If you need something new to read/watch/experience, here’s a few tasty morsels mentioned at Narrativity!

At the Writing Workshop:
Archer’s Goon – Dianna Wynne Jones
connected by structure:
Conquest – Nina Allan
Airside – Christopher Priest
Lost Books of the Odyssey – Zachary Mason

Friday & Saturday Mentions:
Non-fiction Books
The Fan’s Little Golden Guide to Throwing Your Own Con
Hero with a Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell (books about story)
The Science of Story – Will Storr (books about story)
My Story Can Beat Up Your Story – Jeffrey Schecter (books about story)
How to Write a Page Turner – Jordan Rosenfeld (books about story)
The Art of Creation – Arthur Koestler (books about story)
An Experiment in Criticism – CS Lewis (entertaining vs important fiction)
On Moral Fiction – John Gardner (entertaining vs important fiction)
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear – Elizabeth Gilbert (eat the shit sandwich)
Beating the Story – Robin D Laws
Sex, Lies, and Videotape: Movie Edition Screenplay – Steven Soderbergh (how scripts change in the process of making a movie)
Wordslut – Amanda Montell (about gendered language)

Individual Fiction
The Wood Wife – Terri Windling
Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice
Twelve Kings of Sharakhai – Bradley Beaulieu
War for the Oaks – Emma Bull (spawned a meme)
The Marrow Thieves – Cherie Dimaline (believable bad choices)
Watership Down – Richard Adams (subversion of genre)
The Dink Patrol and the Love Slaves of Xuyan Than Phu – Bruce Minney
I Am Not a Serial Killer – Dan Wells (what signals are we sending the reader)
This is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (good foreshadowing)
Comfort Me With Apples – Catherynne M Valente (good foreshadowing)
Hard Wired – Walter Jon Williams (wrong ending)
The City We Became – NK Jemisin (sets up what is going to happen in the 1st chapter)
Eyes of the Dragon – Stephen King (fantasy when readers expect horror)
Emma – Jane Austen (repetition for humor)
Pride & Prejudice – Jane Austen (repetition for humor)
Wizard of Pigeons – Megan Lindholm (mc can only have $1)
Space Opera – Catherynne Valente (the character can say anything)
Shades of Gray – Jesper Fforde (new things on every re-read)
Freedom & Necessity – Steven Brust & Emma Bull (good history)
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden – Hannah Green (book read by someone at wrong time caused harm)
Growing Up Weightless – John M Ford (shows the reader what they need to know)
Gospel of the Night – Will Shetterly
Remake – Connie Willis (censorship dystopia)

Series/Serial Fiction
Rampart Trilogy – M R Carey (trilogy based on single short book Engine Summer by John Crowley)
Ramage Series – Dudley Pope (serial writing that starts good but doesn’t stay there)
Amber – Zelazny (Corwin books written as a serial, Merlin books written as a series)
Magic Treehouse series – May Pope Osborne (middle-grade serial)
Nancy Drew (serial, started as one author, became many)
Game of Thrones – George RR Martin (perhaps some bad writing, letting characters make all the decisions)
Jack Reacher – Lee Child (choices done poorly, when it becomes a drinking game)
The Rising – Brian Keene (ending of first book ambiguous, author had one intent, but the audience wanted another direction)
Dresden Files – Jim Butcher (telegraphing “Chekov’s gun”)
Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe (densely layered)
Honor Harrington – David Weber (detailed sections that can be skipped or not by the reader)

Authors
Scott Lynch (not pulp)
James Elroy (making wrong decisions in the right way)
Lois McMaster Bujold (making wrong decisions in the right way)
Michael Crichton (dense with info drops)
Tom Clancy (dense with info drops in a way that created the techno-thriller genre)
Umberto Eco (notoriously dense)
William Gibson – language tells you about the world

Movies/Television
Cocaine Bear (idea kernel from boring to crazy)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (train your brain to see rabbits)
The Room (is it bad?)
Dr. Who (early serialized, later series)
Coronation Street (longest running British soap opera – serial fiction)
The Last of Us (change of character motivations)
Breaking Bad (signals the reader where the series is going)
Banshees on Inisherin (consequences of decisions)
Stranger than Fiction (what kind of story are we in)
Sean of the Dead (sets up what is going to happen in the first “chapter”)
Blood Simple → Raising Arizona (Coen Brothers took BS and turned it into RA by pushing it into the absurd)
Zero Hour (earnest movie Airplane is based on)
Abbott Elementary (quality current sitcom)
Headless: A Sleepy Hollow Story (comedy series)
Don’t Look Up (satire)
Disastrous Life of Saiki K (anime, quick-paced snappy comedy)
Pepsi, Where’s My Jet

Other Media
First Line Frenzy (YouTube channel)
Born with Teeth – Liz Duffy Adams (play)
Flying Karamzov Brothers (comedy troupe)
Bloom County – Berkeley Breathed (comic strip, 11.14.92 referenced)

Works and Creators that have been/are frequently censored
The Family Shakespeare – Thomas Bowdler (really his sister)
Lawn Boy – Jonathan Evison
Genderqueer – Maia Kobabe
The Hill We Climb – Amanda Gorman
Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Toni Morrison
The Smothers Brothers (Vietnam bits)
Roald Dahl (classic collection and new “edited” versions)
And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street – Dr Suess
Goosebumps – RL Stine
Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
The Mikado – GIlbert & Sullivan (creator edited to remove unintentional slur)
The Alan Parsons Project
E.T.
Star Wars
The Lost Prince – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Harry Potter – JK Rowling

Anti-Book Ban Resources/Organizations
American Library Association
PEN America
Banned Books Week
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

 
Got something cool that we missed off this list? Add it in the comments!