Assigment 1: Recommend a title to two colleagues based on a title or titles that they have enjoyed using the comments field on Goodreads. Be sure to include appeal characteristics in your recommendation and note why it is similiar to the title or titles they enjoyed.
To my friend Katie. "Based on your interest in fantasy and young adult books I want to recommend Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners" to you. We talked before about Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy (and how much you enjoyed "Harry Potter with fuck words!") and I think Link has a lot in common with Grossman in that she's willing to take fantasy tropes to a mature and dark place. That said it's also a lot of fun! In one story a girl loses her boyfriend to a Narnia-like kingdom that exists inside a purse. A young man works at a 24-hour convenience store that serves actual zombies. It's great and reminds me of you and now that I think about it I'm kind of ashamed that I haven't loaned/bought you a copy already. Anyway, another book you might like is "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell" by Susanna Clarke. This is probably the next best thing to another Harry Potter book. Susanna is less snarky about fantasy than Grossman and loves inventing specific details about the rules and history of magic in her world, (If you flip through it you'll notice lengthy footnotes and annotations covering the pages) similar to J.K. Rowling in her books. If you haven't read it already you should!"
To my friend Aaron. "Based on your interest in humor and sci-fi/fantasy I want to recommend Simon Rich's "The Last Girlfriend on Earth." Rich takes the three stages of a relationship (boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl) and adds ghosts, time-travelers, and cavemen, among other things. His stories are short, funny and fast paced (many of them appeared in the New Yorker and he also used to write for SNL.) If you like that you might also enjoy books by George Saunders or Sam Lipsyte, who also write humorous/fantastical stories but of a more literary bent."
No comments:
Post a Comment