Books: Long-Time Listener, First-Time Reader

Meme time. Jeff Pierce at The Rap Sheet called me out earlier today. The rules:

1. List the authors you read in 2008 who were new to you, regardless of the year of publication.

2. Bold the ones that were debuts (first novel, published in 2008).

3. Tag some people.

I’m going to change them slightly, counting debuts from mid-2007 on. I’m including a pair of titles that I haven’t read yet but will finish by month’s end. And I’ll copy from Jeff and go with two lists. First, fiction authors who were new to me.

• Peter Spiegelman (Red Cat)
• Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road)
• Ray Banks (Saturday’s Child)
• Joseph Weisberg (An Ordinary Spy)
• Tom Epperson (The Kind One)
• David Levien (City of the Sun)
• Tom Rob Smith (Child 44)
• Shepard Rifkin (The Murderer Vine)
• Anthony Neil Smith (Yellow Medicine)
• Ian Rankin (Knots and Crosses)
• Adrienne Barbeau & Michael Scott (Vampyres of Hollywood)
• Tom Piccirilli (The Fever Kill)
• Derek Haas (The Silver Bear)
• James Patrick Hunt (The Betrayers)
• Dave Zeltserman (Small Crimes)
• Michael Koryta (Envy the Night)
• Jerry Kennealy (Still Shot)
• Simon Kernick (The Business of Dying)
• Bill Cameron (Chasing Smoke)
• Steve Fisher (No House Limit)
• Stieg Larsson (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo)
• Charles Cumming (A Spy By Nature)

Vampyres of Hollywood marks Adrienne Barbeau’s debut as a novelist, so it gets bolded. And yes, I am admitting that I am a crime fiction fan who prior to this year had never read any Ian Rankin. I’m sure each of you have similar shameful admissions of your own. And I did start with the first of the Rebus books, so give me some credit.

Next up, non-fiction authors I read for the first time.

• Kelly DiNardo (Gilded Lili: Lili St. Cyr and the Striptease Mystique)
• Stephen Marks (Confessions of a Political Hit Man)
• Hugh Wilford (The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America)
• Mark Harris (Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood)
• David Hajdu (The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America)
• Melissa Plaut (Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Starting Driving a Yellow Cab)
• Matt Taibbi (The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire)
• Philip Delves Broughton (Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School)
• Dan Kennedy (Rock On: An Office Power Ballad)

Feel free to leave your own list in the comments. As for tagging people, I don’t want to impose. Although I will say that such a list drafted by Bill Crider would be something to see ...

UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive.