With e-publishing getting so easy (unless you are trying to format poetry, sigh), there has been a boom in self-published books. I've found that if I apply the same selection methods I do to traditionally published books (premise, recommendations, reviews, read a sample), the quality is surprisingly similar.

For example, my single favorite romance novel of last year was Courtney Milan's Unraveled. (Click on author tag to see my review.) For a different type of example, click my "awesomely bad books" and "implausible plots" tag-- most of those books were traditionally published and edited by professional editors.

Since self-published authors don't get any publicity beyond what they can drum up themselves, I'm sure there are many self-pubbed books and authors which are completely off my radar. Please recommend self-published books or short stories to me. (I'm not including reprints of books which were originally traditionally published.)

I am already aware of Courtney Milan, Andrea Host, Sarah Diemer, Zetta Elliott, Neesha Meminger, and Judith Tarr's Living in Threes. If you want to rec them in comments for the benefit of other readers, go ahead, but please try to additionally rec something else which I may not know about.

Books obtained at library sale. Please comment if you've heard of or read any:

Dangerous Waters, by John Burnett. Arrr - no, this is actually nonfiction about modern pirates.

The Final Solution: A Story of Detection, by Michael Chabon. Mysteries, Holocaust survivors, codes, and a parrot.

Folk Tales from the North, by Winifred Finlay. North England, I believe; titles include "The Laidley Worm of Spindlestone Heugh" and "Mary-Ann and the Cauld Lad of Hylton." This is exactly the sort of thing that makes library sales so great.

The Rocking Horse Secret, by Rumer Godden. Children's book, never read it. Godden's work is very much love-it-or-hate-it for me. Probably my favorites are Thursday's Children (ye Gods, what a hideous cover), about brother and sister child ballet dancers, but really about families, ambition, talent, and the longing for talent, which isn't the same as the longing for fame, and In This House of Brede, a beautifully written, meditative book about life in a nunnery - no, really, it's great. (Warning for non-graphic but upsetting death of a child.)

The Game, by Diana Wynne Jones. One of her last books which I haven't yet read. Whatever this particular one is like, her work will forever be a treasure and a joy to me.

By the Light of the Moon, by Dean Koontz. What can I say? I sometimes get the craving to read his books on plane trips, and I have a plane trip coming up.

Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory: Two Volumes Complete (Unexpurgated Edition). I've never read the whole thing, I want to check it for PTSD references, and I wanted a hard copy.

The Golden Nineties, by Lisa Mason. I enjoyed her time-travel sf novel, Summer of Love, A Time Travel (San Francisco Time Travels), but never saw anything else by her. Looks like she's putting her books up on Kindle.

Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army, by Kayla Williams. Memoir by female Iraq War veteran.

When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession, by Irwin Yalom. In nineteenth-century Vienna, a drama of love, fate, and will is played out amid the intellectual ferment that defined the era. Josef Breuer, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, is at the height of his career. Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe's greatest philosopher, is on the brink of suicidal despair, unable to find a cure for the headaches and other ailments that plague him. I have enjoyed Yalom's nonfiction. Dipping into his classic work on group therapy, Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy,, I was delighted to find a particularly annoying type of person/behavior pattern named and described as "the help-rejecting complainer."

[Poll #1846500]

Please discuss any books which you have read or of which you have heard scurrilous rumors.

(For reference: The Complete Stalky and Co., A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend, Bitterblue , The Sleeping Partner: A Sarah Tolerance Mystery, Indigo's Star, My Love Affair With Music, Please Ignore Vera Dietz, The Dust of 100 Dogs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, The Cloud Roads (The Books of the Raksura), Maisie Dobbs, Rocket Girls.

1. Paper for Mindfulness-Based CBT class.

2. Paper for Life as Practice class.

3. Very complicated paper for Psychological Testing class, including analysis of multiple test forms and graph-drawing.

4. Presentation on Trauma-Based CBT.

Other Things I Have To Do Before All That Is Due:

1. All-Day CPR class.

2. Two tutoring sessions.

3. Four-hour block of on-call time with police - I am crossing my fingers they won't call, but I can't rely on having that time free.

4. Five and a half hours of classes.

Send cheer, encouragement, macaroons, book recs for when I'm done, a file baked in a cake, etc.

Can you all name me some comparatively recent (ie, less than 20 years old) YA urban fantasy (ie, not set in a fantasy world or post-apocalyptic world) in which the protagonist does NOT have any magical powers or attributes or devices (ie, no magic rings), does not develop any later, and is not a professional demon-hunter or anything like that?

I'm thinking of books like A Wrinkle in Time (but more modern) or Neverwhere (but for teenagers.) Also, ideally, more along the lines of Charles de Lint than "my vampire boyfriend."

The only ones I can think of offhand are Holly Black's Valiant, Flora Segunda, Fire and Hemlock (borderline - Polly does have a power, of sorts), and some of Charles de Lint's novels.

It's a little hard to write stories like that and not have the action be entirely driven by the magical characters, leaving the protagonist drifting passively in their wake. The characters with abilities are inherently going to be far more powerful. Tolkien used this type of plot very well, but even so, Frodo and Bilbo had the One Ring. I'm thinking of books in which someone like Sam is the protagonist.

Asakiyume had a post about romanticism and mental illness with some good discussion in comments.

I wrote, "I have mixed feelings about that one. Yes, it's obnoxious to write stories in which mental illness is actually nothing but magical specialness, whether the magic part is literal or metaphorical.

On the other hand, the flip side of the "mentally ill people are better and more special than the rest of us tools of the system" myth is the "mentally ill people are doomed to a miserable, squalid existence filled with nothing ever but loneliness and pain" myth.

I think there's room for realistic depictions of mental illness in which the intent is to de-glamorize, focus on the pain, and have the hope be in the slow, difficult work of healing. But maybe there's also room for non-realistic in which people live with mental illnesses and have those be part of the fabric of their lives as they have romanticised adventures and pursue villains and do magic and get the girl. Why should the non-mentally ill get all the escapist literature?

The key, I think, is not to take some painful and unpleasant mental illness and pretend that the illness itself is not painful and not unpleasant, and just looks that way because the mundane world doesn't understand how magical and awesome it really is. That's not cool. But I'd love to see, say, a paranormal romance with a heroine in therapy for social anxiety torn between a bipolar vampire and a werewolf with Asperger's.

Why not? Very few of us are out on the streets murdering people because the voices in our head told us to. Most of us are living our lives - with struggle and pain, but who doesn't have that?"

I am interested, too, in stories in which mental illnesses and non-neurotypical states are dealt with not unrealistically by accident, but with extrapolation and deliberate fantasy applied: Walter Jon Williams' breathtaking space opera Aristoi ($4.99 on Kindle; also has excellent martial arts), in which people deliberately induce multiple personalities in order access the full richness of their psyches; the later books of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies, in which the characters take on various cognitive/neurological templates, raising the question of whether identity is something separate from brain chemistry. Very similar questions come up in Westerfeld's novel Peeps, in which vampirism-causing parasites create OCD-like irresistible compulsions and aversions. And, of course, the many, many, many magical or science fictional versions of brainwashing and de-programming, from Cyteen to The Avengers to Mockingjay.

There is sometimes a tendency to see any non-realistic treatment of serious issues as inherently trivializing or even insulting. But I think it depends on the individual work, as well as the judgment of the individual reader. I would like to see more extrapolative works dealing with the subject, as well as more stories in which mental illness or non-neurotypicality is part of a character's character, not the subject of the story.

I would like to see fewer soft-focus, romanticized depictions of beautiful fragile mad girls.

What do you think? Good examples? Bad examples? Things you'd like to see more of? Things you'd like to see less of?

Please share opinions on any of these, should you be familiar with them:

Elegy for Iris, by John Bayley. Memoir by Iris Murdoch's husband, of their life together and her slow decline due to Alzheimer's. I'm sure it will be incredibly depressing, but a peek inside convinced me to buy it: it's really, really well-written.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel, by Peter Cameron. Mainstream YA novel, though it looks like it's borderline adult. I love the title, and the first page is in a similar style.

Night Gate: The Gateway Trilogy Book One and Winter Door: The Gateway Trilogy Book Two, by Isobelle Carmody. YA fantasy; the third book does not seem to exist, or at least not yet. Love the premise: a teenage girl whose best friends are her four dogs goes through a magical gateway into fantasyland, where her dogs are transformed into humans with similar personalities to their doggy selves. Links to inexpensive Kindle editions.

The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece (P.S.), by Edward Dolnick. Nonfiction about the brazen theft of "The Scream;" looks really fun. Discounted on Amazon.

Deathworld (Wildside Edition), by Harry Harrison. I am a sucker for "everything on this planet can kill you!" Only 99 cents on Kindle.

The Icarus Girl, by Helen Oyeyemi. Mainstream magic realism about a Nigerian/English girl with a creepy best friend. I'm guessing the best friend is ambiguously a spirit/folklore being/imaginary. I've heard good things about this.

Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language, by Katherine Russell Rich. (Currently discounted to $6.00.) Memoir by American woman who moves to Udaipur (a city in Rajasthan) to study Hindi. It looks like it pays a lot of attention to the process of learning a second language as an adult.

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, by Ronald Takaki. A history of America in terms of its non-dominant groups: Asian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jews, Indians, etc. I've read portions of this before, but not the whole thing. What I've read was well-written and detailed, and did a good job of pulling together many different perspectives to give a broad yet personal view of America.

Gentlemen's Alliance +, Vol. 1, by Arina Tanemura. Fluffy-looking shoujo manga. In return for a business loan of 50 million yen, the prestigious Kamiya family gave their daughter Haine away to the Otomiya family. Haine, now an Otomiya, is appointed to the student council of the exclusive Imperial Academy, a private school for the aristocracy. Even though Haine is of proper lineage to be on the council, she finds herself struggling to find her place among the many secrets of its elite members, especially those of the president who holds her heart--Shizumasa Togu, aka "the Emperor.

I need recommendations for books which are likely to appeal to an 11-year-old who likes sf, fantasy, and the Alex Rider series, AND to a 10-year-old who likes mysteries and Lemony Snicket. To clarify: a single book must appeal to BOTH kids.

On a completely different topic, I double-checked with my Queer Narrative professor, and got an okay to do a fictional therapy session with a queer character from a historical work. He said to just insert myself-as-therapist into their historical context. I am leaning toward one of the heroines in Sarah Waters' Fingersmith. Lots of issues regarding social narratives, personal "stories," "problem-saturated narratives," queerness, and "madness" there! (I could also counsel them as a couple, but we haven't yet gotten into couple's counseling so I don't feel on firm ground with that.)

Can you please recommend me books on sex/couples therapy and/or male sexuality which are a) not too densely academic - literate and thoughtful pop psychology is fine - and are neither sexist nor heterocentric? Trans-friendly/non-cis-centric would be great too, but I realize that may be even harder to find in pop psych.

I already have Hanne Blank's Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Hetrosexuality on my radar, but I think it's not quite what I'm looking for, for this purpose. (I have not yet read it, but look forward to it immensely.) Ditto The Guide to Getting It On.

This book, one of the required texts for my 10:00 AM Monday Human Sexuality class, suggests that the class, while possibly lacking in academic rigor, will not lack in amusement value. I am picturing a cross between a 70s encounter group and a "Let's all draw our vulvas, watch a video of women ejaculating, and then make an offering to the Great Goddess!" workshop.

Its arrival this week was perfect timing, given that the month to date was the sort which, to completely misquote Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, left me grasping for straws of comfort like, "No matter what else happens today, at least I still like my clitoris."

This is the sort of book which has an anatomical drawing of a clitoris, and a woman pointing to it and exclaiming "WOW!"

The book has some interesting information about clitoral anatomy (the little button part is just the tip of the iceberg; a large portion of the female genitalia is made up of clitoral tissue and structures.) But most of the book is basically, "Wow! A clitoris!"

There is a long chapter on female ejaculation, in which women enthusiastically describe their gushing orgasms, with slightly terrifying details like, "And then I had to mop the floor!" The author then notes that you too may be able to teach yourself to ejaculate, if you don't already. Personally, after I am done having solo or partnered sex, the last thing I want to do is mop the floor.

Despite some dubious history and a cringe-worthy discussion of the Tao and Tantra, this book is mostly harmless. I expect it would be delightfully eye-opening to any women who aren't already familiar with their anatomy or the possible range of their sexual response. But for a graduate course... seriously? This is the best you can do? If anyone knows of more academically rigorous or up-to-date or more culturally sensitive books on female sexuality, please rec them to me, and I will rec them to the school.

I also boggle that this apparent typo in chapter one didn't get corrected through many editions: From as far back as the Kinsey report in 1953, intercourse has not been found not to be the most effective means for women to experience the full range of their sexual response, and yet, penis-in-vagina sex remains the ne plus ultra of sexual activity.

And I boggle more at this: During full-blown sexual response, clitoral tissues expand enormously. The erectile tissues fill with blood, causing the clitoris to protrude enough, as one woman put it, "to fill my cupped hand."

The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips

( Hilariously pornographic cheery illustrations below cut )