I feel like a total outsider in the cool kids club. I don't read scifi and only very limited fantasy. I cut my teeth on historicals and mysteries and of course, romances and the big glitzy, smutty roman à clef novels of the late seventies and eighties.

I cut my teeth on historicals and mysteries and of course, romances

Have you read any Jane Aiken Hodge? I adore her.

Historicals and historical fiction, all I remember from my early teens is Kipling and Wilbur Smith. Does Gerald Durrell count as historical?

Mysteries, I went from Hardy Boys and Tom Swift to Desmond Bagley and Dick Francis.

Have you read any Jane Aiken Hodge? I adore her.

Not that I recall, connie. I take it I should look her up? (Not that I don't have a HUGE stack of books waiting for me already.)

Speaking of mysteries, anyone wanting to pick up a Regency-set with a wonderful lead, the Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries by C.S. Harris are a lot of fun. I was sent the fourth book in the series to judge in the RITA finals and loved it so much, that I went back and ordered the first three and am currently mainlining.

I read Hodge, and remember liking her. Has anyone read Charlotte Armstrong? She's delicious, but very very dated--late 50s to early 70s, I think. She's sort of a counterpart to Christie for me, though she's a bit creepier.

Also?

Stupid Greek tragedy of Elf angst.

Anyone in need of a new tagline?

One of my favorites of the old skool romance authors is Mary Burchell-- she was a huge opera fan and her love of music was featured prominently in many of her novels.

Her real-life persona was every bit as impressive as her heroines, if not more so. She and her sister Mary used their positions as avid opera fans to help rescue Jews in the late thirties. Her autobiography has recently been reissued by Harlequin. [link]

I will have to look up some of Burchell's work, Raq. She sounds intriguing.

I was just reminded rather sharply that the best class in how to write a tortured, turgid, painfully subjectve and bloated novel was the brief fling I had with Frances Parkinson Keyes.

Hodge is a very '70s writer, re: heroes rescuing heroines etc., and at the age of 48 I'm remembering her "middle-aged" mid-30s heroine in one book with amusement. Her big focus is the Napoleonic era, especially in Portugal, but she also has modern stuff.

One of my favorite books is a recent one. She'd started a book several years ago, and it was typical of the rest. She never finished it at the time, and she picked it up again in the late '90s. Instead of picking up the original story line, she projected it forwards, showing what happened to our hero and heroine and adding some very modern twists to the plot. I wish I could remember the title.

Daybreak 2250 AD was my maiden voyage

And mine! Well, either that or The Stars Are Ours. I loved them both.

I blame my oldest brother, who had quite an SF collection, and I read just about everything he had, including some really dubious stuff (Jack Chalker? John Norman? Ewww). But also a bunch of heroic fantasy, like McCaffrey and Katherine Kurtz and all that mid-70s fantasy when the field really took off.

Still, I think Andre Norton changed a lot of lives.

I can't really say what started me on it, given how much of, well, EVERYTHING I read as a child, but I think the first real fantasy/scifi adult stuff I owned was a gift from a friend for a birthday (5th or 6th grade?). I have no idea how or why she got it for me, or whether she even picked it--she wasn't one of my geekier/closer friends, but she gave me the Anne McCaffrey Dragonsong/Dragonsinger/Dragondrums trilogy. I still have those copies, all beat to hell, after a million and one re-readings.

(And though she and I lost touch for a few years after that, we became friends again in high school, better friends, and I went to her wedding last year! ...but for all that she's a doctor, she's still not really a geek)