Many readers tend toward the compulsive for some reason: we keep lists of the books we've read, the books we'd like to read, the books we've recently acquired, the books we're looking for when we visit used bookstores. My Amazon wishlist is presently 44 pages long, and I have a paper wishlist that contains mostly different wishes that's another 37 pages. I have an online catalog of every mystery I own, and have made progress in cataloging the rest of the unruly shelves as well.

But one can never have too many lists. I've recently come across several lists that I find particularly drool-worthy regarding fantasy, slipstream, New Weird and institial fiction that I thought you might enjoy as well. Thanks to those who originally created the lists, who are credited below:

Jeff VanderMeer's Big-Ass Fantasy List

A Working Canon of Slipstream Literature, created by the Slipstream Panel at the 2007 Readercon (panelists included Paul DiFilippo, John Kessel, Cat Valente, Dora Goss, Brett Cox, Ron Drummond, Victoria McManus, Graham Sleight. Convention organizer Eric Van participated in preparing the list as well.

Bruce Sterling and Lawrence Person's slipstream list

List from OF Blog of the Fallen regarding books fantasy and SF readers perhaps should be discussing more often

There is that in me that wants to toss these all together and come up with one grand and glorious list -- perhaps combining it with Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, the Random House list of the best books of the 20th century, and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and come up with some sort of definitive list of books I'm going to read in this lifetime -- assuming I live to be 250 years old.

A request to readers: does anyone know of a list of mysteries or of straight science fiction to match the lists of fantasy and slipstream lists above? I'd be particularly interested in lists that include more contemporary works, i.e., works written in the last 30 years.

Ilario: The Lion's Eye: A Story of the First History, Book One
Mary Gentle
Eos, 2006
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 0-06-082183-3
320 pages; $14.95

Ilario: The Stone Golem: A Story of the First History, Book Two
Mary Gentle
Eos, 2006
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 0-06-134498-2
368 pages; $14.95

For pure storytelling, don’t-want-to-stop-reading-it fun, these two books were among the best I’ve read this year. I lived in Mary Gentle’s world even when I wasn’t actively reading the books. I dreamt of her Mediterranean Renaissance. I fretted about Ilario. I couldn’t wait to get back to the books when I’d set them down. Gentle’s worldbuilding is extraordinary, her characters are complete individuals, and her plot compelling. This is fantasy with a heart and a mind. I’m thoroughly perplexed as to why the books have not received a great deal more attention among fantasy readers, and strongly encourage those interested in intelligent, intriguing fantasy to give them a try.

Ilario is a hermaphrodite in every possible sense of the word. He (I shall refer to him as “he” for the sake of convenience only; I could just as easily use “she”) not only has the sexual organs of both a man and a woman, but also has sexual desire for both men and women. He has no sense that he is primarily one sex or the other, no feeling that his “ka” or “soul” is one gender or the other: he is both.

That, standing alone, is a strong premise for a book, but Mary Gentle isn’t content with merely exploring one man/woman’s sexual identity. She sets her book in a world that never was, at a time that appears to approximate our Renaissance. Carthage was never conquered, and remains a powerful city-state. But it is a city forever shrouded in darkness, called the Penitence, and no one knows why. Under darkness, it cannot grow crops, and therefore has ambitions of conquest. Rome has been a backwater ever since Gundobad’s curse left Peter’s Chair (that is, the office of Pope) vacant. Taraconensis is another great power, from which Ilario hails. Turkey, too, is powerful, but it owes its position in the world to New Alexandria – formerly known as Constantinople – the center of Egypt in exile The Alexandrian Library is the most reknowned collection of writings of all sorts in the world, many, if not most, one of a kind. Politically and militarily, however, Alexandria is barely holding on.

When the first book opens, Ilario is fleeing Taraconensis, where his birth mother, Rosamunda, has just tried to kill him. He has been freed by King Rodrigo from his position as King’s Freak, a slave mocked for his sexual identity. Rosamunda’s second attempt on his life is no more successful than her first, but it wounds him more – psychically, for he loves her, though not physically. But she is married to Videric, the king’s First Minister, and he has ordered her to kill her only child. And she has her own reasons for obeying.

Ilario is an artist, and he chooses Carthage in order to paint under the Penitence, trying to get the colors of eternal darkness correctly. He seeks to apprentice himself to an artist who can teach him the New Art, an art that we, and Ilario, learn is based upon the study of perspective and proportion. He meets with misfortune almost immediately in Carthage, however, and the misfortune never lets up: he is bilked as a newcomer and made a slave again to an Egyptian, Rekhmire’. Worse yet, Rosamunda follows him and again attempts to kill him. There is more at work politically here than he knows, and more to come when Rekhmire’ denounces his mother to the powers that be in Carthage, causing an international incident.

All of this happens within the first one hundred pages or so of the first book, and I haven’t even mentioned Ilario’s night of passion with Marcomir, his discovery of his true father or Rekhmire’’s status as a eunuch. The books take Ilario and Rekhmire to Rome, Venice, New Alexandria, and elsewhere about the Mediterranean, introducing all manner of what we know as artifacts of the Renaissance. Political intrigue is abundant, as Videric continues his quest to end Ilario’s life. Ilario’s own body betrays him, or blesses him, or both, as the reader struggles to bend his or her mind around the notion of a human who is both male and female. There is much to consider here about the nature of love as well as of sex, and the relationship of love to the configuration of one’s genitals.

Gentle’s writing is largely transparent, with rare moments of a keen turn of phrase. It is this transparency that allows the reader to become so thoroughly lost in these books that all else disappears so that you can smell the cheese in the artist’s glue, hear the thunder of the sea and feel the heat of the midday sun in New Alexandria. Tension builds as the politics grow more complicated, the assassins more numerous and the stakes higher.

Occasionally it is apparent that Gentle would have benefited from an editor, as when, for instance, she draws the same word picture several times within pages. In addition, the short epilogue should have been cut altogether; it adds nothing we need to know to the story.

And there is no reason whatsoever why this story should have been two books instead of one. The first book’s cliffhanger is an insult to readers, because it is not a true cliffhanger; its resolution is apparent by the fact that there is a second book at all. This is plainly a single book cut in two for profit’s sake, a fault to be laid squarely at the feet of the publisher. This recent regrettable trend is extremely annoying and makes books so expensive as to take them out of the reach of many. I would gladly have paid $35 for a single hardcover volume of nearly 700 pages rather than $30 for two trade paperbacks; the former would have been a fine addition to my permanent library. As it is, much as I loved these books, they are merely fine additions to my local public library.

I understand that Ilario’s story is a sort of prequel to Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History. I look forward to seeking out that quartet or duology of books (depending on the publisher) and reading them soon. If these two books are any indication of what I can expect from this world of Gentle’s, then I have many fine hours of reading ahead of me.

The Grass-Cutting Sword
Catherynne M. Valente
Prime Books, 2006
Trade paper, first Canadian edition
ISBN 0-8095-5677-4
128 pages; $12.95

This slim volume is identified on its cover as a “novel,” but don’t be fooled. It’s a prose poem. It is a metaphor, comprised almost entirely of exquisite imagery, and every single word has obviously been chosen with a poet’s eye for sound and sight. It is a creation myth and a Grendel for the nuclear age, a story of beginnings and endings, of beauty and hideousness. The images Valente chooses will haunt your nightmares and inform your dreams. Close your eyes, for instance, and envision the monster of the tale from this excerpt of its self-description:

I am Eight. We are Eight. Lying on my side, if you prefer the symbolism. Eight heads, eight tails, eight snakes susurring against each other like auto-asphyxiating lovers, joined at the torso – circus grotesque, unseparated octuplets in a jar of formaldehyde, jumbled trunk a snaggletoothed muscle with the brawn of a circus strongman, and all the bells ringing, ringing in the gloam. Eight-all-together rattle eight diamond heads, heavy and flat, a clutch of serpent- castanets, and oh, the music I-and-we make, music for the maidens, music for the midden we made of our caves, music for the bones, the old rolled bones, rooster bones and buffalo bones and fox bones and tigress bones, bones like bellows and bones like cudgels, bones like whistles and bones like pillows.

Not a creature you’d like to come across on a dark night. Not even a creature you’d like to confront on the brightest day, armed to the teeth.

The Grass-Cutting Sword is a retelling of the Japanese creation myth, beginning with Izanami and Izanagi coming from nothing and procreating to produce the earth and all of its lands. While creation is a violent act, it proceeds apace until Izanami gives birth to fire and burned to cinders, ultimately transformed into the underearth itself. Izanami, not content with creation as it stands, follows after his sister/wife, and she nearly suffocates him with dirt, fungi, the detritus of the earth-beneath-the-earth. Izanami survives, and gives birth to three children when he cleans the dirt, flesh and blood from himself upon returning to the world: Ama-Terasu, the sun, Tsuki-Yomi, the moon, and Susanoo-no-Mikoto, the god of the sea and storms. While the sun and the moon come from Izanami’s eyes, Susanoo is hawked from his father’s nose, like snot, and he feels this insult deeply.

Susanoo is expelled from the heavenly realm and comes to earth in the form of a human after a quarrel with the sun. He alone of his mother’s children grieves for her, and he resolves to find her. When he arrives on earth, however, and is first adjusting to his human body, a mourning couple recognizes him and asks him to rescue their eighth daughter, Kushinada, “whose hair was dark as ink pooled in the belly of a crow, whose skin was pale as new-sewn silk!” She has been stolen by a beast with eight heads – a beast that has already swallowed their other seven daughters. The couple promises Kushinada to Susanoo as his wife if he can effect her rescue.

And so the tale is set in motion. The narrative is told in two parts: Susanoo’s tale of his history and his quest, and the tale of the sisters and the serpent. It seems that while the serpent swallows the sisters, it does more than digest them; it incorporates them, and it grows to be them. One is hard-pressed to wholly hate this monster, just as one may well find it difficult to feel much admiration for Susanoo as a hero, for the actions and emotions and thoughts of all are complex. The rescue of a fair maiden from the clutches of a monster is not as it seems. And soon we find we have traveled from the beginning of time to the ending of the first age of humanity; we have arrived at Hiroshima.

I did not expect this book to be what it is. I began to read it as if it were a story, like any I might expect to find in a standard anthology, a straightforward narrative. I quickly found that I could not read it that way. This book requires and rewards a concentrated, thoughtful reading, one that revels in every word, one that sees the colors and hears the sounds. Do not stint yourself on time when you read this beautiful book. Luxuriate in it. Wallow in it. Let yourself be lost in its glories. It is exquisite.