I scoured through Fiction Connection and some adult fantasy booklists and found a couple of options of new series to look into.
M. John Harrison's Viriconium collection is somewhere between science fiction and fantasy and features dark themes, crumbling society and an incredible landscape.
Anne Bishop's Black Jewels Trilogy is a fully functional deviation from typical fantasy and features memorable characters, a taut and believable world order and an epic story.
That about covers my 5 advisees. I found that Fiction Connection, Novelist and other databases, while helpful to find a path, were not always as helpful as searching individual library's "librarian suggestion" pages when looking for read-alikes. My advisees seemed to be more interested in similar themes rather than similar styles. So, searching for authors that are similar to Tamora Pierce or books that are similar to Dune was not as fruitful as searching for books about young heroes or books about... universal.... domination? Well, you get the idea, right?
Gotta read Dune someday.
ReplyDeleteYou should keep your RA business open. Great use of the tools and the interview and your people skills to get folks reading and talking about what they've been reading.
What's better than that? I ask you.
"My advisees seemed to be more interested in similar themes rather than similar styles."
ReplyDeleteI think that the above is an important point to make about knowing your audience (or customer, as it were). It would seem to me that the majority of casual readers are mostly interested in story and themes in a book as opposed to the writing style of the author. Sure, they may notice when one author is a better storyteller (or more to their liking, at least) than another, but it would seem to me that you're rarely going to deal with people looking for stylistic similarities unless you are dealing with a student writing a comparative essay or paper. So while it is important to be able to produce titles from similar authors, it is also important to be able to select books with similar plot devices or themes. After all, not everyone is a literary scholar interested in reading analytically.