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2013 Sub-Genre Reading Challenge

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From Book Dragon's Lair:

 Requirements:

  • read three books from each genre
  • each book must be a different sub-genre (sub-genres can be found here at Writer's Digest)
  • each book counts only once for this challenge
  • books may overlap with other challenges
  • any format allowed (print, ebook, audio)
  • reviews are not necessary but a list of books read is.
  • a blog is not necessary, just comment that you want to join in
  • *addition* if you do have a blog, write up a post and link up

Now for the genres. . .

ROMANCE

  • Chick-Lit: often humorous romantic adventures geared toward single working women in their twenties and thirties.
  • Christian: romances in which both hero and heroine are devout Christians, typically focused on a chaste courtship, and mentioning sex only after marriage.
  • Contemporary: a romance using modern characters and true-to-life settings.
  • Erotica: also called “romantica,” a romance in which the bedroom doors have been flung open and sexual scenes are described in candid language.
  • Glitz/Glamor: focused on the jet-set elite and celebrity-like characters.
  • Historical: a romance taking place in a recognizable historical period.
  • Multicultural: a romance centered on non-Caucasian characters, largely African-American or Hispanic.
  • Paranormal: involving some sort of supernatural element, ranging widely to include science fiction/fantasy aspects such as time travel, monsters or psychic abilities.
  • Romantic Comedy: a romance focused on humor, ranging from screwball antics to witty interplay.
  • Romantic Suspense: a novel in which an admirable heroine is pitted against some evil force (but in which the romantic aspect still maintains priority).
  • Sensual: based on the sensual tension between hero and heroine, including sizzling sex scenes.
  • Spicy: a romance in which married characters work to resolve their problems.
  • Sweet: a romance centered on a virgin heroine, with a storyline containing little or no sex.
  • Young Adult: written with the teenage audience in mind, with a suitably lower level of sexual content.

HORROR

  • Child in Peril: involving the abduction and/or persecution of a child.
  • Comic Horror: horror stories that either spoof horror conventions or that mix the gore with dark humor.
  • Creepy Kids: horror tale in which children are often under the influence of dark forces and begin to turn against the adults.
  • Dark Fantasy: a horror story with supernatural and fantasy elements.
  • Dark Mystery/Noir: inspired by hardboiled detective tales, set in an urban underworld of crime and moral ambiguity.
  • Erotic Vampire: a horror tale making the newly trendy link between sexuality and vampires, but with more emphasis on graphic description and violence.
  • Fabulist: derived from “fable,” an ancient tradition in which objects, animals or forces of nature are anthropomorphized in order to deliver a moral lesson.
  • Gothic: a traditional form depicting the encroachment of the Middle Ages upon the 18th century Enlightenment, filled with images of decay and ruin, and episodes of imprisonment and persecution.
  • Hauntings: a classic form centering on possession by ghosts, demons or poltergeists, particularly of some sort of structure.
  • Historical: horror tales set in a specific and recognizable period of history.
  • Magical Realism: a genre inspired by Latin-American authors, in which extraordinary forces or creatures pop into otherwise normal, real-life settings.
  • Psychological: a story based on the disturbed human psyche, often exploring insane, altered realities and featuring a human monster with horrific, but not supernatural, aspects.
  • Quiet Horror: subtly written horror that uses atmosphere and mood, rather than graphic description, to create fear and suspense.
  • Religious: horror that makes use of religious icons and mythology, especially the angels and demons derived from Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
  • Science-Fiction Horror: SF with a darker, more violent twist, often revolving around alien invasions, mad scientists, or experiments gone wrong.
  • Splatter: a fairly new, extreme style of horror that cuts right to the gore.
  • Supernatural Menace: a horror tale in which the rules of normal existence don’t apply, often featuring ghosts, demons, vampires and werewolves.
  • Technology: stories featuring technology that has run amok, venturing increasingly into the expanding domain of computers, cyberspace, and genetic engineering.
  • Weird Tales: inspired by the magazine of the same name, a more traditional form featuring strange and uncanny events (Twilight Zone).
  • Young Adult: horror aimed at a teen market, often with heroes the same age, or slightly older than, the reader.
  • Zombie: tales featuring dead people who return to commit mayhem on the living.

THRILLER/SUSPENSE

  • Action: a story that often features a race against the clock, lots of violence, and an obvious antagonist.
  • Comic: a thriller played for laughs, whether through a spoof of the genre or wisecracking interplay between the protagonists.
  • Conspiracy: a thriller in which the hero battles a large, powerful group whose true extent only he recognizes.
  • Crime: a story focused on the commission of a crime, often from the point of view of the criminals.
  • Disaster: a story in which Mother Nature herself is the antagonist, in the form of a hurricane, earthquake or some other natural menace.
  • Eco-Thriller: a story in which the hero battles some ecological calamity Ð and often has to also fight the people responsible for creating that calamity.
  • Erotic: a thriller in which sex plays a major role.
  • Espionage: the classic international spy novel, which is enjoying a resurgence with one important change: where spies used to battle enemy spies, they now battle terrorists.
  • Forensic: a thriller featuring the work of forensic experts, whose involvement often puts their own lives at risk.
  • Historical: a thriller taking place in a specific and recognizable historic period.
  • Horror: a story—generally featuring some monstrous villain Ð in which fear and violence play a major part, complete with graphic descriptions.
  • Legal: a thriller in which a lawyer confronts enemies outside as well as inside the courtroom, generally putting his own life at risk.
  • Medical: a thriller featuring medical personnel, whether battling a legitimate medical threat such as a world-wide virus, or the illegal or immoral use of medical technology.
  • Military: a thriller featuring a military protagonist, often working behind enemy lines or as part of a specialized force.
  • Police Procedural: a crime thriller that follows the police as they work their way through a case.
  • Political Intrigue: a thriller in which the hero must ensure the stability of the government that employs him.
  • Psychological: a suspenseful thriller in which the conflict between the characters is mental and emotional rather than physical—until an often violent resolution.
  • Romantic: a thriller in which the protagonists are romantically involved.
  • Supernatural: a thriller in which the hero, the antagonist, or both have supernatural powers.
  • Technological: a thriller in which technology Ð usually run amok Ð is central to the plot.

Science Fiction/Fantasy

  • Alternate History: speculative fiction that changes the accepted account of actual historical events, often featuring a profound “what if?” premise.
  • Arthurian Fantasy: reworkings of the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
  • Bangsian Fantasy: stories speculating on the afterlives of famous people.
  • Biopunk: a blend of film noir, Japanese anime and post-modern elements used to describe an underground, nihilistic biotech society.
  • Children’s Fantasy: a kinder, gentler style of fantasy aimed at very young readers.
  • Comic: fantasy or science fiction that spoofs the conventions of the genre, or the conventions of society.
  • Cyberpunk: stories featuring tough outsiders in a high-tech near-future where computers have produced major changes in society.
  • Dark Fantasy: tales that focus on the nightmarish underbelly of magic, venturing into the violence of horror novels.
  • Dystopian: stories that portray a bleak future world.
  • Erotic: SF or fantasy tales that focus on sexuality.
  • Game-Related Fantasy: tales with plots and characters similar to high fantasy, but based on a specific role-playing game like Dungeons and Dragons.
  • Hard Science Fiction: tales in which real present-day science is logically extrapolated to the future.
  • Heroic Fantasy: stories of war and its heroes, the fantasy equivalent of military science fiction.
  • High/Epic Fantasy: tales with an emphasis on the fate of an entire race or nation, often featuring a young “nobody” hero battling an ultimate evil.
  • Historical: speculative fiction taking place in a recognizable historical period.
  • Mundane SF: a movement that spurns fanciful conceits like warp drives, wormholes and faster-than-light travel for stories based on scientific knowledge as it actually exists.
  • Military SF: war stories that extrapolate existing military technology and tactics into the future.
  • Mystery SF: a cross-genre blend that can be either an SF tale with a central mystery or a classic whodunit with SF elements.
  • Mythic Fiction: stories inspired, or modeled on, classic myths, legends and fairy tales.
  • New Age: a category of speculative fiction that deals with occult subjects such as astrology, psychic phenomena, spiritual healing, UFOs and mysticism.
  • Post-Apocalyptic: stories of life on Earth after an apocalypse, focusing on the struggle to survive.
  • Romance: speculative fiction in which romance plays a key part.
  • Religious: centering on theological ideas, and heroes who are ruled by their religious beliefs.
  • Science Fantasy: a blend in which fantasy is supported by scientific or pseudo-scientific explanations.
  • Social SF: tales that focus on how characters react to their environments Ð including social satire.
  • Soft SF: tales based on the more subjective, “softer” sciences: psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.
  • Space Opera: a traditional good guys/bad guys faceoff with lots of action and larger-than-life characters.
  • Spy-Fi: tales of espionage with SF elements, especially the use of high-tech gadgetry.
  • Steampunk: a specific type of alternate history in which characters in Victorian England have access to 20th century technology.
  • Superheroes: stories featuring characters endowed with superhuman strengths or abilities.
  • Sword and Sorcery: a classic genre often set in the medieval period, and more concerned with immediate physical threats than high or heroic fantasy.
  • Thriller SF: an SF story that takes on the classic world-at-risk, cliffhanger elements of a thriller.
  • Time-Travel: stories based on the concept of moving forward or backward in time, often delving into the existence of parallel worlds.
  • Urban Fantasy: a fantasy tale in which magical powers and characters appear in an otherwise normal modern context, similar to Latin American magical realism.
  • Vampire: variations on the classic vampire legend, recently taking on many sexual and romantic variations.
  • Wuxia: fantasy tales set within the martial arts traditions and philosophies of China.
  • Young Adult: speculative fiction aimed at a teenage audience, often featuring a hero the same age or slightly older than the reader.

Mystery/Crime

  • Amateur Detective: a mystery solved by an amateur, who generally has some profession or affiliation that provides ready access to information about the crime.
  • Child in Peril: a mystery involving the abduction or persecution of a child.
  • Classic Whodunit: a crime that is solved by a detective, from the detective’s point of view, with all clues available to the reader.
  • Comic (Bumbling Detective): a mystery played for laughs, often featuring a detective who is grossly unskilled (but often solves the crime anyway, owing to tremendous good luck).
  • Cozy: a mystery that takes place in a small town—sometimes in a single home—where all the suspects are present and familiar with one another, except the detective, who is usually an eccentric outsider.
  • Courtroom Drama: a mystery that takes place through the justice system—often the efforts of a defense attorney to prove the innocence of his client by finding the real culprit.
  • Dark Thriller: a mystery that ventures into the fear factor and graphic violence of the horror genre.
  • Espionage: the international spy novel—here based less on action than on solving the “puzzle”—is today less focused on the traditional enemy spies than on terrorists.
  • Forensic: a mystery solved through the forensics lab, featuring much detail and scientific procedure.
  • Heists and Capers: an “antihero” genre which focuses on the planning and execution of a crime, told from the criminal’s perspective.
  • Historical: a mystery that takes place in a specific, recognizable period of history, with much emphasis on the details of the setting.
  • Inverted: a story in which the reader knows “whodunit,” but the suspense arises from watching the detective figure it out.
  • Locked Room: a mystery in which the crime is apparently committed under impossible circumstances (but eventually elicits a rational explanation).
  • Medical: generally involving a medical threat (e.g., a viral epidemic), or the illegitimate use of medical technology.
  • Police Procedural: a crime solved from the perspective of the police, following detailed, real-life procedures.
  • Private Detective: Focused on the independent snoop-for-hire, these have evolved from tough-guy “hard-boiled” detectives to the more professional operators of today.
  • Psychological Suspense: mysteries focused on the intricacies of the crime and what motivated the perpetrator to commit them.
  • Romantic: a mystery in which the crime-solvers fall in love.
  • Technothriller: a spinoff from the traditional thriller mystery, with an emphasis on high technology.
  • Thriller: a suspense mystery with a wider—often international—scope and more action.
  • Woman in Jeopardy: focuses on a woman put into peril by a crime, and her struggles to overcome or outwit the perpetrator.
  • Young Adult: a story aimed at a teenage audience, with a hero detective generally the same age or slightly older than the reader, pursuing criminals who are generally less violent—but often just as scary—as those in adult mysteries.

My TBR List:

Romance

  1. Contemporary -- P.S. I Love You by Cecelia Ahern
  2. Historical -- The Hostage by Susan Wiggs
  3. Chick Lit -- Love the One You're With by Emily Giffin

Horror

  1. Religious -- Year Zero by Jeff Long
  2. TBD
  3. TBD

Thriller/Suspense

  1. Historical -- A Foreign Affair by Caro Peacock
  2. Action -- Heat Stroke by Rachel Caine
  3. TBD

Scifi/Fantasy

  1. Vampire -- The Passage by Justin Cronin
  2. Dystopian -- Crossed by Ally Condie
  3. Epic Fantasy -- A Game of Thrones by George Martin

Mystery/Crime

  1. Historical -- Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn
  2. TBD
  3. TBD