long. I don't entirely agree with Cheryl Morgan's taste, but she does a good job of giving the reader a feel for what the book is like.
A one-man institution in the Hugo awards for best fan writer, David Langford is one of the most entertaining writers about science fiction and fantasy anywhere, and quite a bit of his writing is available off his web site for free. I particularly like his reviews, which often feature wonderful turns of phrase. See particularly the "Nonfiction Sampler" and "Reviews Index" links off his home page.
The reviews of Thomas M. Wagner, whose taste differs from mine somewhat but is close enough that I've gotten good recommendations from his site. He reviews many less widely-known books, the sort that turn up in used bookstores but aren't purchased by anyone since the author is relatively unknown. Good reviews with ratings and more than enough to get a good feel for his taste and adjust the reviews accordingly.
Susan Stepney, a professor of computer science at the University of York in the UK, has numerous reviews of fiction and non-fiction on her web pages. The SF and non-fiction (mostly physics, non-standard models of computation, and complex adaptive systems) reviews are particularly extensive, and I've taken away many reading recommendations from her.
LOCUS is one of the best-known and longest-lived magazines about science fiction and fantasy, and they maintain a very comprehensive index of SF-relevant awards and all of the past winners. I've been going through award-winning books as a way to find good novels and to catch up on SF classics, and this site has proven very useful to me.
An incredible index to works of fiction available on-line. Due to the untiring work of groups like the Gutenberg Project, a vast amount of classic literature has been made available on the Net for free to anyone. I hate reading fiction on a computer, or I would take advantage of this more than I do, but one can always download and print out works that look interesting.
Looking around my shelves, my fiction collection is dominated by Tor (and Bantam Spectra). They are frequently voted the best publisher of fantasy and science fiction and praised by writers. The web site is fairly sparse, just sample chapters and publishing schedules, but they do also have links to web pages for the authors they publish.
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