Recommend Books, Please

[queerbychoice]

It's that time of year again and my mother is demanding a birthday list from me. I have an old list that I've been using for years and just crossing things off as they were bought, but I'm bored with everything left on it so I want to compose a new one from scratch. Recommend some stuff I should ask for, please. Especially books. Usually 85% of what I ask for is books.

Comments

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

I've read Triton, Dhalgren and most of Samuel Delany's novels, actually. They're pretty good. I also had his nonfiction recommended to me by somebody or other on LJ recently (hmm, I think it was tikarass), but I haven't gotten around to actually reading much of that. The novels were pretty good, although they're the stuff of sexual fantasies and my sexual fantasies, while not immune to small doses of Delany, tend to run more along the lines of Amy Bloom's plots instead. (Note: this is possibly the most outrageously shocking thing I've ever admitted to in my entire life, but ha! I can get away with it and nobody will act shocked, because very few people around here except illscientist will have a clue what I just said! I love being a literary snob!)

I've read some Boswell that was written later than that book, in which he discusses how social constructionist scholars challenged him for having been too essentialist in that book, and how he changed his views to agree with them. In view of that, I find it interesting that even that book often gets cited as a social constructionist work too. But I haven't actually gotten around to reading it, and I sort of have reservations about doing so because when an author publicly recants a major viewpoint upon which his book was based, I feel like I'd do better to only read all his subsequent books instead.