For the 6-year-old boy, the Oz books are great fun. For the 11-year-old girl, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

I don't remember when I started the Prydain books, but I was obsessed with Alexander's Westmark trilogy when I was in the 6th grade. (Also books about ideas, but also funny and character-driven.) Okay, I haven't read a book of Alexander's that I haven't liked.

I've always meant to read his books, but I never did. Is it really pathetic to go to the children's section of your local library to check out books for yourself?

Is it really pathetic to go to the children's section of your local library to check out books for yourself?

No.

The only book other than the Prydain books which was translated to Hebrew was "Lukas Kasha" (sp?), and it was lots of fun.

In the US this was published as "The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha", and it is among Alexander's better novels. The Westmark books -- Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen, are about a pretend country in Europe in about 1820, with revolutions and counter-revolutions and a couple of really fun characters. It's all one big reality-stretch of a universe -- Mickle can't be that good at everything; the coincidences are too much -- but the books are by turns hilarious and exciting and really dark, which is all I could have asked for in the 6th grade.

Is it really pathetic to go to the children's section of your local library to check out books for yourself?

Absolutely not. It's an incredibly exciting time right now in children's fiction. Some of the newish stuff that has come out (last 10 years) would rival what you see for adults. Also, oddly, "adult" authors are beginning to write for intermediate, junior and YA audiences -- people like Allende and Hiassen.

the books are by turns hilarious and exciting and really dark, which is all I could have asked for in the 6th grade.

If a book can give me all those things right now, I'm very grateful. Then again, I do think I'm sort of 12 for way over half my life now, so maybe it's just me. I'll definitely try to find them - thanks, Nutty!

It's an incredibly exciting time right now in children's fiction. Some of the newish stuff that has come out (last 10 years) would rival what you see for adults.

Thanks for the validation, guys!

Hmm. I know he got into Dick because he loves Blade Runner with a passion (he's studying film), and I think I gave him Gibson's Neuromancer a few years ago and he finally read it recently and liked it. I don't really know of any other authors he likes--like I said, he doesn't really enjoy reading, which is why I really want to encourage him reading the stuff he does like. I'd guess that it's the ideas he finds really exciting in both Gibson and Dick, and probably the cyberpunky style too (at least in Gibson--Dick preceded cyberpunk, didn't he?).

Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Dick preceded cyberpunk, but Blade Runner-the-movie is a pretty big influence on the subgenre. (I really like both the movie and the book, but they're completely different entities.) So my revised recommendations, slanted towards the cyberpunks, would still include Delany (who's cited as an influence by many cyberpunks), the cyberpunks listed, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man (also precursors; flashy prose, brilliant idea spinning, lousy gender politics), and Raphael Carter's The Fortunate Fall (a beautifully written second-generation cyberpunk novel) if you can find it, and, as David says, Storming the Reality Studio.

Weird outliers you could try: Paul diFilippo's Ribopunk (I cannot stand diFilippo, he's much too flippant and surfacy for me, but he's knowledgeable about genre, smart, and inventive); Charles Stross; Cory Doctorow; Candas Jane Dorsey's collection (Learning About) Machine Sex; Michael Swanwick's Jack Faust or The Iron Dragon's Daughter; Lewis Shiner, although his latest stuff has been published as mainstream rather than SF.

Pretty much all the writers called "cyberpunk" have gone off and done different things since the movement heydey in the late eighties/early nineties.

At one of my temp jobs last summer my coworkers thought it was very odd that I still read YA/childrens' books. I smiled politely at them and returned to my Peter Dickinson.

Peter Dickinson.

Who doesn't love Peter Dickinson? He's one of the best.

"King and Joker" and "The Last House Party" are two my favourite books.