About a year ago my mom gave me a book- Nick Sagan's Idlewild. Other than noting the last name of the author and wondering if he is related to Carl (yes- Nick is his son) I didn't really pay too much attention. It went on the stack of unread books that keeps getting bigger no matter how many I read. But when I saw John Scalzi specifically thank Nick in the acknowledgments of Old Man's War I figured I should go take another look.
It started off as one of those "I have amnesia and I have to figure out what's going on before they kill me" books. What genre is that called? Luckily he brought in some Lovecraftian nightgaunts just as I was about to close the book for good. That's when you realize you're not reading a normal amnesiathriller. Without giving away too much I'll tell you it's descended from Ender's Game and the Matrix (which is in turn descended from everything from Neuromancer and Snow Crash to Hyperion and Terminator) and worth a read. It takes you a while to figure out what exactly is going on and just when you think you do you discover you really don't. There's actually a whole trilogy and Idlewild has just been released in paperback- in fact I saw it and the others facing out on the sci-fi shelf at Chapters today.
Yeah, I was buying more books today for the stack. Good ones too- Scalzi's Ghost Brigades and another Scalzi-recc, China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. About twenty pages into that one and already it's right up my alley.