Short Fiction

The order of these books (so far) goes:

(1)   In Legend Born
(2)  The White Dragon
(3)  The Destroyer Goddess
(4)  The Palace of Heaven (upcoming)
(5) Arena

(Yes,I have recently changed the originally-planned order of books (4) and (5). Arena will now be the fifth book in the series, rather than the fourth.)

When I sold In Legend Born to Tor, I didn't really know I was starting a series. That sort of evolved. So there was no series name back then.

I switched editors around the time The White Dragon was released. My new editor noticed I didn't have a series name and said I should get one. By then, I had thought of the series name... but I said we shouldn't put it on The Destroyer Goddess, because DG was Volume Two of In Fire Forged, and since Volume One (The White Dragon) didn't have the series name on its cover, it would confuse readers to slap it on DG all of a sudden. However, since the series' second book, White Dragon, had the words "Part One" on it, it now turns out that readers were plenty confused anyhow, and it's not clear to everyone that these books are all part of the same series, or that the series begins with In Legend Born. I've since learned that many people think White Dragon is the start of a series called In Fire Forged. Oops.

Anyhow, "The Chronicles of Sirkara" may or may not be on the cover of the next book in this series. By now, even I am confused.

In fact (brace yourself), In Fire Forged was the second book of the series. But it turned out to be so long a novel that, after much back-and-forthing on the subject, Tor decided at the last minute that it couldn't publish IFF as one book. So I had about four days to split the 1,743-page manuscript into two books. I said we had to label them "Part One" and "Part Two" of the same story, because The White Dragon doesn't have an ending and The Destroyer Goddess doesn't have a beginning. If you picked up DG first, you would feel—with good reason!—that you had walked in on the second reel of a film and couldn't figure out what was going on.

If this series is ever repackaged, obviously I'll ask the publisher to make some changes to the way all the books are titled, to make things clearer than they are now...

The Palace of Heaven is scheduled for late 2009.

When will the next "Manhattan Magic" Esther Diamond novel be published?

In 2009. (Yes, the answer used to be 2008.) There have been delays because I switched publishers. (The booksellers that listed Doppelgangsters as a December 2006 release were mistaken. It was not released in 2006. That's a database error that we think has now finally been eliminated.) And further delays because I agreed to serve as president of Novelists, inc., and it's rather alarming how far that has put me behind in my work. (My two-year sentence ends on December 31st, so the light is at the end of the tunnel.)

I'm delighted to be at the new house, DAW Books! This series will be repackaged with a new look, and I hope for a steady annual release schedule hereafter. Check this website again for excerpts, updates, and release information about Doppelgangster. (Yes, the previous title was plural, this is singular. I switched my title back to this original singular form upon switching publishers.)

The order of the Esther Diamond novels (so far) is:

(1) Disappearing Nightly
(2) Doppelgangster (upcoming)
(3) Unsympathetic Magic (upcoming)

I'd like to, but I have no immediate plans to do so. For the time being, I have too many other writing commitments.

Meanwhile, I hope my Leone readers will decide to try some of my other books. (I recommend starting with Disappearing Nightly, a contemporary series, set in New York City, which combines comedy, mystery, and romance with fantasy.)

Back when I was starting my career, my first book deal was with Harlequin (a.k.a. The Evil Empire), to be published under their Silhouette imprint. At that time, they had just instituted a new policy (in fact, I was one of the first writers to whom it applied) whereby any newcomer who sold them a book was required to take a pseudonym—or else there would be no book deal with Harlequin, kiss it goodbye, kid. So I came up with the name "Leone" because I thought it would be lucky for me, Leone being my star sign (Leo) in Italian; I had been living in Sicily when I wrote my first couple of books, One Sultry Summer and A Wilder Name.

This was not, as has often been rumored with great authority by people who have no idea what they're talking about, a "house name." (A house name is one that belongs to the publisher, and numerous different writers write under that name.) I am the only person who ever wrote for Harlequin (or for any other house) as Laura Leone. The pseudonym policy was Harlequin's attempt to protect its profits through an unconscionable restriction of freelance writers: If a writer like me built a readership while at Harlequin, I could not attract those readers to any books I wrote for other publishers since, in those pre-Internet days, Laura Leone readers would be be unlikely to learn I was Laura Resnick when I published elsewhere.

I was still a Silhouette writer, and still bound by that policy, when I sold my first science fiction/fantasy short story. Since I was contractually prohibited from using my professional name on anything not published by Silhouette, I published that story under my real name. The story was intended to be a fun, one-off project between books, not a new career path. However, I wound up writing another sf/f short story, then another, then a bunch more, and suddenly one day I had a second professional name and was marketing books under it. In fact, Resnick is now my primary professional name, and Leone is the name most people don't know.

Meanwhile, Harlequin's pseudonym clause was starting to come under legal scrutiny. Though the clause took a few more years to die at Harlequin, they released my pseudonym to me when I stopped writing for them, so I was finally able to use it elsewhere. It was clearly useless to me by then for writing sf/f, where I was already known as Resnick; but Leone was the name I was known under as a romance writer, so I continued using it when writing romance.

There are many reasons that writers use pseudonyms. Some writers want to maintain their privacy. Others have real names that are hard to remember, pronounce, or spell. Some use different names to brand the different types of fiction they write (ex. one name for mysteries, another for fantasy). Some change names after weak sales figures have made the previous name difficult to keep marketing. And, like me, dozens of romance writers wound up with a pseudonym because they started their careers at Harlequin/Silhouette during the era of the notorious pseudonym clause.

Where do you get your ideas?

From everywhere. Ideas are the easy part of writing. Figuring out how to take an idea (or, rather, a million ideas—which is probably how many go into the a book) and develop it into a compelling story that many thousands of total strangers, whose personal schedules and budgets are limited, will spend their time and money to read, and that they'll stay absorbed in long after they should have turned out the light and gone to sleep... that's the hard part.

Since this is perhaps the single question writers are asked most often, it's evidently something that people are curious about. So I've added a page about it to this site, called Where Do You Get Those Crazy Ideas? To make it more interesting than just me talking about where I get my ideas, since every writer is different, some other writers visit to talk about where they got their ideas, too.

No, alas. The process by which a book gets a cover is complex and varied. To learn more about it, take a look at A Book By Its Cover, the page of this website that reproduces a 5-part series of articles I wrote a few years ago on covers and the cover process. Based on what I learned while researching and writing those articles, I take a proactive, hands-on approach to my covers... but sometimes my input is used (The White Dragon, Fever Dreams, many of my Wildside reprint covers, In Legend Born, the gorgeous paperback edition of Fallen From Grace), and sometimes it's not (The Destroyer Goddess, Disappearing Nightly, A Blonde In Africa, the hideous hardcover edition of Fallen From Grace).

Writers tend to be verbal, rather than visual. Consequently, many writers avoid getting involved in the cover process at all, feeling it's just not their strong suit. Additionally, most publishers aren't that eager to have us involved in our covers, so a writer who isn't actively trying to get involved in the cover process is usually not part of it. Also, even among those of us who do actively try to be involved, publishers, art directors, and editors all vary tremendously in how receptive they are to this. Finally, even where there's genuine good will about involving the writer, her input may still wind up on the cutting room floor, for a wide variety of reasons.

Somewhere between 12 days and 8 years, depending.

For example, I once wrote a 50,000-word, pseudonymic erotica novel, called Nights of Fire, in 12 days. It was a short book, a simple plot, and required only a little research (I read up on WWII, the OSS, and occupied France). And I did nothing else for those 12 days but write that book. Whereas I normally break up work on a book by also writing short stories, articles, columns, and new book proposals.

By contrast, In Fire Forged, which became The White Dragon and The Destroyer Goddess shortly before publication, was an extremely big (more than 400,000 words!), complex, difficult book, so it took a long time to write—more than 3 years. And I wrote lots of other stuff while writing it, since I was at it for (did I mention?) more than 3 years. I find, by the way, that a 100,000-word book isn't twice as difficult and time-consuming as a 50,000-word book, it's about five times as difficult and time-consuming. These things seem to multiply geometrically.

The "how long does it take?" question is additionally difficult to answer because of the way I work. I usually have to think about a book, do research, and makes notes for months before I can write the first chapter; meanwhile, of course, I'm busy writing books I've already thought about for months. Moreover, since I do this for a living and am (thank goodness!) almost always under contract, I always have deadlines, and so I can't afford to finish a book for which I do not yet have a contract or a deadline. Therefore, like many career novelists, I usually write a proposal (maybe 2 pages, maybe 200 pages, depending on circumstances) for a book that I only sit down to finish writing if I sell it; and selling a proposal has, so far in my career, taken me anywhere from 2 weeks to 8 years.

So I seldom start a book from scratch and work all the way through. I'm usually starting a book I won't return to finish until/unless I sell it; or I'm finishing a book I started writing a few months or a few years ago. How long it takes to finish a book depends on how much work I did on the proposal (which depends on circumstances), on how long and how complex the book is, and on what else I'm working on while finishing the book.

No. Some writers do, some don't. Everyone is different.

For myself, I find that if I set a fixed, inflexible schedule for my work, then I'm completely eliminating one of the few benefits of being self-employed, which is flexibility. By and large, being self-employed is professionally and fiscally risky, the IRS punishes you for it, health insurance costs the earth, there's no such thing as a sick-day or a paid vacation, and no bank will offer you a mortgage or a car loan. So you need to take advantage of what few benefits there are! Such as flexibility. I work very long hours, I just don't work the kind of set, fixed, inflexible hours that a salaried employee typically does.

I do tend to set a page-count goal most days, but it varies from day to day, depending on my schedule, my deadline, the book, and what I need to accomplish with the book that day. Setting a fixed, perennial goal of "X" number of pages per day would ignore the fact that I often suddenly realize I need to spend the day revising the first 150 pages or completely rewriting a chapter or a scene.

Well, I can't possibly introduce you to my agent, because I don't have one.

I had four agents, over a period of about fifteen years, but I don't have one now, and I'm not currently planning to hire another one. While it's certainly not the right career choice for everyone, it's working well for me, so it's how I'll proceed until it stops working well for me.

Meanwhile, I only see various editors once every couple of years, on average, when I have pre-arranged business meetings with them in New York or at major conferences. So the practical logistics of introducing you to them would be darned tricky. (Contrary to how the writing life is depicted by Hollywood movies, novelists don't typically socialize with agents and editors on a daily basis.)

Actually, there are very few people in my career whom I had met before we started working together. The writer's work (and, later on, her sales and her reputation) is what generates agency and editorial interest in her, not meeting her.

The way to get an agent interested in representing you or an editor interested in acquiring your book is to send them outstanding material presented very professionally. If they love your manuscript, they'll be interested in you. If they don't love your manuscript, they won't care that they've met you, that you're the friend or acquaintance of another writer they work with, or even that they found you personally charming and delightful. This is business, and the only reason an agent represents a writer's career or an editor acquires her book is that they're exicted about the material and believe it will earn money.

For more information about finding an agent, take a look at my 3-part series of articles on agents, via the links on the Non-Fiction page of this website.

I don't read or critique manuscripts. My skill is writing, not editing. I haven't the faintest idea how other writers can make their work "good." I'm fully occupied with learning how to make my work "good." So I just write. I don't critique or edit.

I give some writing workshops where I discuss various writing principles and possible ways to approach doing the work (see the Going Public page); but I don't comment on manuscripts.

However, the Writer's Resource page of this website provides reams of information and resources for aspiring writers, including a list of reputable freelance editors who will read and comment on your work (for a fee).

No.

To elaborate: I am not Mike Resnick, he is my father. Due to growing up in a writer's house, I never wanted to write for a living, because I saw—close up, unvarnished, year after year—all the drawbacks of the writing life. My parents didn't particularly encourage me to write, because they'd have liked to see me enter a sane, stable, salaried profession with benefits and a retirement plan. But you can't escape your destiny, so I wound up writing for a living. Whaddya gonna do?

The old man and I do not share, swap, or exchange story ideas. (Nor do I know of any writers who do. Story ideas are very personal and individual.) Pop does not write my work, nor does he advise me on my work-in-progress. In fact, we're both so busy with our own writing, we rarely even read each other's finished, delivered, published work, though we always give each other copies of our books. My mother is closely involved in my dad's writing, but she is not even remotely involved in mine. Do you want your parents messing around in your work? Does anyone?

I have been a contributor to many of the anthologies that my dad edits, and he was the acquiring editor of A Blonde In Africa (which, I freely confess, was a wholly nepotistic book sale). In these instances, obviously, he does see and comment on my not-yet-published material; but since he's not an intrusive editor and since it is my custom to deliver very-finished work, any suggestions or changes in these instances have always been very minor, standard stuff.

My dad has an excellent agent who's represented him for more than half my life. However, I wouldn't choose to hire her, despite my professional admiration for her, even if she were willing to represent me (which certainly might not be the case), because I believe that multiple family members hiring the same literary agent is a bad idea, fraught with potential pitfalls. (For example, if an agent and a writer part acrimoniously, what happens to the business relationship between the agent and a client who happens to be the departed writer's spouse, sibling, parent, or offspring?)

If Tor Books signed me as a favor to the old man, then they're paying me way too much! Seriously, though, a publisher signing one writer as a favor to another would be such a huge favor (because, you know, time and money are involved, and those are the two things no publishing house can spare), there are very few circumstances under which I can imagine it happening. (Maybe if the author were #1 New York Times hardcover bestseller, and so keeping him happy with an expensive favor was a way of protecting millions in profits... But, in truth, every bestseller I know personally is so smart and professional—because it's really hard to get to the top of our industry—that's difficult to imagine, too.) My experience is that people in publishing houses are sometimes more polite (and, frankly, sometimes more rude) if they know your dad, but that's about all.

I read a book many years ago called How To Write A Romance and Get It Published by Kathryn Falk, founder and publisher of Romantic Times Magazine. I thought that writing a short novel about two likeable people who fall in love was something I might be able to do.

I did not have any professional writing experience, nor had I ever taken any writing classes, and I had not been on staff at my college or high school newspaper. (In fact, as a foreign languages major, I hadn't even written many of my college papers in my own language.) There were two elements in my background, however, that helped me a lot when I started writing.

First, when I was a teenager, my dad paid me $0.50 per page to type his manuscripts. (Years earlier, I used to carry manuscripts-in-progress back and forth between him and a collaborator, on my bicycle. But at the age of six, I was too naive to demand payment.) That not only taught me to be an efficient typist, it also taught me, by osmosis, how a good writer revises and hones his work. As I typed up successive drafts of various books and stories for the old man, I learned a lot about how and why a writer improves the material through revisions and line-editing.

Second, as an aspiring actress, I sought excellent training in the US and England. It didn't give me the talent or temperament to become a working actress (I'm much better suited to writing), but the years of dissecting dialogue, characterization, and scene structure from an acting perspective taught me, again by osmosis, a lot of valuable craft lessons that I've employed as a writer ever since I started work on my first book.

Anyhow, having grown up in a writer's house, I understood what a tough, competitive profession this is, so my commitment to myself, when I decided to start writing, was that I'd complete six romance novels before I reevaluated my plan or considered giving up. I hoped that rejections for the first three books would give me clear and consistent enough feedback that I'd have a better chance of writing something saleable on my fourth, fifth, and sixth attempts.

Using the essays and information in Falk's book as my guide, I outlined my first book and wrote it by hand, then typed up the final version on a manual typewriter, which was all I owned. By then, I had the idea for my second book, so I started working on that while sending queries to agents and submissions to editors.

Eleven agents rejected my first two books; but the first publisher I queried, Silhouette Books, a division of Harlequin, bought them both. (I was working on my fourth book by the time I sold the first one.) It wasn't smooth sailing after that, though. Silhouette rejected four of my next six proposals (and that also wasn't the last time they would reject four of my books in a row, either). But it nonetheless began an association that lasted for five years and a dozen books, and enabled me to become a full-time, self-supporting writer by the age of twenty-six.

Yes, because I must.

I'd rather eat ground glass.

Good god, man—do I look like a masochist?

I read professional reviews of all my work because it's a business necessity. As you have undoubtedly noticed, publishers use good reviews to promote books.

In my experience, publishers are good about using this material if I give it to them (and, in some cases, if I repeatedly remind them that I gave it to them), but they're a bit hit-and-miss at collecting the reviews themselves. Probably because, like every other department in publishing houses, publicity departments tend to be under-staffed and over-worked.

Therefore, I read all my reviews so that I can collect the good ones and forward them to my publishers. This is far from my favorite task, and I'd much rather only see the good reviews (rather than sifting through all reviews, good or bad) after someone else has collected them; but as unpleasant tasks go, at least it's much easier than cleaning kennels (which I did for many years).

However, as you have also no doubt noticed, publishers don't quote readers when packaging, promoting, or advertising a book. So there is no actual need for me to endure the painful process of wading through reader reviews. Therefore, I avoid it.

Because it is indeed a painful process. Picture this: You've spent a year-or-more of your life working on a book. Plotting, researching, writing, rewriting, revising, polishing. You take risks, you stretch yourself, you give the material everything you've got. You sweat blood, you kill a billion brain cells, you do some of your best work ever.

And then, after the book is published, some anonymous stranger, in a public forum, for all the world to see, says something like: "What a piece of worthless shit. Don't waste your time reading this juvenile crap."

Or: "Totally derivative. Stole from a dozen other writers. It's obvious this author is just phoning it in."

Or: "I just couldn't get into this book. It was so boring."

And so on.

If I read ten glowing comments about my work on an Amazon.com book page or a reader blog, that still doesn't take the insomnia-inducing sting out of the one nasty or brutally dismissive comment about my work on the same page. So it's much better for me just not to read such pages and websites at all.

Some writers read these things and aren't bothered by it. Some are incredibly bothered by such comments and yet read Amazon.com pages and reader websites anyhow—indeed, read them compusively! But many other writers, like me, say, "I get nuts and start chasing my tail when I see that stuff, so I do my best to avoid seeing it."

People are perfectly entitled to hate my work and to say so in public. And I'm entitled not to suffer through their comments if I don't absolutely have to.

Check out the Books & Films page of this website, where I recommend what I'm reading now or have read recently that I like.

I don't read much romance or fantasy fiction anymore. I suppose those genres have become a bit of a busman's holiday for me—which is a not-uncommon phenomenon among writers.

However, some of my favorite romance novels are: The Rake by Mary Jo Putney; Seize the Fire by Laura Kinsale; The Lion's Daughter and Mr. Impossible by Loretta Chase; Public Secrets by Nora Roberts; My Lady Notorious by Jo Beverley; Outlander by Diana Gabaldon; Sunrise Song by Kathleen Eagle. Among Georgette Heyer novels, my favorites include The Reluctant Widow and The Devil's Cub. My favorite Jane Austen novels are Sense and Sensibility and Emma ( of course, I like P&P, but I never could warm up to Darcy). My all-time favorite romance novel is M.M. Kaye's Trade Wind, and I wish someone would reissue it so another generation could discover this wonderful book. (I believe Kaye's historical novels were marketed as general fiction, not romance; but Trade Wind is a high-adventure love story, so I count is as romance.)

My all-time favorite fantasy novel is A Face in the Frost by John Bellairs. Other favorites include: Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, and The Last Enchantment; T. W. White's The Once and Future King; and (if this counts) A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh. I'm a fan of Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series, as well as Jennifer Roberson's Sword Dancer and Cheysuli series (and don't miss her Robin Hood novel, The Lady of the Forest, either). I enjoy Tanya Huff's Toronto-based Blood series, and I recommend Lincoln's Dreams and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.

Paradise may be my favorite book of my dad's, although Santiago and The Soul Eater are mighty good, too. (FYI, his own favorite is Adventures.) I'm not a science fiction reader, but I am nonetheless a longtime fan of Golden Age author C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith (sf) stories and also her Jirel of Joiry (fantasy) stories. Among novels somewhat related to the sf/f genre, I really liked Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman and Raptor Red by Robert Bakker.

I particularly enjoy reading mystery, suspense, and espionage novels. My all-time favorite mystery writer is the witty and elegant novelist Sarah Caudwell who, alas, only wrote four books (starting with Thus Was Adonis Murdered) before being taken from us too soon. I'm a huge fan of the "Art History Mystery" series (starting with The Raphael Affair) by Iain Pears, though he appears to be wholly focused now on his historical novels (which haven't been to my taste). I thoroughly enjoyed Diana Gabaldon's historical mystery, Lord John and the Private Matter, and I look forward to more in this series. I really enjoyed Janet Evanovich's first six Stephanie Plum books, and I've recently become a fan of Hannah March's Georgian England mysteries.

I am a longtime fan of Elizabeth Peters. Her delightful Amelia Peabody series is her best-known work, but I particularly recommend her even more delightful Vicky Bliss series (starting with Street of the Five Moons), as well as terrific stand-alone novels like Devil May Care, Summer of the Dragon, The Love Talker, The Camelot Caper, and Legend In Green Velvet. As if that weren't enough, the four books of her Jacqueline Kirby series are also great fun (starting with The Seventh Sinner). This prolific author also writes supernatural suspense as Barbara Michaels. My favorite Michaels novels are: The Sea King's Daughter, The Dark On the Other Side, Wait For What Will Come, The Walker in the Shadows, Ammie Come Home, and Patriot's Dream.

In suspense, I read every Linda Fairstein novel as soon as it's released; her Alexandra Cooper series combines an insider's look at the Sex Crimes division of the NYPD with a literate, well-researched love of the rich history and culture of New York City. I'm also a longtime reader of Kathy Reichs' series about a forensic anthropologist who divides her time between North Carolina and Montreal, Canada. (Yes, I also watch Bones, the TV show loosely based on the book series.) I was riveted by Katherine Neville's elegant and imaginative The Eight (she also wrote an enjoyable, more-traditional suspense novel called A Calculated Risk), as well as by Robert Harris' Fatherland and Enigma. I used to devour Cold War and WWII espionage books, though I haven't read many in recent years.

Some of my favorite mainstream novels are: A River Sutra by Gita Mehta; The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham; Sinai Tapestry and Jerusalem Poker by Edward Whittemore (who wrote magic realism before it was popular); Catch-22 by Joseph Heller; Of Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende (a wonderful and versatile writer whose work I haven't kept up with lately); The Leopard (the classic novel of Sicily) by Giuseppe di Lampedusa.

I read a lot of non-fiction for pleasure. Some of my favorite non-fiction books include The Age of Kali and City of Djinns by William Dalrymple; A Natural History of the Senses, The Moon By Whalelight, and The Rarest of the Rare by Diane Ackerman; Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams (best known for his HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy fiction series); Richard Lederer's Anguished English, as well as a number of his other entertaining books; archaeologist Aubrey Burl's books about the megalithic cultures of Britain, Ireland, and Brittany; Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age by Richard Rudgley; various Dave Barry collections; Round Up the Usual Suspects by Aljean Harmetz, a fascinating portrayal of Hollywood during WWII via the making of my favorite film, Casablanca; The End of Fashion by Teri Agins, a compulsively readable book about the high-fashion industry even for those of us who aren't interested in fashion; The Sky's the Limit and Philistines At the Hedgerow by Steven Gaines, two delightful books about eccentricity (and sheer lunacy) at the high-end of real estate markets in Manhattan and the Hamptons; A Natural History of the Rich by Richard Conniff, one of the most amusing books I've ever read; On Persephone's Island by Mary Taylor Simeti, one of the best books about Sicily; The Future of Freedom by Fareed Zakaria; The End of Faith by Sam Harris; The Exception to the Rulers by Amy Goodman and David Goodman; Sixty Million Frenchman Can't Be Wrong by Jean Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow (read it before you go); Ciao, America! by Beppe Severgnini (read it before you have guests from Europe); Ransom by Ann Hagedorn Auerbach (read it before you decide to go for a hike in Columbia); the books of Barbara Mertz (the Egyptologist who, in her copious spare time, writes fiction as Elizabeth Peters and also as Barbara Michaels); Blink and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

For books I recommend about the Middle East (having spent half of 2006 in Jerusalem), check out the "A Partial Reading List" link on the Dispatches from Israel page of this website. If you read A Blonde In Africa, I recommend a number of books about Africa in there. I've fallen behind in my reading about Africa in recent years, but two good ones I've read lately, both gifts from friends, are: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller and Dangerous Beauty by Mark C. Ross. I've also enjoyed I've Been Gone far Too Long, edited by Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Wendy Logsdon, an amusing collection of essays from biologists and anthropologists in the field (including parts of Africa).

As for my research reading... that's another topic entirely!

Whichever book I finished writing last.

Whichever *@!$*%#*!  book I'm working on now.