[xenophonf]

The classics are classics for a reason. Huxley and Flaubert are both wonderful authors, but all the joy was sucked out reading their works when I was forced to do it. I don't know why. Personal failing, maybe.

I thought Herbert's non-_Dune_ works were very good while also being very disturbing. I read _The White Plague_ in my teens and am reminded of it whenever I read about modern gene drive technology. The ConSentiency stories and books have stayed with me to this day, and I periodically re-read them. Both _Hellstrom's Hive_ and _The Santaroga Barrier_ are fantastic utopias crossed over with deep horror; I love them but can't bring myself to re-read them!

Everybody's different. I can't stand Asimov or Clarke or Drake or Heinlein, despite reading nearly all of their respective science fiction oeuvres, but that Ursula Le Guin isn't in your top five is a damn shame. _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is one of my favorite books, and _The Dispossessed_ primed a political conversion completed by Iain Banks' Culture novels years later. Le Guin and Banks are probably my two favorite authors now, and in that order, with Bradbury and Adams a very close third and fourth.

I'm so tired of trilogies and tetralogies and so on and so forth. I wish authors would just finish the damn story. I think that's why I like Le Guin and Banks so much. You can read out of order and it's no big deal. In fact, I read _The Tombs of Atuan_ before _A Wizard of Earthsea_, and all of Le Guin's Hanish stories are stand-alone. The same goes for Banks' Culture novels, where I started with _Excession_ and back-tracked to _Consider Phelebas_ and read in release order (mostly).

Anyway, I heartily recommend giving the literary fiction another chance some day. There's some really amazing stuff out there that doesn't happen in space.