And I love, love, love the first Beauty. I feel like I should appreciate the second one more (more mature, more insightful, blah, blah, blah) but I just love the first one so much more.

Me too. Might be a question of reading the first one at an impressionable age, but I love it. The second one...I found less accessible. I need to reread it.

I also really like Spindle's End, although I seem to remember that there are some around here who don't. It's a nicely formed world, and I like the characters.

The end of The Hero and the Crown bugs me enough that I prefer The Blue Sword, although once I started writing myself and reading other people's writing critically, there are some bits that come across as stilted to me. But I love Harry.

I have A Door in the Hedge around here somewhere...

Oh, I LOVE A Knot in the Grain. There's one story in that collection--"Buttercups"? I think? That is just redolent of pastoral land-magic.

Shameful confession: I've never read LeGuin. I started A Wizard of Earthsea and it didn't grab me. I wandered away and was never compelled to pick her up again. Over time I think I conflated her with MZ Bradley (gag).

Anyone read The Heaven Tree trilogy by Edith Pargeter, AKA Ellis Peters? I love the Cadfaels and Peters' standalone mysteries, but THT is daunting in sheer size.

(edited for errant apostraphe)

The end of The Hero and the Crown bugs me enough that I prefer The Blue Sword, although once I started writing myself and reading other people's writing critically, there are some bits that come across as stilted to me. But I love Harry

Me, too. I don't understand why Aerin and Luthe fell in love; I was kind of rooting for Tor. And the magic was not explained well; it's like "it's magic! So, believe!" and I have a problem with that now.

The first three Earthsea books are A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore, written fairly close together, and the last three are Tehanu, Tales of Earthsea, (short stories), and The Other Wind, written about twenty years later. And I do find Tehanu polemically feminist in a problematic way, despite being a feminist myself and liking many polemical books, because there's a significant change in register and approach between it and the earlier books. Tales of Earthsea and The Other Wind do a better job of integrating Le Guin's reconceived gender politics with the worldbuilding she'd already done, imho.

Most of Le Guin's fiction struck me as admirable but cold for a long time (though I've always been fond of The Lathe of Heaven), but something finally clicked for me a few years ago.

Robin McKinley is going to be one of the guests of honor at next year's Wiscon, btw.

I think A Door in the Hedge has been re-printed -- I saw it in the children's section of a bookstore last week.

I just checked Amazon and it was re-issued in 2003 in paperback.

Well, do I feel all behind the times! But I'm glad, cause I can read it again.

Anyone read The Heaven Tree trilogy by Edith Pargeter

God, yes. Worth reading, Beverly. In one of the Kate Shugak mysteries by Dana Stabenow, Kate is on a salmon fishing boat in the middle of the Bering Straits, crying over The Heaven Tree Trilogy. I love that.

It's a marvelous trilogy about art, love, death, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Written in Pargeter's lucid prose. These are not people of now, they are people of then, and you love them and hate them in equal measure. I loved it.

The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet, oddly enough, didn't have nearly as much impact, possibly because it's less fictional. But I really liked A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury, which is all about Prince Hal and Hotspur.

Pargeter also wrote a marvelous sequence of novels about a WWII-era soldier, while the war was ongoing. Which makes it that much more compelling, since she didn't know how it was going to end when she started it. I forget the name, will have to research.

I love McKinley but I had problems with Spindle's End, don't remember why. I admit I like her earlier stuff better, as well. That could be purely emotional.

Betsy, it wasn't the arranged marriage. It was the slap. I think that sort of self-righteous attitude (See? I told you I would do it!) would have made the master of the house progressively more difficult to live with. I wished to do great damage to him with that poker. In a proactive, this is going to be more trouble to you than it's worth sort of way. So I guess it's a good thing the author had a more pliant woman in that scene, one who was willing to put up with a little wedding night domestic violence.

... I don't remember curious circumstances regarding the conception of Ripsie's firstborn. Borowis?

Thanks, Suela. I actually have read--and loved--the middle book. And started the first. It was just so daunting a beginning I couldn't really get a running start on it. Plus, I think my attention span has shortened. It's all that web-surfing and instant gratification, I tell you! But I will assay it once more, once I pull up my socks.

OK, hivemind: a colleague's asked me for book recommendations, and while I can cover several genres, spy novels ain't one of them. So I figured (since I'm reading The Wisdom of Crowds ) that all of us are smarter than no single member, I'd ask all of us. What are the key spy novels to read?

(edited in order to use actual English grammar)