Kimberly Gardner

We all have favorite authors and favorite books. I am no exception, and with each year that passes my list of favorites and auto-buys grows longer and longer. Thank heaven for the advent of ebooks. Now I can store hundreds of titles on my computer rather than having my husband build an addition on our house just to hold my TBR piles. *g*

But that isn’t really what this post is about. It’s about stepping outside my comfort zone and trying not only a brand new (to me anyway) author, but a brand new genre as well.

Now, admittedly, I read a lot of romance, in fact romance is my favorite genre hands down, and the more explicit the better.

But I also enjoy reading horror, suspense, mainstream and literary fiction.

What I hardly ever pick up when brousing for my next reading experience is science fiction or fantasy. Sure, the occasional Margaret Atwood or Lois McMaster Bujold makes its way into the rotation, but almost never the hard core sf that has garnered such a loyal following among so many of my bookish friends.

But all that is about to change. *trumpet flourish*

After reading a column called Beautiful Losers over at Picador, I am about to venture into the realms of the sf/f enthusiast.

I just bought from Fictionwise a book called Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Here’s the blurb.

Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her–and the life he knows vanishes like smoke. Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won’t stop for him, his hundred rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere. For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the cause of her family’s slaughter, and in doing so preserve this strange underworld kingdom from the malevolence that means to destroy it. And with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew must now join the Lady Door’s entourage in their determined–and possibly fatal–quest. For the dread journey ever-downward–through bizarre anachronisms and dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time–is Richard’s final hope, his last road back to a “real” world that is growing disturbingly less real by the minute.

Doesn’t that sound delicious?