Hunter Ellinger Books (always a work in progress)

My favorites in different genres:  CHILDREN    YOUTH     DETECTIVE     HISTORY    FICTION IN HISTORY    HISTORY AS FICTION     FICTION AS HISTORY 
plus several categories and MegaTokyo under construction at the end of the page

CHILDREN'S FICTION
Adult enthusiasm for children's books often comes from being given a respectable excuse for keeping in touch with some of the most lovingly-crafted productions of literature.  But we are shopworn enough to usually need the presence of children to get full benefit.

• The Oz books of L. Frank Baum and successors have a surprisingly original and varied morality underlying their overt goody-goody style.  Admittedly the plot lines are mostly weak (a series of incidents until a magic rescue), but the many memorable minor characters provide little archetypes that stick with you (e.g., the vanity of the Glass Cat and the pomposity of Prof. Wooglebug, H.M.).
• Dr. Seuss, especially the earlier books that have a subversive edge rather than an explicit message.  My favorites are The King's Stilts (kids will recognize killjoy Lord Droon in many adults, while seeing the Grinch as just a fairy-tale monster), and Horton Hatches An Egg (which points out that being nice will not necessarily produce gratitude, but that justice can work in mysterious ways).
• Dr. Doolittle -- My first glimpse of a scientist in fiction.  In retrospect, I realize that these books were also the first economic books I read, since there is a recurrent theme of limited resources and having to earn money.  They also have great images of a cooperative household, dependent on the varied talents and perspectives of the animals (including the few human ones).  The political correctness of the books is mixed (although very nonchavanistic about other species), with avant-garde appreciation of Native-American medicine-man Long Arrow but occasional heavy-handed use of African-native stereotypes.
• Wind In The Willows -- This is a book that you may need to read to kids, rather than just letting  them read it by themselves.  It is a magical evocation of both nature and friendship, with much more depth than the movie.  As with most of the best read-to-children books, it is a fine read-for-yourself book as well.
• A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books are well known and loved.  His children's verse collections Now We Are Six and When We Were Very Young also have some little-known jewels that beautifully capture aspects of childhood: "Now I am six, and I'm as clever as clever, so I think I'll be six now for ever and ever."  Christopher Robin grew up to be a banker, but it is Pooh and Eyore and their ilk that are the heros here.
• The Hobbit -- Much lighter than the Lord of the Rings in every sense, it still wonderfully conveys two LOTR themes: the involuntary hero, and that the present is built on a deep (and sometimes shaky) foundation of the past.  One of Tolkien's little-noted literary achievements in the Hobbit (repeated in LOTR) is to make a fat, modest 50-year-old into a credible hero.
• The Naria stories of C. S. Lewis.  Some of the stories are a little forced, when Lewis's preparation-for-Christianity agenda shows too clearly, but other times (such as in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) we are reminded that our sensitivity to, and appetite for, magical quests transcends sectarian boundaries.
• Alice in Wonderland (and Through the Looking Glass).  The first really great books I know of deliberately written for children, they show wonderful even-handedness between childish and adult perspectives.  Their mad logic is both instructive and liberating.  
• Uncle Remus stories.  When I was in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, I learned that the tales of Brer Bear, Brer Fox, and Brer Rabbit are direct translations of West African stories, a reminder that many of the treasures of Southern-US culture were involuntarily imported from Africa.  These stories are also examples of the wealth of traditional stories each culture provides to give people archetypes that they can use to sort out their experiences. 
• Calvin & Hobbes (and fellow travelers) -- Bill Watterson's decade of daily comics remain one of the best artistic expositions of the creativity children not only show, but also provoke (I identify with Calvin's Dad).  Among comics, only in the midcentury comic-book series Little Lulu (not to be confused with the insipid Nancy) and Carl Bark's Uncle Scrooge (and the related Junior Woodchucks) have I seen a similar level of wild invention untainted by patronage or apology.
• Are  Scrooge McDuck comics politically incorrect?  Some people feel that they exalt wealth and reflect a propaganda effort by the right-wing Disney corporation (or even darker conspiracies).  I disagree completely.  On the contrary, they seem to me to be deeply subversive of respect for rich people and go out of their way to point out that everyman Donald is constantly being exploited by Scrooge and betrayed by his own greed.  It is the nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie who repeatedly use intelligence, accumulated knowledge (via the omniscient Junior Woodchuck Manual), and humane principles to save the day.  They are the role models here.

YOUTH FICTION
From about age 10,  the stories of interest include growth and change, not just action -- a "coming of age".  There is a sense in which this strand of thought is the basis of most higher literature, with the static detective and sexual-adventure stories that occupy so much of adult reading being less mature.  But the books that best serve the voracious appetite of youthful readers also have a directness that avoids explicit reflection on the complexities of the world, which is better saved for readers who have already encountered them.

• Tarzan -- The stories are immensely better than the movies in every respect, and Tarzan (Lord Greystroke to us other great white apes) is a complex and interesting character.  He is deeply individual (compared to those bound by either African or aristocratic-English tribal customs), and his superiority is clearly based more on intelligence and knowledge than just physical strength.  Other Burroughs stories (the alternate-evolution The Land That Time Forgot is one of my favorites) are also great youth reading, but the early Tarzan books are the best.
• Kim -- This is my favorite of all youth books, and the "Friend of All the World" eurasian youth Kim one of my favorite characters in fiction.  The book is Kipling at his best, when he is reflecting the wild mixture that constitutes world culture (a mixture of personalities as well as of peoples) and showing the possibilities that exist for those who can live in several worlds. 
• Hawkmistress -- This story of a youth building competence on her own terms collects most of the themes of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series into a particularly well-crafted and self-sufficient tale.  Bradley also has several other youth-oriented Darkover stories, most with the clash-of-cultures theme that is developed so well in the adult-protagonist books in the series.
• Madeleine L'Engle -- These are stories of kin and kith families where both individuality and community are celebrated.  The science-fiction/adventure plots are a slight-of-hand distraction from character-counts morals, which go down smoothly because you really like the people.
• The Pern novels of Anne McCaffrey, with their working dragons and harper-led culture, narrate a mixture of high politics and personal growth that is attractive to more than young readers.
• Horatio Alger -- Okay, he recycles plots freely, but his books give fascinating insights into 19th century American life, especially at the low end of the social scale.  Contrary to legend, the books are not celebrations of capitalism (villains and friends are drawn from all classes), and the contributions of luck and charity to success are repeatedly acknowledged, as is the obligation to share success once achieved.
• Mark Twain -- Tom Sawyer succeeds by honestly reporting a youth perspective, but Huckleberry Finn goes much further, showing Huck developing an authentic personal morality amid the temptations of both slave-owning respectability and live-by-your-wits adventuring.
• Robin Hood -- These tales of outcasts banding together as an alternative government are both fun in themselves and indicators that resistance to exploitation is not new, and that community is a larger idea than authority. 
• Cheaper By The Dozen and sequel Belles on Their Toes -- No doubt my enjoyment of this biography of the Gilbreth family is colored by being one of nine kids myself, with somewhat similar parents.  But the stories should be all the more interesting to those to whom such a family is news.
• The Earthsea trilogy of Ursela Le Guin -- The path of Ged from shepard youth to Archmage (via the mage school, visits to the underworld, and conversations with dragons) is engrossing, but it is the story of his errors and the growth forced in correcting them that makes this tale stick in the mind and soul.
• The dialogs introducing chapters of Godel Escher Bach -- Some of my best read-to-children experiences were with the brilliant lead-ins in Douglas Hofstader's tour de force.  Starting with the "Achilles and the Tortoise" dialog from Lewis Carroll (which shows that reasoning is not founded in axioms), they progess through recursion, self-reference, musical structure, and contrafactuals (which of course don't really exist) to a final "fugue" in six voices that brings it all together.

• The Peloponnesian War --  This detailing of the decline of classical Athens into imperialism and then disaster was written soon after the events but is, alas, all too relevant to today's America.  The book is strikingly modern in tone, with Thucydides using standards of judgment (for both facts and morality) that have not been improved on in two dozen centuries.
• The French Revolution -- Thomas Carlyle proves that history need not be dispassionate (or dull) to be fair, as he shows the flaws and the strengths of the all parties in this landmark period.
• A Study of History -- Arnold Toynbee's classic balances provocative intellectual compartmentalization with sensitivity to the untidiness and interrelatedness of the underlying civilizations.  It is all the more interesting for being a bit out of date, inspiring the reader to think about what adjustments to the analysis are needed.
• Geography -- Hendrick Van Loon uses a geographic survey to give a comprehensive summary of world history and immediate prospects in a single moderate-sized volume.  That his 1932 predictions are so often on the mark demonstrates that there are larger forces shaping history than which politician happens to gain power.
• Guns, Germs, and Steel. -- Jared Diamond's explanation of the big currents of human history (and it is an explanation, not a recounting) is staggeringly successful, although guns and steel have a limited role compared to animals, crops, and geography.  What is most impressive about it is how well the interplay between factors is illuminated, as when the presence of domesticated animals promotes germ mutation and spread (with resultant immunities).

FICTION IMBEDDED IN HISTORY

• Mary Renault 's novels of ancient Greece. My favorite is the first in temporal sequence, the Theseus story The King Must Die, but each of the others suceeds very well in giving insight into the spirit of one of the eras of classical Greek life.
• King Arthur et al -- The strength of these legends is indicated by the contrasting first-class stories they have later inspired.  In addition to the classics of Malory and Tennyson, my favorites are T. H. White's  The Once And Future King (whose core idea is that Lancelot was ugly, transforming our understanding of both his quest for perfection in knighthood and his disasterous romance), Marion Zimmer Bradley 's The Mists of Avalon (where the tragedy is the sacrifice of Spirit to Church, not petty adultery), Mark Twain 's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (whose lessons on how modernity fares when imposed are all too timely), and C. S. Lewis 's  That Hideous Strength (where Merlin is awakened in the 20th century by Arthur's surprising successor to fight a perverted science).
• The Lymond Chronicles of Dorothy Dunnett .  This series of six books following an ambiguous hero starts in Scotland in the late 1540's, and returns there repeatedly until it ends ten years later just as Elizabeth becomes queen, but has brilliant extended excursions into France, Malta, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, London, and France again.  While the history is scrupulous and informative, it is the story of adventure, politics, and love (familial as well as romantic) that compels attention.  I find this early work of Dunnett's more compelling as literature than her later-written 1460's House of Niccolo series, which on the other hand describes a greater range of cultures, from Trebizond to Timbuktu.
• The Amelia Peabody (and family) stories of Elizabeth Peters.  While this long series started as a well-written set of comic mystery/romance adventures in 1890's Egypt, it has accumulated impressive seriousness and depth (still with plenty of humor) as the children produced or adopted by the original protagonists come of age amid the contradictions of World War I and its aftermath.  The older folk keep growing too, overcoming their racism (on the British side) and misogyny (on the Egyptian).
• The Brother Cadfael stories of Ellis Peters.  These stories of mid-1100s Shrewsbury and Wales (starting with A Morbid Taste For Bones) have an abundance of sympathetic characters and skillful evocations of the contrasting English, Norman, and Welsh religious and political spirits of the time, but the heart of their charm for me is that crusader-turned-monk Cadfael and his comrades (both cloistered and secular) have the combination of free minds and restricted power that makes their challenges interesting and their successes relevant.  This is also true of Peters' less numerous modern-settings stories.
• C. S. Forester 's Horatio Hornblower stories of the Napoleonic-era British Navy.  In addition to the wealth of illuminating detail about the workings of the navy, these stories build an impressive portrait of a man whose conscientiousness, intelligence, and luck builds a successful career, but who remains a surprised observer rather than becoming a boring self-confident hero.
• Georgette Heyer wrote adult but chaste historical romances of uniquely high quality, with excellent dialog (what insults!) and psychological depth.  Except for two army-oriented ones (which include a renowned description of the battle of Waterloo), the stories are purely personal, with the settings (mostly early-1800's England) used to display the characters, not as a goal in themselves.  Ten or so of the books are absolutely first class: The Masqueraders [my favorite], These Old Shades, Sylvester, The Unknown Ajax, Venitia, The Tollbooth, Fredrica, The Grand Sophy, and Bath Tangle .  The rest are better than anything else of their kind, with some quite close to the best.  All include many plums, and are well-stocked with characters that you can both like and respect.

• Upton Sinclair 's Lanny Bud books, starting with World's End .  This is a series of eleven books that gives, in the course of love stories and secret missions and other growing pains, a scrupulously accurate and deeply informative political/social history from 1913 to 1948.  While the central perspective is Sinclair's democratic socialism, much of the value of the book is that it puts every shade of political opinion into articulate voices -- this is a choral work (or perhaps an opera), not a sermon.  Although long (a virtue to heavy readers), the books are steadily rewarding, with every paragraph supplying some tasty morsel of insight, wit, or sympathy without calling attention to the skill required to make readers repeatedly say "What an interesting world!" rather than "What an interesting book!". 
• Lives, by Hendrick Van Loon , is a unique interweaving of biography, history, fantasy, and current events.  By special heavenly permission, a sequence of pairs of historical personages (starting with Erasmus) are invited to share dinner with two 1930's Dutch hosts and with each other.  The book includes briefing notes, menus and music selections for each visit (always tailored to the guests), and the conversations, which sometimes get out of hand.
• Mary Renault 's books telling the story of the life of Alexander the Great (Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, and Funeral Games) have sources detailed enough to make the transition into being primarily historical, although her storytelling skill is fully deployed. 

FICTION AS HISTORY

• The Lord of the Rings -- J. R. R. Tolkien explains in his preface that what he writes is history from an imagined world, which readers are welcome to apply as they will to their own thinking, not allegories with author-determined meanings (a jibe at his close friend C. S. Lewis).  This approach lets him transcend his own conservatism to build a saga that is anchored in many traditions but is not predetermined by them, giving a bravery and variety to the characters that would be missing if they were unreflective champions aligned with destiny.  We are all halflings in the great currents of history -- but at our best we can be elf-friends (and perhaps even Ent-friends) as well.
• Dune -- Frank Herbert may have put his full stock of invention into this masterpiece (its sequels are not remotely as good), but the result is a book packed with ideas and images in which historical forces clash and shift before our eyes.
• Red/Green/Blue Mars -- Kim Stanley Robertson provides, in an excellent hard-science and hard-politics setting, a future history whose interaction of personal, multi-personal, and impersonal forces illuminates how history happens (and implicitly how it can be changed).

DETECTIVE STORIES

• Josephine Tey wrote eight detective novels, all of outstanding quality: Inspector Grant stories To Love and Be Wise, The Man in the Queue, A Shilling For Candles, The Singing Sands, and The Daughter of Time (a tour-de-force retrospective investigation of Richard III), as well as stand-alones Brat Farrar [my favorite], The Franchise Affair, and Miss Pym Disposes.
• The Nero Wolfe stories of Rex Stout .  Unusual in having a balanced (but not at all symmetrical) relationship between the genius (fat stay-at-home Wolfe) and the narrator/helper (sociable Archie Goodwin, whose job is as much to provoke and manage Wolfe as to assist him), this very long series starts with a fully-developed background and maintains a high level from 1934 (Fer de Lance) to 1975 (A Family Affair).  My favorite is when Wolfe outfoxes J. Edgar Hoover in The Doorbell Rang.
• The stories of Dick Francis all have mysteries to be solved but are adventure stories at their heart, centered on the impact of events on their protagonists rather than on the answer to a puzzle.  They are strikingly good and vary much more widely in their plots than the recurrent presence of horseracing would suggest.
• The Dr. Thorndyke stories from Austin Freeman .  The first one, The Red Thumb Mark , is one of the best, but I am also very fond of many others such as Pontifex and Son, Mister Polton Explains, and A Certain Dr. Thorndyke.  The stories celebrate applied science: disciplined, informed, and humane intelligence in action; they go beyond the oblique scientific references in Sherlock Holmes stories to clear and convincing descriptions of the technical and lab work involved.
• Arthur Upfield's stories of half-caste aborigone Napoleon Bonaparte show the fascinating world of outback Australia using one of the most original and attractive main characters in detective fiction.  The stories are not of uniform quality, although all are rewarding; The Will of the Tribe is a good starting point.
• Robert van Gulick's Judge Dee mysteries, tales of 7th-century China written in a pattern derived from traditional Chinese detective stories but adapted to Western tastes (less supernatural, more plot).  This gives them just enough distance from our expectations to open us to new perspectives, which are copiously supplied.  All the books are good and largely self-sufficient, but starting with the first in temporal sequence, The Chinese Gold Murders, lets you follow the development of Magistrate Dee and his assistants.
• Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Whimsey novels are justly famous, although they build in quality over Sayers' career.  I suggest Murder Must Advertise as an easy start (Sayers worked in advertising and provides a hilarious informed-but-not-impressed view).  The high point of the work is the Oxford-situated Gaudy Night, which is a serious novel about the conflict between romance and intelligence.  It is the third of four involving Whimsey's destined mate, Harriet Vane, but reading it and its successor Busman's Honeymoon before reading the less brilliant lead-ins works fine.  A recent sequel based on Sayer's notes (Thrones, Dominations by Jill Paton Walsh) is fully up to the standard and should not be left out.
• The six Charlie Chan novels of Earl Der Biggers are intelligent and anti-racist, in contrast to what Hollywood has done in their name.  The first one, The House Without A Key, is a particularly deft mix of cultural contrast, detection, and romance.
• Laurie King 's The Beekeeper's Apprentice and its sequels (especially A Monstrous Regiment of Women, O Jerusalum, and The Game) are an astoundingly successful extension of the Sherlock Holmes mythos, adding comparably-capable young Mary Russell (and a late-middle-aged Holmes' interactions with her).  King's contemporary-settings stories (such as To Play The Fool) are also excellent -- much more than escapist fare.
• The Superintendent Bone books by Suzanne Stacey are an odd mix: police-procedurals full of perceptive and loving people of all ages.  There is a strong progessive development of widower Bone's relationship with his teenage daughter Charlotte (and eventually with her favorite teacher), so start with Goodbye Nanny Gray.
• The Professor Kate Fansler novels of Amanda Cross.  Intelligence, liberated and sympathetic but trained and genteel, deployed in academia based in New York City.  Heart and mind working together. 
• A Night At The Vulcan, by Ngaio Marsh, is one of the most successful romance-with-mystery-trimmings novels I have read.  Also noteworthy is her Artists In Crime, in which gentleman detective Roderick Alleyn starts the romance that becomes an attractive marriage of impressive integrity.
• Sherlock Holmes -- Start with The Sign of Four and move on through.  Some of the stories are a bit routine (author Conan Doyle got tired of Holmes before the public did), but His Final Bow (on the eve of World War I) still has some jewels.
• Patricia Wentworth -- While her books featuring governess-turned-detective Miss Silver (e.g., Eternity Ring, Latter End, The Story of William Smith ) are dependably good, her stand-alone books like Nothing Ventured show that she can vary the formula, although she always includes a romance.
• While my favorite at this point is Professor Peter Shandy of Balacava Agricultural College rather than Boston downstart Sarah Kelling Bittersohn, all four of Charlotte McLeod's cosy mystery series are attractive, including the two she writes as Alisa Craig (Mountie Madoc Rhys and Grub-and-Stakers Dittany, Osric, et al).  All are ensemble pieces with several contrasting but (mostly) harmonious protagonists.
• Too Many Magicians -- Randall Garrett's unique tour-de-force novel is both a fascinating alternative history (where high technology developed via magic rather than science and a reformed feudalism has led to a well-integrated but very human society) and an excellent mystery, where Duke's Investigator Lord Darcy and his forensic sorceror Sean O Lochlainn untangle a mixture of crime, espionage, and government politics arising from a murder at the Anglo-France Sorcerers' Convention.  Garrett wrote eight other shorter stories in the same vein but, alas, no more novels in our strand of history.
• Agatha Christie -- No sex, not much romance (and then mainly as a motive), very little lab work or insight into police methods.  Instead, a steady stream of perceptive psychology in characters and plots, with solutions that seem fair in retrospect but get lost in the distractions even on the second or third reading.  Of the detectives I particularly like Miss Marple, the old maid whose village-gossip experiences have given her a level of insight that it would be unfair to expect of policemen.
• While the Mrs Pollifax stories of Dorothy Gilman are well done, her other stories (Incident at Badamya, Thale's Folly, Caravan, The Tightrope Walker, Kaleidoscope) are where she fully deploys the character insight and creativity that she has to ration in a popular series. 
• Yes, Perry Mason is rather a formula, but Earl Stanley Gardner varies the legal situations to keep us (and the District Attorney) guessing until the end each time.  Gardner's authentic passion for justice shows through in these and other stories, and if few of his plots are memorable, all are enjoyable.
• Leslie Chateris ' stories of The Saint, like the actions of their protagonist Simon Templar (the "Robin Hood of Modern Crime"), are irresponsible expressions of unapologetic male ego that expect exemption from normal rules.  They get it from some (a flaw in us, no doubt) because the combination of wit, freedom, grace, and skill is rarer than the missing docile virtues.
• Sara Woods -- London barrister Antony Maitland has the initiative and commitment to justice of Perry Mason without Mason's self-confidence or (as a junior figure in a tradition-based system) freedom of action.  Instead he has a family/friend network of supportive but dissimilar equals, with the result that each of these stories packs an emotional punch as well as an intellectual puzzle.
• Philo Vance -- The greatest interest of the dilettante-as-detective 1920s New York City stories of S. S. Van Dine is their early exploration of that motif, with the conflict of official/evidence and intellectual/psychology cultures all the more clearly portrayed since they are nominally working together.
• Elizabeth Daly took a different tack in her 1930s stories of bibliophile/gentleman Henry Gammage, whose incidental detection is more in the unsupported-amateur tradition, with more emotional realism and less rhetorical florish.
• Emma Lathen's many stories in which eminent investment banker John Putnam Thatcher is forced to solve mysteries in the course of business deals are surprisingly varied and fresh, benefiting from the complexity of the world's relationship to money.

FANTASY

• Nine Princes in Amber
• The Lord of the Rings
• Darkover
• That Hideous Strength
• Stranger In A Strange Land

UTOPIAS

• The Dispossessed --
• Out of the Silent Planet --
• Back To Methuselah --
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress --
• Islandia --

CLASSIC FICTION

• Dickens -- Little Dorritt
• Fielding -- Tom Jones
• Hemingway -- For Whom The Bell Tolls
• Jane Austen --
• William Shakespeare -- The only reason to read Shakespeare (except for the sonnets) is so that you can be amazed at how much more effective the plays are in performance.  Books are not the only medium for stories.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (always in a category of his own)

• Major Barbara
• Man And Superman
• Back To Methuselah
• Saint Joan
• An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism

ACCESSIBLE SCIENCE

• Godel Escher Bach
• Linus Pauling's General Chemistry --
• Flatland --
• Proofs and Refutations --
• The Prehistory of the Mind

EDUCATION

• Thought and Language
• Mindstorms

EVOLUTION

• The Origins of Order
• Fluid Dreams and Creative Analogies.

• Modern English Usage
• Encyclopedia of Mathematics

MEGATOKYO
     A wealth of art and literature is emerging online, mixing the classic themes of love, honor, and adventure with the cultures of gamers, techies, and artists.  A particularly engaging and accessible example is Megatokyo, an American manga strip set in Japan.  Now with over 1000 hand-drawn scanned strips (all free at http://www.megatokyo.com/), it has been growing at 3 strips per week since 2000.  The strips form a single continuous still-developing story but include meta-strips about the artist, digressions of various sorts, and occasional guest strips.  The art has manga stylization and varies, without apology, in its level of polish as it explores various levels of experience.  An extended Wikipedia entry is available.
     I'm a fan.  My MegaTokyo guide site  makes it easier to access the main story.  The first few dozen strips evolve from self-contained gags to character-driven narrative, so persevere through Chapter 0 to get a feeling for the style (the drawing gets much better too).  You will see that what we have here is not just escapism, but literature about escapism.  The gamer, romantic, and fantasy elements are played against the cliches and realities of modern culture with striking honesty and richness, both in characters and situations.  As the plot layers and swirls accumulate, whatever strands and people you first identify with lead you to a wider and deeper feeling for all the rest.