Caveat Lector

One group starts thinking about Christmas even earlier than marketers: musicians. Christmas concerts are invariably a race to learn huge amounts of music in teeny-tiny amounts of time. Was so when I was a bitty high-schooler half my lifetime ago, is so now that I’m a grown ex-Jew who sings Christmas music for fun (though not, alas, for profit). So I apologize for bringing up the holiday season vastly too early.

Even with the rush, though, there’s always time for a good prank… our conductor raised his hands to start us off with a little Handel—and we gave him Handel. Did we ever. “ZAAAAAADOK THE PRIIIIIIIIIIIEST! AND NAAAAAAAAATHAN THE PROOOOOOPHET! ANOOOOOOOOINTEEEED SOLOMOOOOOON KIIIIIIIIING!”

“Yes, yes they did,” he said, that really being all the poor guy could say under the circumstances. “Er, where did you get your pitches for that?” (Our accompanist was in on the prank, carefully plunking out the right chord as though randomly exercising his fingers.)

There’s a lot of Christmas music in the world. A lot a lot. Fortunately, a lot of it is fairly easy, because composers have to scramble at Christmastime too. Much of it is twee. Much is overused. Some of it is cringingly dreadful. Bits and pieces (as long as I’m picking on Handel) create unsavory mental images involving sheep. All of this is only redeemed by the indisputable fact that Christmas has inspired some amazingly good music.

For my money, the best music ever written for Christmas is Tomás Luis de Victoria’s motet O Magnum Mysterium. I can’t even be articulate about how wonderful this piece is. It just is. Go and find a recording by someone good (this one at Marquette manages not to be completely horrible, but I’m afraid they’re not feeling the wonderfulness much). We’re not singing it; I remember it fondly from high school, is all.

As you might guess from the above recommendation (the text of which, if my getting-rustier-every-day Latin will serve, begins “O great mystery and admirable sacrament, that the animals should have [first] seen the newborn Christ lying in the manger”), I prefer Christmas music that emphasizes humility, hope, and shared humanity.

So I’m cool toward the famous Hallelujah Chorus (which also isn’t on the program); it’s great fun to sing, but it’s a bit triumphalist for my tastes. I much prefer “For unto us a child is born,” which we are singing. The text veers between the domestic, immediate, familiar joy of a just-born baby to the immense, world-spanning vision of what this particular baby will grow into. The genius of Handel’s setting (which, being Handel at Christmastime, he cribbed from another of his works) is that the triumphal future doesn’t eclipse the gentle present; except at the very end, we always return to the quieter title line and its almost self-absorbed melisma.

For spine-tingling melodic beauty, you can’t go wrong with “O Come Emmanuel.” The more modern “Still, Still, Still” on our program tries for a similar sense of serenity, and doesn’t miss by too much (which is, admittedly, damning with faint praise—but there’s so much truly great Christmas music that the merely good runs into trouble). We’re doing “O Holy Night,” of course, but that piece is ruined forever for me, because my best friend in high school sang the absolutely definitive, not-to-be-improved-upon rendition in her crystalline lyric soprano long ago. (In passing, though, there is nothing worse than “O Holy Night” done with a big wibble-wobbly vibrato, as it too often is. Ugh, the wrongness. Makes me want to boil my ears out with lye.)

I don’t know quite what I think of classically-trained choirs doing gospel or calypso or the like. Leaving aside that the effect is at best mildly bizarre and at worst wince-worthy, there are serious issues of cultural (mis-)appropriation and stereotyping to think about… but for classically-trained choirs to shy away from that music altogether risks marginalizing plenty of people who deserve to be visible and audible at the holiday table, so—I don’t know. We’re doing a calypso number. It’s a fun sing. Take it for what it’s worth. It’s much better music than this one weird frantic John Williams thing that’s in the program, I’ll happily give it that.

I love me some good English 6/8 caroling, and our program has plenty, even though the silly arrangers go and write it in 3 or 2 to keep the orchestra happy. But we’ve got your gossipy “I Saw Three Ships” and your wassailing song (in an amusingly sly arrangement that features both chorus and orchestra demonstrating a few effects of overindulgence). Also some standard favorites I won’t bother discussing, though I will note that I cannot sing “Ding Dong Merrily On High” now without hearing my coworker Jamie’s parody from last year’s library holiday party: “Ding dong merrily on high, the loading-dock bell ringeth! Ding dong verily some guy, deliv’ries for us bringeth…” So if I break up laughing in the middle, now you know why.

There will be cute little kids singing, and there will be carols for audience participation, and there will be Handel (sans sheep), and there will be “O Come Emmanuel,” and there will not (thank goodness) be a choral rendition of “Sleigh Ride,” and at one point there will be me hitting a high G-natural (trust me, this is an event), and there will be either the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra (with its awesome brass section) or the City of Fairfax Band, and the performance with the band is free (though you should call for a ticket to be assured a seat), so how can you lose? I know it’s dead early to be thinking about this stuff, but save a date anyway, won’t you?

If my fangirly tribute posts squick you, now would be a good time to move on.

I first started skimming the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography updates when I was a wee conversion peasant at Impressions in the late ’90s. (I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think those updates existed in weblog format at the time; I remember there being a mailing list. I wasn’t on it. I just checked back every couple of weeks or so.)

I didn’t understand a lot of what floated by at the time; my focus was too narrow for that. Still, SEPB made me subliminally aware that there was more to e-publishing than the ebook hype I was caught up in, and that these weird creatures called “academic libraries” were implicated. I can’t honestly say that SEPB is the reason I’m a librarian, never mind the kind of librarian I am—but I can and do maintain that SEPB opened my mind to let the possibility in.

My path hasn’t (yet) crossed his at a conference, so I don’t know whether his low-key, formal online self-presentation corresponds to his offline demeanor. (I’m cautious about assumptions of this nature, having found—from both sides of the act of judgment!—that the degree of congruence varies widely.) All I can say is that it’s easy, probably much too easy, for a new entrant to the field not to realize what a powerhouse Charles W. Bailey Jr. has been and still is.

Because the SEPB is moving, I heard about Bailey’s resignation from the University of Houston libraries from several different mailing lists at once. (Typical of him to center his announcement on the SEPB rather than himself.) It was several hours at least before the same announcement appeared on his weblog, and a whole day before Liz Lawley asked what I (not being any sort of friend or acquaintance) didn’t dare ask: what next?

Bailey’s answer is equivocal, suggesting perhaps a done but unannounced deal… but I look forward to clarification, because I expect it’s good news for scholarly communication. Anything that enhances Bailey’s impact on the world is.

I hate PDF. I have plenty of PDF-hater cred. It is a wretched format for any digital object that has any conceivable future use other than perusal by a sighted human being. It’s terrible for the print-disabled. It’s terrible for text-mining. It’s terrible for transclusion or other reuse. It’s terrible for metadata-embedding. I hate it.

The ETD conference’s one serious misstep was letting in an Adobe shill. (Just repeating how much I loathe commercials masquerading as conference sessions, so we all know, right?) As shills do, this one talked about the whizbang new wonderfulness that the next version of PDF will have—the new wonderfulness being multimedia embedding. I dropped my head into my hands (because multimedia embedding makes my preservation job harder, not easier!), and then I sat up, raised my hand, and let the shill have it with both barrels. This embedding, it’ll be Adobe-proprietary, won’t it? I asked. Uhhhhhhhh, I dunno, the shill said. (Why is it that companies who send shills to conferences don’t prepare them at all for the questions they are likely to encounter from a given audience?) Well, I said, we’re librarians here, and we worry a lot about digital preservation, and proprietary formats are total non-starters with us. The shill winced. I nodded in satisfaction.

Plenty of other people despise PDF too, most of them far smarter and more influential than I’ll ever be. I have my own reasons, is all.

I was working on batch-import metadata for the repository last week. (I’m still working on batch-import metadata for the repository; 40 years of papers suddenly dropped in my lap, and even without the half I can’t use yet due to no permissions, that’s a lot of papers! I got twelve years in last Friday. It’s a start.) Because I am a librarian, and they’ll yank my MLS if I don’t get obsessive about metadata, I’ve been grabbing out abstracts whenever possible. Whatever tool produced the PDFs for the two-column ACM layout that a lot of the more recent articles are in, it produced PDFs that don’t grok columnar layouts. I can’t cut and paste the abstract without culling a lot of garbage from the second column.

(This is one reason PDF is terrible for text-mining. Most halfway-sophisticated text-mining apps pay attention to a word’s context. When PDF mucks up the context by not indicating where logical rather than layout-driven line ends are, it mucks up text-mining engines.)

I have been retyping those abstracts into the metadata. I’m just that obsessive. Let’s not talk about how much time that cost me, hm? All because of a bad, bad, bad format. My able co-presenter Tim Donohue is working on a DSpace filter from Office docs to corresponding OpenOffice formats, and I can’t wait, I’m so sick of PDF.

I still take PDFs into the repository. I take PDFs that are nothing but mashed-up page scans. I take PDFs that look like warmed-over death. I even make PDFs for the repository, usually out of slideshows or Word documents. (Yes, yes, I ingest the original too. I’m not stupid about PDF.)

Why? Because I can’t afford to be picky, and more often than not, PDF is all there is. That’s reality. I’d love to be a format snob. I can’t, because format-snobbery means many things disappear forever, in any format. Capture first—then we can talk about preservation. Maybe we can even talk about pouring time into pulling something useful out of the PDF. But capture first.

More fundamentally, I can’t be a format snob because I don’t work in publishing any more. (I strongly believe I will again someday, because I think academic libraries will be the university press reborn, but my vindication on this point is still a decade or more away. I expect CavLec will still be here in 2016, so everyone can laugh at my hubris then.) I don’t control editing or typesetting practices. I triply don’t control author behavior. Until the rules of the game change, repository-rats are beggars, and beggars don’t get format menus.

A Portico rep dropped by to give us a presentation last week (you can read about it via my boss). Portico has been smart about this. For publishers that produce markup in some form or other, they’re grabbing it, NLM-DTDifying it, and storing that alongside the original.

Yet even Portico has to store PDF too. That’s just how it is. We do our best to preserve what we have, and what we have is PDF. Doesn’t make me like the format any better, of course, but I do wish folks would allow that I’m not an Adobe tool; I’m just being realistic.

I knew about the uproar in the American Anthropological Association over FRPAA, of course. (Short version: the AAA board opposed FRPAA without consulting the membership’s online-publishing arm, which promptly told the board to get stuffed, at which point the board disbanded them. DISBANDED. THEM.) After all, I’m the librarian daughter of an anthropologist.

The online-publishing arm isn’t taking this lying down. Oh, no. There’s an energetic blog. There’s a wiki. There’s T-shirts. There’s talk of a session on open access at the AAA’s national conference—now that’s cojones for you.

I love these folks. They rock. They are my shiny new heroes. I could almost join ALA again just to pull stunts like this. (Almost.) The problem with open access is that we don’t have a glitzy swanky award ceremony to invite these people to and give them little statues.

I’m working on my presentation for this in between hacking at metadata and checking rights on that huge pile of papers, and I’ve already stashed AAA in there (along with Stephen Breckler of the APA) as examples of how you! too! can shoot your society in the collective foot by trying to protect your journal revenue at whatever cost to your society’s membership and its public image. Debate the issue by all means, lay out your worries, ask for feedback and explain the society’s financial options clearly—but don’t insult your readership (actual or potential) the way Breckler did, and don’t split your membership over this!

Because you will lose. My money’s on the OAA against the AAA, all the way. Go heroes go!

Clearing rights on this pile of papers I’ve got is no joke. What should I do with a 20-year-old article in a journal that no longer exists from a publisher that’s been sold two or three times? (Ask for the author’s copy of the publishing agreement, you say? You are a funny person. Where are your last five publishing agreements? How about your publishing agreements from 1983?)

I’m erring on the side of inclusion and access, with an immediate-withdraw-on-controversy policy (which has saved my bacon before, though not in any copyright disputes) to back me up. No, I don’t know that the book agreement between the author and a now-nonexistent publisher contained the usual rights-reversion clause when the book went out of print, and I can’t exactly ask, can I? But it’s a reasonable guess—that’s how the vast majority of scholarly-book agreements work. So in go the book chapters.

Even so, I’m finding things (usually journal-publisher PDFs) I just cannot use. Sure, they’re just-as-illegally up in plain sight on the author’s own piece of the university web, but publishers who tread lightly around their authors won’t hesitate to come down like a ton of bricks on me. Just ask your local e-reserves librarian.

I intend to treat this as a teachable moment, and I strongly recommend that other repository managers do likewise. I’m keeping track of items I can’t use and why I can’t use them. The list will go back to the author when I’m finally done with this pile. I will stop short of demanding that the author pull down the offending items from his own website, partly because I am not campus copyright cop (though I duly emailed our CCC and got her input), and partly because I doubt he’ll pay much heed to a mere librarian—but I certainly shall indicate that the postings are in violation of publisher policy and (in some cases) U.S. copyright law, and leave him to his own thoughts.

I shall also mention that some of the items I have to reject because they are publisher PDFs can be archived in final-draft form. SHERPA/ROMEO will figure in this statement. And of course I shall offer to look at future publishing agreements with or for him, to keep this problem from occurring in future. We’ll see what happens.

Most faculty do not understand how scholarly publishing works, nor do they realize how what they sign affects what they and others can legally do with their work. (I had to dissuade an enthusiastic website creator from creating an automated publisher-PDF harvester the other day. To be fair, he was not faculty; he was a contractor in the process of becoming a Ph.D student.) Triply do they not realize the control they have over the situation. Those few faculty who do understand all this are mostly scholarly-society brass who tell their colleagues to sign the nice agreement, no, you don’t need to read it!

Despite the extra paperwork and faculty ire involved, repository managers need to acquaint faculty with how much of their work is disappearing into the toll-access abyss, and what they can do about it. (I am pondering a new set of faculty brown-bags, shorter and less comprehensive but much sharper and more focused than my previous talk series.) Moreover, any repository whose policy on copyright violations does not include mediating between publisher and author is missing a trick. Don’t just “disappear” material that shouldn’t have been posted. Make sure the author knows what happened and why. We have to educate. And we have to educate at pain-points, or nothing will change.

Bits and pieces, because I’m bloody busy:

• DSpace fans, there’s survey results you should look at. My takeaway was that there are boatloads of people writing code around DSpace and not sharing it. I suspected that was so, and that’s why (when I actually took the survey) I put a plugin API at the top of my wants list, but now I know. I’m not all that keen on a plugin API; I just want to be able to get my hands on Other People’s Code!

• Arthur Sale, bless him, has finally recognized that repository-rats have zero power to impose mandates. He is of the opinion that the way forward is “patchwork mandates,” lobbying specific departments to impose mandates on their people. I tend to agree, despite significant reservations about repository-rat power to accomplish even this much—this is a game a smart repository-rat wants the Powers That Be in her library in on.

  Me, I want the folks who might actually want to be in the repository first, before I go chasing after mandates. Know who that is? I do. It’s the little research fiefdoms. They’re smaller and vastly less bureaucratic, so there’s a lot less hair-tearing involved than with an actual department. Plus, they need the exposure in a way an established department doesn’t. Plus, anything that allows them to shove some IT chores off on somebody else will be agreeable to them.

• The Open Access Anthro wiki moved.
• Lots of government and funder mandate action happening the last couple of weeks. We live in interesting times, and for once that’s a good thing!

I read anything and everything I could get my grubby little paws on when I was a kid. I’m sure this surprises no one. Some things I couldn’t get through (and still can’t); I made a valiant try at James Fenimore Cooper because my grandfather recommended him, but yuck.

Lattimore’s translation of the Odyssey, though? I think I was all of eight. I found my mother’s high-school copy in the basement, recognized the name (because I read Bulfinch and Hamilton at seven thanks to a gifted elementary-school teacher), and just dove in. I remember giggling when Odysseus pitched up buck-nekkid in front of Princess Nausicaa, and being as sanguinary as youngsters generally are, I loved when the first arrogant suitor got it in the neck from the master’s immense bow. (Thought Telemakhos was a royal bore, but hey, I was eight.)

I read not a few of the standard children’s offerings. The Little House books. Some of the Grosset and Dunlap career series—Cherry Ames and Vicki Barr and that lot. Anne of Green Gables, for whom I still have a fondness. Tolkien and Lewis, of course, and Lloyd Alexander, and when I got into my teens I’m afraid I was rather indiscriminate about fantasy, though I never sank so low as to much enjoy Terry Brooks or RA Salvatore or all the other Tolkien-poseurs. (Did read Brooks. Did read Weis and Hickman at summer camp. Never read Salvatore.)

But my hands-down all-time favorite children’s book, the one I still pick up and read with pleasure, the one I took the trouble to have autographed by its author because I love it so much, is The Phantom Tollbooth.

For unstinting verbal ingenuity, for its morose but indefatigable protagonist, for sharp satire hidden in gentle allegory, for excellently rhythmic dialogue, for fall-down-funny moments, for love of beauty in all its forms, for the promise that mistakes and faults can be redeemed and transcended—for all these things I love that book.

If by some freak of chance you haven’t read it, do so. I promise you won’t regret it, no matter how old (or, for that matter, young) you are.

Walt Crawford didn’t tell me I was getting a big spread in the latest Cites & Insights. Believe me, I’ve had many worse surprises!

For the record, if you read via newsfeed, it’s quite possible to catch up on my open-access pieces and dodge the rest of my maunderings altogether. Check the sidebar for the little (feed) link after each of my category-archive listings. That gets you just the feed you want. Subcategories are included in their larger-category feeds, so if you subscribe to the Librariana feed, you get everything posted to that category as well as anything posted to the DSpace, Ebooks, and Open Access categories.

Call it a compromise. CavLec is a personal blog and will remain so, but I do realize that some folks read it for professional reasons and haven’t time for posts about Goth-kitties or Duruflé choral works or the National Zoo. With luck, the category-feed setup means nobody is too unhappy.

(with a nod, of course, to The Liminal Librarian…)

I’m hardly the first to notice that the boundaries between on-the-job life, professional life, and off-work-entirely life can be decidedly fuzzy. Sure, CavLec’s a personal blog where I talk about whatever’s in my brain at the moment that’s fit for worldwide dissemination (much being unfit therefor, of course). But just look at the last couple months’ posts—almost entirely profession-related. What can I say? I get obsessive about these things, and CavLec has become a highly convenient soapbox rather in spite of itself.

This leads, however, to some tricky social/professional negotiations. It might seem obvious that an existing blogger is the choice to head up a library’s blogging initiatives—but what if that blogger is profane, coarse, prone-to-fly-off-handles me? What library wouldn’t think twice? Even though I believe I’ve demonstrated to MPOW’s satisfaction that I know where the appropriate boundaries are, the mere fact that CavLec is a hybrid beast creates perfectly legitimate worries about whether I’ll forget in future.

Moreover, what happens if I say something professionally, socially, or politically beyond the pale here? Is MPOW obliged to take notice? Is MPOW obliged to take action? What about any professional societies I happen to belong to? Remember, CavLec is theoretically and actually my space—but I’ve assuredly muddied the waters by talking shop here; CavLec is a liminal space, sprawled over both sides of the personal/professional fence.

Restricting ourselves to the biblioblogosphere just for a moment, I note a range of responses to this difficulty. The purely professional blog, written in purely professional voice, as the blogger’s unique public face is perhaps the most obvious, because it is the easiest and most welcomed. Nearly all biblioblogs about open access take this approach, though the degree of editorialization varies from almost-entirely editorial to link-and-comment to just links.

Other bloggers split their blogging between professional and personal blogs. Still others (among whom I place myself) split between public blogging and (semi-)private blogging, often at a site that offers access controls such as Vox or LiveJournal.

The problem gets harder, though, in spaces less obviously bounded and more obviously social. Some listservs. Wikis. IRC channels: the DSpace developers’ list just got all in a tizzy about maybe logging the #dspace channel to the Web. LiveJournal communities (as opposed to individual journals). Second Life.

DSpace decided not to log its IRC channel. Two reasons were offered: first, that much of the chatter is just that, and second, that open conversation on the channel would be chilled by the awareness of logging. To my mind, the presence of ephemeral chatter and the fear of bright lights paint the IRC channel as a liminal space, between the personal and the professional.

Clearly separating personal from professional spaces makes life easier for everyone; employers can genteelly ignore the personal, while employees can extract whuffie from the professional, and since the line is roughly the same as in regular non-virtual space nobody’s expectations are violated and nobody’s nose has to go out of joint. Why do I have a LiveJournal? Because I force enough noses out of joint as it is; I’m all for MPOW not even seeing a few things, rather than forcing themselves to genteelly ignore them!

The thing is, the whole “genteelly ignore behavior in liminal spaces” model is at best a figleaf and at worst an illusion. As a professional librarian, I can’t ignore liminal spaces. Can you? Does all the information you need come to you through the strictly professional literature? Really? Do you feel not the slightest twinge of worry about your service population turning to liminal spaces for their information needs? (Then you’re the weirdest librarian I know. Google sprawls over all sorts of spaces.) Have you not even once considered how to place your library within liminal conversation spaces? (Again, if you haven’t so much as considered it, I wonder where you’ve been the last two-three years.)

I don’t agree with and am actually rather disappointed by all the WTFing surrounding Second Life and its library. Liminal online social spaces can become or be made professionally relevant. Without experimentation, how can we tell which are up-and-comers and which are flashes in the pan? Notably, experiments in making liminal spaces professional typically happen when professionals come upon, use, and become attached to the space in their non-professional lives. It’s no surprise Second Life librarians were Second Lifers first, or that IM reference tends to get pushed by avid IMers, or that library wikis get started by existing wikifolk; how could it be any other way? So a Second Life Library is a good idea because some librarians are already Second Lifers and are interested in pushing the space further toward librarianship. No other justification necessary.

But the transition from purely-social to liminal space carries costs in freedom of behavior. If there were a common, well-understood code of conduct surrounding liminal spaces, we’d be all right, even if that code was implicit. But there isn’t, and friction is flaring up all over the place. Consider the black eye Second Life Library got over at Rochelle’s because one SLL advocate brought Usenet-style social flaming into a professionally-toned discussion.

Consider my wholly graceless departure from #code4lib; consider the reasons I left, and especially consider them in light of an understated but genuine movement to consider #code4lib and similar spaces vital parts of library technology advancement. (For those who joined late: several behaviors that are accepted in IT spaces either don’t fly at all in librarian spaces or turn off people who would otherwise be useful parts of the conversation. Further deponent sayeth not except in archives.)

These are hard problems. I’ve been bitten more than once, and I wonder if anyone hasn’t by now. We can’t shut our professional selves out of liminal spaces; we impoverish both ourselves and the profession thereby. We can’t expect to treat them as purely personal spaces, either, which means a lot of unpleasant uncertainty and second-guessing, as well as regret; we all behave badly sometimes, and it’s frustrating to see venues where folks used to cut us a little slack turn into the same guarded, buttoned-down places we used the slacker venues to escape from.

At least we can talk about it. We can do that.

Via world plus dog:

“Below is a Science Fiction Book Club list most significant SF novels between 1953-2006. The meme part of this works like so: Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put a star next to the ones you love.”

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien *
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov*
3. Dune, Frank Herbert (Hate, loathe, abominate this series. Hate. HATE. Stylistically abysmal, and jaw-droppingly sexist.)
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin* (but Tehanu will always be my favorite of that series)
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke (Clarke’s long fiction behaves like L-tryptophan on me. Dunno why.)
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. * (An uncomfortable book, but a beautiful one. Skip the posthumous sequel; it’s garbage.)
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish (I really did read the whole thing, yes. Gets weird and sorta pointless toward the end.)
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett (Love much Pratchett. Very much do not love this one. Rincewind is a creep.)
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany (A grad-school book of the grad-schooliest sort. I have no stomach for grad-school books any longer. With Delany, I stick to the short stuff, which is excellent.)
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson (Guh. Horrible. So bad I won’t read any other Donaldson.)
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin*
31. Little, Big, John Crowley[?]
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny (Enh. The problems of repellent little ubermenschen forced to mix with the hoi polloi do not thrill me. I don’t like Amber either.)
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith* (Ah, lovely language!)
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke (I did finish this one. Just barely.)
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys (The novella is better than its expansion into a novel.)
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien (Doesn’t get a star only because parts of it aren’t all that lovable. It’s got some rattling good stories, though.)
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester* (I wish I didn’t love this book sometimes, because ol’ Alfie was an unreconstructed misogynist. But I still love this book.)
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer (They’re all dead. I don’t care.)

And a similar meme surrounding female sf/f writers (via):

The meme is this: go down the list and bold those writers whose work you know you’ve read, and list the most memorable or significant-to-you work(s) by that writer that you’ve read (or put “all” if the writer’s that good!). Italicize those writers whose work you’ve tried to start reading, but have bogged down, stopped, or not gotten to it for whatever reason. Strike through those writers whose work you’ve read and just can’t stand.

If there’s a writer missing whose work is SF/F and significant to you, then add her in the appropriate alphabetical location!

Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, of course)
Leigh Brackett (I don’t find her stuff memorable, though my husband absolutely loves it. Pulp in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein.)
Marian Zimmer Bradley (World plus dog has read Mists of Avalon, but I actually remember Bradley best for the stories collected in the Lythande collection, one of the earlier and better contributions to the rapidly-devolved-into-garbage Thieves’ World series.)
Lois McMaster Bujold (I can read the Miles Vorkosigan stuff, but I’m not rabidly fangirly about it. The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls I get rabidly fangirly about. Hope the next book in the series is better than The Hallowed Hunt, however, because that one was rather a waste.)
Octavia Butler (Her shorter stuff, mostly. Butler makes me squirm, so getting through her books is hard, but it’s worth it!)
Suzy McKee Charnas
C.J. Cherryh
Jo Clayton
Diane Duane (Wrote a couple readable Star Trek novels, which sounds like damning with faint praise but isn’t, because novelizations are straitjacketed writing.)
Suzette Haden Elgin (Enh.)
Carol Emshwiller (Carmen Dog)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Barbara Hambly (Liked the sensible use of linguistics and the academic mindset in the first Darwath trilogy. Unfortunately, she turned it into a soap opera after that, and I completely lost interest.)
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Nalo Hopkinson (Oo! Amazing! Loved Midnight Robber and the collection The Skin Folk.)
Diana Wynne Jones
Nancy Kress (The Beggars series, though I think it eventually went off the rails.)
Kathryn Kurtz (Not after Poughkeepsie.)
Ellen Kushner (Wow, her stuff is so polished. Swordspoint is my favorite. Didn’t care for Thomas the Rhymer, though.)
Mercedes Lackey
Tanith Lee (Another very polished writer. I like the Tales of the Flat Earth series, though I can’t get into her horror or YA stuff.)
Madeline L’Engle (Enh after the age of fifteen or so.)
Ursula K. LeGuin (All! Except for The Other Wind, which felt rushed and a copout, I’ve never read a LeGuin I didn’t love, and I reread her books more than anyone else’s.)
Doris Lessing
R.A. MacAvoy
Anne McCaffrey (Enh, and swiftly downhill from there. The Harper Hall trilogy is okay YA stuff.)
Maureen McHugh (Liked China Mountain Zhang, but it didn’t oomph me into reading more of her work. Probably too grad-schoolish.)
Vonda McIntyre
Patricia McKillip (I really wanted to like the Riddlemaster of Hed books. The worldbuilding is awesome—but she doesn’t do anything with it! Frustrating.)
Robin McKinley
Judith Merril (Read her more famous short works, but I don’t think that counts.)
C.L. Moore (Jirel of Joiry, of course, and “Vintage Season.” The Northwest Smith stories are okay in moderation, but don’t try to read them all at once, because they’re rather repetitive in plot and theme. At least read “Shambleau,” though.)
Andre Norton
Marge Piercy
Anne Rice
J.K. Rowling (When the fanfic is better-plotted and better-written than the canon…)
Joanna Russ (I know, I know, bad feminist.)
Melissa Scott (Burning Bright, because of its treatment of RPGing.)
Mary Shelley (Not in years.)
Starhawk
Sheri S. Tepper (Extremely unsubtle. Extremely. So much so that I have trouble recommending her even when her views dovetail with mine—which they don’t, always.)
James Tiptree Jr. (I am a BAD feminist. BAD. I did like “The Women Men Don’t See,” though.)
Joan D. Vinge (Enh. Living proof that women writers don’t necessarily write good female protagonists.)
Kate Wilhelm (I left a round tuit around here somewhere…)
Connie Willis (The Domesday Book is just as good as everybody says it is.)
Monique Wittig
Virginia Woolf (Okay, okay, I’ll turn over my feminist card peacefully; there’s no need to get upset about it.)

Authors I would add off the top of my head: Phyllis Gottlieb, Kij Johnson, Pat Wrede, Caroline Stevermer, Pamela Sargent, Elizabeth Moon, Pat Cadigan, Midori Snyder.