Here’s a website, Beta Shepherd, that declares its goal is to “create an experience that is like wandering around your favorite bookstore.” Certainly a laudable goal! I do miss the bookstore experience, which nearly disappeared for me when I moved an hour and a half from any regular bookstore.
They asked me to write a post for them. I did, and here it is: The Best Fantasy Novels that Sweep You Into a Very Strange World.
I was trying to think of worlds that, like Tuyo, aren’t set on planets with normal geology and so on. It was tricky to come up with five.
If you poke around on the site, you’ll see some amazingly specific lists: The best books about 1939 Hollywood, for example. I wonder what was special about 1939 in Hollywood. I guess something must have been. Here’s one I’m much more likely to click into: The best young adult fairytale retellings. A lot more nonfiction categories than fiction, it looks like, so far; but on the other hand there are A LOT of categories. Tons. Scroll way down to F and you’ll find various fantasy categories, like The best fantasy books you’ve never heard of — there’s a perennially useful topic for blog posts.
Anyway, lots here. Let me see. Suspense Novels with Emotionally Intelligent Characters. Thucydides. Women in War. Zeppelins. Really, this is an entertainingly cluttered site. It’s definitely well worth clicking through and poking around.
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1939 is typically considered the best year ever for movies, featuring _Gone With the Wind_, which is *still* the top movie in history adjusted for inflation, and a whole bunch of other classics like _The Wizard of Oz_ and _Mr Smith Goes to Washington_.
1939 is when the world turned from peace (however uneasy) to world war again. Msybe the authors used 1939 as sort of temporal liminal space, if you will, that provided dramatic tension in the background (or foreground) of their books.