conceptual fiction
The Year
of
Magical
Reading
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The Year of Magical Reading:

Week 1: Midnight's Children by
Salman Rushdie

Let others write about rags-to-
riches, Rushdie prefers to tell
us about riches-to-rags. Even
our hero's face, body and
internal organs take a severe
beating during the course of
these pages, and not all of his
constituent parts survive to the
end of the book...
to read
more,
click here.


Week 2: The House of the Spirits by
Isabel Allende

"In 1981, in Caracas, I put a
sheet of paper in my typewriter
and wrote the first sentence of
The House of the Spirits,"
Allende later recalled. "At
that moment I didn't know for
whom I was doing it, or from
whom."...
to read more, click
here



Week 3: The Witches of Eastwick by
John Updike

Parents in Medicine Bow,
Wyoming rejected Updike's
work for its frankness and
profanity, while as recently as
2010, Updike's writing was
kept out of Texas jails in order
to "protect the safety and
security of our institution, but
also aid in the rehabilitation of
our offenders."...
to read more,
click here



Week 4: Magic for Beginners by
Kelly Link

Where others offer plot, Link -
what an appropriate name
for this writer! - moves ahead
on the basis of free association.
I'm reminded of Yogi Berra's
advice: "You've got to be
careful if you don't know where
you're going, because you
might not get there."...
to
read more,
click here


Week 5: The Tin Drum by Günter
Grass

When granting Günter Grass
the Nobel Prize, the Swedish
Academy lauded him for
"recalling the disavowed
and the forgotten: the lies
that people wanted to forget
because they had once believed
in them." These words would
later take on unintended irony....
to read more, click here


Week 6: The Golden Ass by Apuleius

What was the first magical
realism novel? Some may
point to books by Gabriel
Garcia Márquez or Italo
Calvino or Franz Kafka or
Jorge Luis Borges, but my
choice predates those works
by almost 2,000 years....
to
read more,
click here



Week 7: The Tiger's Wife by Téa
Obreht

This is an imaginative book
that expands our sense of the
possible, but also a thought-
provoking work about different
levels of responsibility - of
child to elder, of doctor to
patient, of people to animals,
of races and religions to each
other....
to read more, click here


Week 8:  One Hundred Years of
Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Readers remember this book
for its fanciful impossibilities.
Yet Gabriel Garcia Márquez
starts his narrative with the
exact opposite - tapping the
unexpected power to delight
of the commonplace: magnets,
a telescope, false teeth and a
trip to ponder the hitherto
unknown marvel of ice...
to
read more,
click here


Week 9: The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting by MIlan Kundera

His career, began with a joke,
which is the literal translation of
the title of Milan Kundera's debut
novel
Zert. The punchline could
have been predicted by readers
of this author's work - who know
that, for Kundera, jokes are
seldom a laughing matter...
to
read more,
click here


Week 10: Gargantua and Pantagruel
by
François Rabelais

Forget the Nobel Prize in
literature. The highest literary
honor, accorded to a nobler
elite, comes when an author's
name enters the language as
an adjective. Hence
"Rabelasian" which my
dictionary defines as
"bawdy, coarse, gross,
lusty, raunchy."...
to read
more,
click here


Week 11: The Famished Road by
Ben Okri

The main characters of Ben
Okri's novel
The Famished
Road
, winner of the 1991
Booker Prize, move back
and forth between the human
and spirit worlds with the ease
of urban commuters changing
subway trains....
to read more,
click here




Week 12: Like Water for Chocolate
by Laura Esquivel

An unexpected disclaimer is  
hidden in the small print at the  
front of my edition of
Like  
Water from Chocolate
, the  
debut novel by Laura Esquivel:   
"The recipes in this book are  
based on traditional Mexican  
recipes and have not been  
tested by the publisher"....
to  
read more
click here



Week 13:  Winter's Tale by Mark
Helprin

No author has attempted a more
ambitious or thorough literary
regeneration of Manhattan than
Mark Helprin.  In his 1983 novel
Winter's Tale, Helprin aims for
nothing less than an apotheosis
of the city, a sanctification by fire
that, at times, crosses beyond
the familiar terrain of the novel
and enters into the realm of myth
or dogma....
to read more click
here



Week 14:  Dhalgren by Samuel R.
Delany

I have noticed that short quotes
from books are very popular
on the emerging media.  After
all, why read a 800-page novel,
when you can savor the best
passages in 140-character
tweets?  With that in mind, I
have distilled Mr. Delany's
Dhalgren into some bite-
size extracts suitable for
Twitter....
to read more click
here


Week 15:  Jonathan Strange & Mr.
Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Remember that ridiculously
long novel on magicians in
a fantastical England that
came out in 2004?  Who
would have thought that a
supersized work of
imaginative fiction—almost
900 pages long!—would find
such an enthusiastic audience?  
What’s that you say?
Harry
Potter? Hogwarts?  I don’t
know what you're talking
about....
to read more click
here



Week 16:  The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov

Bulgakov builds his story around
a compelling idea:  the Devil
decides to visit the Soviet Union
in order to see firsthand whether
human nature has changed under
communism.  Has a new era of
collectivism eliminated covetous-
ness, greed and all those other
familiar sins? Or have the old
vices merely found new outlets,
under different names perhaps?
to read more click here



Week 17:  Dangerous Laughter by
Steven Millhauser

Steven Millhauser is
obsessed with obsession.  
Each of the stories in his
collection
Dangerous
Laughter
presents an
unhealthy fixation—
sometimes exhibited by
an individual, at other
times by a small cadre
of friends, or even a
community or entire nation
....
to read more, click here



Week 18:  Conjure Wife by Fritz
Leiber

Few literary figures of the
early 20th century led less
predictable lives than Fritz
Leiber.  He was a brilliant
chess player, a preacher, a
college teacher, a champion
fencer, a Shakespearian actor,
and even appeared on screen
with Greta Garbo.  And then
there is the matter of his
writing.
...to read more, click
here


Week 19:  1Q84 by Haruki
Murakami

All the key characters ends up
in hiding or seclusion. Take your
pick, they are either (1) held
captive  in a small room, (2) in
a coma, (3) hiding out on a
surveillance mission, (4) isolated
in a darkened room, (5) in-
accessible in a religious retreat,
(5) locked in a storage room
with a dead goat…
to read
more,
click here


Week 20:  The Hobbit by J.R.R.
Tolkien

In 1961, C.S. Lewis attempted
to nominate his friend and
fellow Oxford don J.R.R.
Tolkien for the Nobel Prize in
literature.  Recently released
files from the Nobel archive
in Stockholm indicate that the
jury briefly considered Tolkien,
before issuing a terse verdict
to read more, click here
Welcome to my year of magical
reading.  Each week during the
course of 2012,  I will explore an
important work of fiction that
incorporates elements of magic,
fantasy or the surreal.  My choices
will cross conventional boundary
lines of genre, style and historical
period—indeed, one of my
intentions in this project is to show
how the conventional labels
applied to these works have
become constraining, deadening
and misleading.

In its earliest days, storytelling
almost always partook of the
magical. Only in recent years have
we segregated works arising from
this venerable tradition into
publishing industry categories
such as "magical realism" or
"paranormal" or "fantasy" or some
other 'genre' pigeonhole. These
labels are not without their value,
but too often they have blinded us
to the rich and multidimensional
heritage
beyond category that
these works share.  

This larger heritage is mimicked in
our individual lives: most of us first
experienced the joys of narrative
fiction through stories of myth and
magic, the fanciful and
phantasmagorical; but only a very
few retain into adulthood this
sense of the kind of enchantment
possible only through storytelling.  
As such, revisiting this stream of
fiction from a mature, literate
perspective both broadens our
horizons and allows us to
recapture some of that magic in
our imaginative lives.
Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/tedgioia

Conceptual Fiction:
A Reading List
(with links to reviews)

Home Page

Abbott, Edwin A.
Flatland

Adams, Douglas
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Allende, Isabel
The House of the Spirits

Amis, Martin
Time's Arrow

Apuleius
The Golden Ass

Asimov, Isaac
The Foundation Trilogy

Asimov, Isaac
I, Robot

Atwood, Margaret
The Handmaid's Tale

Banks, Iain M.
The State of the Art

Ballard, J.G.
Crash

Ballard, J.G.
The Crystal World

Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man

Bradbury, Ray
Dandelion Wine

Bradbury, Ray
Fahrenheit 451

Bradbury, Ray
The Illustrated Man

Bradbury, Ray
The Martian Chronicles

Bradbury, Ray
Something Wicked This Way Comes

Bulgakov, Mikhail
The Master and Margarita

Burgess, Anthony
A Clockwork Orange

Card, Orson Scott
Ender's Game

Chabon, Michael
The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Chiang, Ted
Stories of Your Life and Others

Clarke, Arthur C.
Childhood's End

Clarke, Arthur C.
A Fall of Moondust

Clarke, Arthur C.
2001: A Space Odyssey

Clarke, Susanna
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Danielewski, Mark Z.
House of Leaves

Delany, Samuel R.
Babel-17

Delany, Samuel R.
Dhalgren

Delany, Samuel R.
The Einstein Intersection

Dick, Philip K.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Dick, Philip K.
The Man in the High Castle

Dick, Philip K.
Ubik

Doctorow, Cory
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Esquivel, Laura
Like Water for Chocolate

Gaiman, Neil
American Gods

Gibson, William
Burning Chrome

Gibson, William
Neuromancer

Grass, Günter
The Tin Drum

Haldeman, Joe
The Forever War

Hall, Steven
The Raw Shark Texts

Harrison, M. John
Light

Heinlein, Robert
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Heinlein, Robert:
Stranger in a Strange Land

Heinlein, Robert
Time Enough for Love

Helprin, Mark
Winter's Tale

Herbert, Frank
Dune

Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World

Kundera, Milan
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Lathe of Heaven

Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Left Hand of Darkness

Leiber, Fritz
The Big Time

Leiber, Fritz
Conjure Wife

Leiber, Fritz
Swords & Deviltry

Leiber, Fritz
The Wanderer

Lem, Stanislaw
His Master's Voice

Lem, Stanislaw
Solaris

Lethem, Jonathan
The Fortress of Solitude

Lewis, C. S.
The Chronicles of Narnia

Link, Kelly
Magic for Beginners

Márquez, Gabriel García
100 Years of Solitude

McCarthy, Cormac
The Road

Miéville, China
Perdido Street Station

Miller, Jr., Walter M.
A Canticle for Leibowitz

Millhauser, Steven
Dangerous Laughter

Mitchell, David
Cloud Atlas

Murakami, Haruki
1Q84

Niffenegger, Audrey
The Time Traveler's Wife

Niven, Larry
Ringworld

Noon, Jeff
Vurt

Obreht, Téa
The Tiger's Wife

Okri, Ben
The Famished Road

Pohl, Frederik
Gateway

Pynchon, Thomas
Gravity's Rainbow

Rabelais, François
Gargantua and Pantagruel

Robinson, Kim Stanley
Red Mars

Rowling, J.K.
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone

Rushdie, Salman
Midnight's Children

Saramago, José
Blindness

Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein

Silverberg, Robert
Dying  Inside

Silverberg, Robert
Nightwings

Simak, Clifford
City

Simak, Clifford
The Trouble with Tycho

Smith, Cordwainer
Norstrilia

Smith, Cordwainer
The Rediscovery of Man

Stephenson, Neal
Snow Crash

Stross, Charles
Glasshouse

Sturgeon, Theodore
More Than Human

Sturgeon, Theodore
Some of Your Blood

Tolkien, J.R.R.
The Hobbit

Updike, John
The Witches of Eastwick

Van Vogt, A.E.
The Mixed Men

Van Vogt, A.E.
Slan

Van Vogt, A.E.
The Voyage of the Space Beagle

Van Vogt, A.E.
The World of Null A

Verne, Jules
Around the Moon

Verne, Jules
From the Earth to the Moon

Verne, Jules:
Journey to the Center of the Earth

Vonnegut, Kurt
Cat's Cradle

Vonnegut, Kurt
The Sirens of Titan

Vonnegut, Kurt
Slaughterhouse-Five

Wallace, David Foster
Infinite Jest

Wells, H.G.
The First Men in the Moon

Wells, H.G.
The Island of Dr. Moreau

Wells, H.G.
The Time Machine

Zelazny, Roger
Lord of Light



Special Features
Notes on Conceptual Fiction
Ray Bradbury: A Tribute
The Year of Magical Reading
Remembering Fritz Leiber
Samuel Delany's 70th birthday
The Sci-Fi of Kurt Vonnegut
Curse You, Neil Armstrong!
Robert Heinlein at 100
A.E, van Vogt Tribute


Links to related sites
The New Canon
Great Books Guide
Postmodern Mystery
Ted Gioia's web site


SF Site
io9
Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
Los Angeles Review of Books
Big Dumb Object
Jospeh Peschel
The Misread City
Reviews and Responses
SF Signal
True Science Fiction


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