Reading Recommendations?

[drcpunk]

Anyone want to recommend books for me to read once I'm done with ranking my finalists for Mythopoeic? Here are the rules.

1. Limit of one recommendation per person.

2. No modern fantasy (which I'm defining, for these purposes only, as anything from the 20th century or later). Fantasy is what I don't screen out. Hard sf, mystery, general fiction, and non-fiction are all fine.

3. I'm not promising to read it all. Just so you know.

Comments

[kyrielle]

Amy Thomson's The Color of Distance if you haven't read it? Science fiction / first contact story. Arguably not hard sf, but not really science fantasy either. Best portrayal of first contact I have ever read. (The sequel is decent; it suffers by comparison to this, though, because this is jaw-dropping.)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I agree on _The Color of Distance_.

You might like _Color: a Natural History of the Palette_ by Victoria Finday--I've only read the first chapter (on ochre) so far, but it's your standard modern non-fiction, lively and full of cool facts.