And some I’m not throwing out

As I was (in the pre­vi­ous post) toss­ing many of my sci-fi and fan­tasy books, I came across sev­eral that I wasn’t throw­ing out, and prob­a­bly won’t ever throw out. In the inter­est of a lit­tle ying in my yang, here’s some of what’s not in the heap:

• Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Ris­ing series, which gave me weird psy­che­delic night­mares when I was a kid, and which I have always intended to read again as an adult.
• Eliz­a­beth Moon’s The Deed of Pak­se­nar­rion. It is, far and away, the best story of how a Pal­adin becomes one. The end is a lit­tle bit­ter­sweet, the pre­quel is just dis­ap­point­ing, but this is fine fantasy.
• Tad Williams’ Mem­ory, Sor­row, and Thorn series. Still one of the best out there. Writes cir­cles around Robert Jordan.
• Brian Daley’s Star Wars: The Han Solo Adven­tures is still good, rol­lick­ing, swash­buck­ling, Star Wars fun.
• Anne McCaffrey’s Dinosaur Planet books. Small, tight, well-written and fun. There are just two of them, and they are often over­looked in favor of her dragon books. But not to be missed.
• Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Esthshar books, of which there are many, each stand­alone. These are humor­ous fan­tasy nov­els, I con­sider them to be Xanth books for grown-ups.
• The E.T. nov­el­iza­tion, which is an awe­some, funny, enlight­en­ing read.
• Every­thing I own by Con­nie Willis, espe­cially To Say Noth­ing of the Dog.
• Most every­thing by Guy Gavriel Kay. The first books I read by him were the Fion­avar Tapes­try books, which in the end are a lit­tle self-involved, but his stand-alone books are very good, espe­cially The Lions of Al-Rassan, and A Song for Arbonne.
• Ursula LeGuin’s _Earthsea_ books, so recently maligned by the SciFi Channel.
• John Christopher’s _Tripods Trilogy_ which I read when I was twelve, and a Boy Scout, and loved, and now think might be sub­tly reli­gious in tone, but I don’t know because I haven’t read them in twenty-two years and I should, so I’m keep­ing them.