This month’s KGB was about as packed as you might expect from a bill shared by one of the most popular authors in the YA field and an up-and-comer with a much-buzzed book. The authors in question are Holly Black, whose first comic book, The Good Neighbors, is just a few days from release, and Lauren McLaughlin, whose book Cycler came out in August. Lauren read two sections from Cycler: one from the perspective of protagonist Jill, and one from Jack, the boy Jill turns into for four days a month. Since it’s hard to do a reading from a comic book without special technology, Holly elected to read her story “The Boy Who Cries Wolf” from the forthcoming anthology Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales (edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling).
And before and between the readings, I conducted this month’s Tor.com Ridiculous Survey. This time I asked people for their favorite book in high school, for presumably obvious reasons. We logged 41 answers in total, including responses from Holly and Lauren. And only six of them started with “Lord of the”!
- Alaya Dawn Johnson: Winter of Fire, Tigana
- Barbara Krasnof: Pickwick Papers
- Ben Francisco: Stranger in a Strange Land
- Carrie: Dark Rivers of the Heart
- Cecil Castellucci: Dune
- Cheryl Barkauskas: Jane Eyre
- Chris Cevasco: The Lord of the Rings
- Delia Sherman: The Lord of the Rings
- Douglas Cohen: Game of Thrones
- Dustin Kurtz: The Sound and the Fury, The Silmarillion
- Ellen Datlow: Last Exit to Brooklyn
- Ellen Kushner: Wizard of Earthsea, The Last Unicorn
- Eugene Myers: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six more
- Genevive Valentine: The Last Unicorn
- Gina Gagliano: Swordspoint
- Holly Black: Tales from the Flat Earth, Interview With the Vampire, Elric saga
- J D. Everyhove: The Last Herald-Mage
- Jim Freund: Martian Chronicles
- John Joseph Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Josh Lewis: The Lord of the Rings
- Justin Howe: Lord of the Flies
- Kris Dikeman: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- Lauren McLaughlin: Catch-22
- Livia Llewellyn: Richard III
- Liz Gorinsky: The Sandman: The Kindly Ones
- Luke Hannafin: Dune
- Matt Kressel: A Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
- Matt Withers: Tono-bungay
- Megan Messinger: Mockingbird
- Meghan McCarron: The Handmaid’s Tale
- Mercurio D. Rivera: Lord of the Flies
- Nina Lourie: War for the Oaks
- Nora Jemisin: Dragonflight (first pern)
- Paul M. Berger: Winter’s Tale (actually, it could be this one, too—Paul?)
- Philipp R.: Otherland
- Rajan Khanna: One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Sarah Micklem: Dune
- Susan Marie Groppi: The Dispossessed, The Fountainhead
- Tempest Bradford: Forever
- Val Freire: Hamlet
- Vanessa: Lord of the Flies
Like last time, if I got your response wrong—or if you’d rather I linked to a different page, or didn’t use your full name—please let me know via my shoutbox. And if I missed you this time, please come find me at the next event!
[Image by Flickr user Anosmia, CC licensed for commercial use.]