In case you missed it, here’s a link to the quarterly science fiction recommendations pod I do with the wonderful Meena Jain of the Ashland (MA) Public Library! Focus on classics and backlist this time!

In the spirit of book recs, I figured I owed you folks an actual essay, since it’s been a while, and this is the first time I’ve had in ages to actually sit down and compose something.

Anyway, last night and this morning I was hanging with some friends in the group chat and we were talking about formative books for us as GenX/Millennials, and how they held up. (Some sample titles: Watership Down, The Westing Game, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The Phantom Tollbooth, The House with the Clock in its Walls.) I had to admit I had never read The Phantom Tollbooth, and that I literally had never even heard of The Westing Game. Though honestly it sounds really cool and I’m gonna go buy a copy when I finish this newsletter.

And that got me thinking about discoverability, and how we find books, and how little, honestly, it’s changed since I was a kiddo. Back in the 70s/80s I found books first because they were lying around the house or at school—or given to me by relatives—but also because they were at Scholastic Book Fairs (yay!). But the way I found books that weren’t mediated by Other People was at the library, and at our local genre bookstore. (Which is my case was The Paperback Booksmith at the Charter Oak Mall in East Hartford, CT. Mystery, romance, SFFH, children’s. Hail! [and farewell, alas.])

Spec fic was a really niche interest in the late 70s/early 80s. I’m lucky that my mom was a huge reader and kept me in books. Every second payday there was a little ritual of going to the bookstore, because Thursday was payday and she had every other Thursday off. I picked up The Blue Sword and The Summer Tree on some of those trips, based entirely on vibes. That original paperback cover of The Blue Sword still gives me a little chill of pleasure when I see it.

I also raided her book collection, more or less unsupervised, and got saturated in a lot of New Wave feminist SF at a wildly inappropriate age. I’m what you get when you let a kid swap between The Three Investigators and The Female Man with basically no oversight.

Then I got into high school and college and found other science fiction and fantasy reading friends, and the world expanded again—I found a whole bunch of writers that I had never picked up before, because some of my new friends loved them: Barbara Hambly, Jane Yolen, Terry Pratchett, Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, etc.

Even today, the main reason people pick up a book by a new author is that somebody they trust told them it was great. Whether that person is somebody they have a parasocial relationship with (Mr. Rogers, Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, LeVar Burton) or their best friend from college who has impeccable taste in literature. And the magic of wandering into a little independent bookstore replete with shelf-talkers remains. I suspect that in some ways that’s why indie bookstores are making such a comeback. It’s a place you can go and hang out and talk about books.

(My local indies, bless them, include Odyssey Books in South Hadley, MA, which is kind enough to offer my in-print works as signed and personalized copies through this link, and Book Moon in Easthampton, MA, which offers a similar service for my husband, the delightful Scott Lynch.)

Social media could be a place you went to hang out and talk about books. It used to be. And sometimes it still is: we had a banging conversation on Bluesky the other day about Walter Farley that made several days this week a little more pleasant, even with the inevitable people who teleport in just to tell you those books you’re talking about were awful. (Why do people do that?)

There are discords and Reddits, sure, but Reddit often seems to be the same five books recommended over and over again (Have you accepted the Gospel of Brandon Sanderson* into your heart?) and when I’m going fishing for books I am probably not looking for another introduction to something I’ve already heard about and quite possibly read.

Goodreads, TikTok, and Instagram are so thoroughly Astroturfed at this point as to be useless on that front. Locus Magazine has a YouTube channel where they list new genre releases on the regular, which is super handy. Andrew Liptak’s Transfer Orbit newsletter is another good source.

So the upshot is, if you love a book, tell a friend. Tell a lot of friends. Nominate it for awards and vote for it, if you are eligible!

I’m doing my part. :)

Best,

Bear

*No shade on Brandon; he’s lovely and does a bunch to support emerging writers. It’s just that he’s also extremely popular with people who maybe don’t read widely.