Most of them that term were sci/eng/CS, actually--luck of the draw. They found the linguistics admixture baffling instead. I wonder too whether it's partly being unused to thinking about science in context of literary texts; I tried John M. Ford's "Heat of Fusion" on another class, and the two physics majors blinked at me. Oh well.
hmm, so noted.
Nah, just an accident of sequence; there's other stuff that I think I should've read and still haven't gotten to. Library randomness is how I started, too--hence having read 80% of everything Heinlein published, not so much because I liked his writing when I was 11-14 but because it was there and I had very little spending money. For me it was Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Zelazny, McCaffrey, Bradley, Bradbury, Herbert's Dune, a little Silverberg, eventually a bit of Gene Wolfe. I envy you those anthologies, I think, just a bit.
...No? :) I don't know--being an English literature major and teaching lit-based comp classes have led me to think that there are very few texts that everyone would benefit from reading, even in a casual/anecdotal excitement-sharing kind of way. But if pressed, I guess I'd put John M. Ford's Heat of Fusion (story collection) on such a list, and Ian McDonald's River of Gods (despite some who-speaks problems), Catherynne Valente's Orphan's Tales duology, Walker's Secret Service, Elizabeth Wein's sequence starting with The Winter Prince, Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and (to lighten things up!) Ellen Kushner's Privilege of the Sword. And I really enjoyed Heaney's District and Circle, and found Paul Park's Roumania tetralogy usefully thinky/baffling. Most of those are linked hence (http://reqfd.net/stack/index-texts/). I wouldn't imagine that everyone would want to read them because most of them are kind of hard reads; spin this list instead as stuff that I enjoyed a great deal and that impressed me (and had nothing to do with my doctoral work).
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Date: 2011-01-20 08:04 pm (UTC)hmm, so noted.
Nah, just an accident of sequence; there's other stuff that I think I should've read and still haven't gotten to. Library randomness is how I started, too--hence having read 80% of everything Heinlein published, not so much because I liked his writing when I was 11-14 but because it was there and I had very little spending money. For me it was Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Zelazny, McCaffrey, Bradley, Bradbury, Herbert's Dune, a little Silverberg, eventually a bit of Gene Wolfe. I envy you those anthologies, I think, just a bit.
...No? :) I don't know--being an English literature major and teaching lit-based comp classes have led me to think that there are very few texts that everyone would benefit from reading, even in a casual/anecdotal excitement-sharing kind of way. But if pressed, I guess I'd put John M. Ford's Heat of Fusion (story collection) on such a list, and Ian McDonald's River of Gods (despite some who-speaks problems), Catherynne Valente's Orphan's Tales duology, Walker's Secret Service, Elizabeth Wein's sequence starting with The Winter Prince, Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and (to lighten things up!) Ellen Kushner's Privilege of the Sword. And I really enjoyed Heaney's District and Circle, and found Paul Park's Roumania tetralogy usefully thinky/baffling. Most of those are linked hence (http://reqfd.net/stack/index-texts/). I wouldn't imagine that everyone would want to read them because most of them are kind of hard reads; spin this list instead as stuff that I enjoyed a great deal and that impressed me (and had nothing to do with my doctoral work).