Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by Luffy

Phew! I thought you were going to rip me a new one. I have read Storm Front, didn't find it very readable. Since I've finished my reading challenge, I'm willing to take risks and go out of my way. I'll check out the Kate Daniels and Otherworld recommendations.

I should point out that those weren't so much recommendations as examples; it's kind of weird for me to love one series by an author and dislike another. All the same, both of those series have a good mix of action, worldbuilding, character development, and romance - but then, I'd say the same (except for the romance) of the Dresden Files, so your mileage may vary.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by meeera

Not necessarily personal recs but popular/books to consider: Dresden Files, Stross's Laundry Files series, Stephen King's Dark Tower series and Talisman, Hines' Libriomancer series, Jamieson's Death Works books. And Harry Potter.

I've butchered meeera's list to pare it down to what I've read. I enjoyed them all, with the Dark Tower probably lowest on that short list.

Given that you're explicitly looking for male-protagonist UF, neither the Otherworld nor Kate Daniels series qualify. I will say that the Dresden Files series takes a few books to get going, and while it's well worth the effort IMO, that's not what you're after.

So, let me throw something at you from left field: Simon R. Green.

He's written a lot of stuff, mainly series work, in a few different genres...but ultimately, it all links up. Sometimes it's just a reference here and there, but they all fit together in a bizarre way. His twelve-book Nightside series (#1: Something from the Nightside) is about a detective with a mysterious heritage and a daunting reputation who works that small part of London where it's always 3am and monsters walk the streets...and sometimes, vice versa. After several books of that, he started the Secret Histories series (#1: The Man with the Golden Torc), which is very firmly set in the Nightside's world but has more of a James Bond feel, as you might gather from the book titles. As Green was winding the Nightside books down, he started a third series, the Ghost Finders books (#1: Ghost of a Chance), which follows a small team whose mission is to find and squash malevolent ghosts. Yes, this means he's currently publishing at least two books a year, one in each of the SH and GF series. (And oh, happy day - I just noticed that GF5 comes out Tuesday, and there's a collection of Nightside short fiction coming in January!)

All three series can be read independently, but I find it works best to read them all in chronological order by publication date, so the references and occasional crossovers line up. Green's got a wicked sense of humor, and I love playing spot-the-reference while reading his stuff. His books tend to be on the short side; the first Nightside book is 230 pages, so it's not much of a time sink...and if it pays off, you've got over 20 more books ahead of you.

His Forest Kingdom and Haven series are more traditional fantasy, but more on the gritty side. Drinking Midnight Wine and Shadows Fall are standalones; the former is "hidden magical layer" UF and the latter is...well, it's pretty hard to describe, especially at this time of night. It's about the place where legends go to retire, I guess is a decent way to put it.

Finally, the Deathstalker books are straight-up SF, or so I understand; I haven't read them yet. However, I may have to; one of his postscripts in Tales of the Hidden World (a short story collection from earlier this year) points out that he "stopped [the third Deathstalker book] dead for two hundred pages just so I could write a version of Heart of Darkness featuring the Muppets. Really. I'm not kidding." That sounds bizarre enough to get just for its own sake...

[Joy736]

Originally Posted by Gazella

Hey you're back!

I'm glad you're enjoying Pride and Prejudice. I love that novel. And the BBC series is equally good.

I have actually tried to read p&p twice before and couldn't get past 100 pages, but I guess I'm now at the right mindset or something, and I honesly can't understand why I haven't enjoyed it before.
After enjoying The Great Gatsby and now P&P, I want to read a lot more classics. I have Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Little Women, Anna Karenina and Lolita ready to go.

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by Yapyap

Thanks for those mentions - I haven't heard of either Rick Cook or Joel Rosenberg, but the "modern day character gets sucked into a fantasy universe" thing sounds like a good "bridge" from contemporary to epic/high/"classical" fantasy indeed. I'll look them up and add to my "list of different fantasy to try when I get around to it".

Both of those series are somewhat older, 1980s/90s vintage, but they're available through Baen.

Rick Cook: Wizard's Bane* (book 1), The Wizardry Compiled (book 2), The Wiz Biz II: Cursed and Consulted (books 3-4). The first two have also been available as The Wiz Biz in the past. The fifth book is not likely to ever be completed; medical reasons, IIRC.

Joel Rosenberg: The Guardians of the Flame* (books 1-3), Guardians of the Flame: Legacy* (books 4-5), Guardians of the Flame: To Home and Ehvenor* (books 6-7). The individual titles are apparently out of print.

* Also verified to be available at Kobo, and thus probably through other e-vendors as well.

[Gazella]

Originally Posted by Joy736

I have actually tried to read p&p twice before and couldn't get past 100 pages, but I guess I'm now at the right mindset or something, and I honesly can't understand why I haven't enjoyed it before.

After enjoying The Great Gatsby and now P&P, I want to read a lot more classics. I have Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Little Women, Anna Karenina and Lolita ready to go.

I utterly disliked The Great Gatsby. If you're looking for recommendations for classic novels, I recommend The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. It's absolutely fantastic.

[Joy736]

Originally Posted by Gazella

I utterly disliked The Great Gatsby. If you're looking for recommendations for classic novels, I recommend The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. It's absolutely fantastic.

Thanks! It's on my list. I've read The Three Musketeers a couple of years ago (after I saw the musical) and loved it very much. So, I'm not at all against trying another Dumas novel

[Luffy]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

So, let me throw something at you from left field: Simon R. Green.

He's written a lot of stuff, mainly series work, in a few different genres...but ultimately, it all links up. Sometimes it's just a reference here and there, but they all fit together in a bizarre way. His twelve-book Nightside series (#1: Something from the Nightside) is about a detective with a mysterious heritage and a daunting reputation who works that small part of London where it's always 3am and monsters walk the streets...and sometimes, vice versa. After several books of that, he started the Secret Histories series (#1: The Man with the Golden Torc), which is very firmly set in the Nightside's world but has more of a James Bond feel, as you might gather from the book titles. As Green was winding the Nightside books down, he started a third series, the Ghost Finders books (#1: Ghost of a Chance), which follows a small team whose mission is to find and squash malevolent ghosts. Yes, this means he's currently publishing at least two books a year, one in each of the SH and GF series. (And oh, happy day - I just noticed that GF5 comes out Tuesday, and there's a collection of Nightside short fiction coming in January!)

All three series can be read independently, but I find it works best to read them all in chronological order by publication date, so the references and occasional crossovers line up. Green's got a wicked sense of humor, and I love playing spot-the-reference while reading his stuff. His books tend to be on the short side; the first Nightside book is 230 pages, so it's not much of a time sink...and if it pays off, you've got over 20 more books ahead of you.

I didn't know this author at all, but it turns out I have his Nightside series on my hard disk. Doesn't he have only 12 Nightside books printed up till now? Twelve and not twenty?

EDIT : I realize I haven't counted the novellas.

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by Luffy

I didn't know this author at all, but it turns out I have his Nightside series on my hard disk. Doesn't he have only 12 Nightside books printed up till now? Twelve and not twenty?

EDIT : I realize I haven't counted the novellas.

The 20-plus figure is counting the Secret Histories and Ghost Finders books as part of the same mega-series. The novellas are being collected into one volume in January, complete with a new story.

[HarryT]

Guys - can you take the reading recommendations off this thread, please? This thread is for talking about what we are reading, not what we should read. Start a new thread for asking for recommendations, please.

Thanks!

[Luffy]

I'm going to read About A Boy by Nick Hornby, very soon.

[Gazella]

Originally Posted by Joy736

Thanks! It's on my list. I've read The Three Musketeers a couple of years ago (after I saw the musical) and loved it very much. So, I'm not at all against trying another Dumas novel

I read The Three Musketeers a few months ago. I think I posted a short review somewhere in this thread. Very enjoyable, although I loved The Count a lot more. Since you loved this novel, you're definitely going to love The Count of Monte Cristo.

[Difflugia]

I've been reading a four-book Baen series by Mercedes Lackey and Roberta Gellis:

• This Sceptered Isle
• Ill Met by Moonlight
• By Slanderous Tongues
• And Less Than Kind

I've been enjoying them, but I'm about a chapter into By Slanderous Tongues and sort of running out of steam. I decided to take Kobo up on one of their recommendations and bought Victor Stenger's God and the Folly of Faith. We'll see if that cleanses the palate a little.

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by alansplace

Since I'd pretty much burnt out on them I just put two books, Outlander and Under the Skin onto my MFRL (maybe finish reading later) pile leaving The Spitting Image, The Paper Magician and Mr. Mercedes as well as adding Ready Player One (at 8% read) to my 'currently reading' list! Then I finished reading The Spitting Image and I loved reading it as much as I had enjoyed reading the first one in the 'Ed Noon' series!

I believe that I'll concentrate on Ready Player One and leave the other two for nexties!

Last night I finished reading Ready Player One! An engrossing story with great characters, and it's happening in a fantastic and interesting environment. Couldn't put it down!
Now I'm finally getting back to The Paper Magician.

And after that I'll finally get to begin reading Mr. Mercedes!

[John F]

I'm reading the last book in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos.

Spoiler:

The Shrike/Nemes battle in Endymion was cool.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

Rick Cook: Wizard's Bane* (book 1), The Wizardry Compiled (book 2), The Wiz Biz II: Cursed and Consulted (books 3-4). The first two have also been available as The Wiz Biz in the past. The fifth book is not likely to ever be completed; medical reasons, IIRC.

It's actually the 6th book which wasn't completed (which is a shame, since it would have been fun to see the skewering of the dot.com bubble), but Cook's put part of what he'd written so far online. The 5th book, The Wizardry Quested, is only available in paperback, though.

As for me, I've been on a nostalgia kick, revisiting one of my favourite childhood YA science fiction authors, William Sleator, who, as I found out when I went to see what else he'd written since the last time I'd reread his books, had actually died quite some time ago while I hadn't noticed.

In any case, I've been raiding the library for his more recently-written books, and the two I just finished yesterday were:

The Boy Who Couldn't Die, whose protagonist trades his soul for immortality/invulnerability and lives to regret it as the person whom he sold it to uses it for increasingly nefarious purposes.

This suffers from a couple of problems that I'll address downpost, since they're kind of the exact same problems that the other book has.

But I'll note that it's refreshing to see a zombie book which features the classical mind-controlled horrific indestructible servant of the zombie-making sorceror, rather than the more modern interpretation of the brain-eating post-apocalyptic self-infecting rotting shambler.

and:

Hell Phone: ah, the days when picking up a cheap mobile of dubious provenance carried considerably weirder and more life-threatening risks then they do now, at least in the public imagination.

This was actually the more interesting of the two, involving a greater degree of (not to mention also a better depiction of) fear, uncertainty, and manipulation as the teenage protagonist struggles with whether or not to get caught up in the apparent bad vs. worse struggle (with an appeal to life-saving heroism) played out between the people who originally owned the phone.

But both books suffer from the problem that they're just not very well written, and far below Sleator's previously excellent standard in his heyday. There's far too much "tell" compared to "show", and the worst of it is that the really interesting angles on the stories aren't very well explored, or mentioned vaguely as a throwaway near the end.

Spoiler:

Boy set up for accusation of murder and publicly executed returns from the dead with taped evidence of conspiracy to frame him? And gets his 15 minutes of fame and a full ride to fortune (or at least a decent higher education scholarship) due to the media-cized notoriety of his return and becomes a celebrity?

I would have loved to have seen the story of the public reaction to that, which would probably be some sort of game-changer if it were really accepted and not dismissed as some crazy conspiracy theory cover-up. But nooooo, it gets like one paragraph in the final chapter.

Similarly, exploring the conscious and unconscious sensations of a zombie who retains full knowledge and self-control, except when being used, thus gradually becoming aware of said zombified state, and then

Spoiler:

after falling in love and being cured from zombie-dom, discovering that the beloved is in fact another undisclosed zombie who is still uncured?

I'd have really liked to see the ramifications to the interpersonal relationships involved in that after the reveal, but any chance of that literally cuts off right at the last paragraph.

I suppose it's nice enough that the characters get to more-or-less live, if not happily ever after, then with at least the strong implication that nothing very bad will happen to them in the future compared to what they just went through in the story.

But it turns out that the story I was told about these characters and their situations seems far less interesting than the story I now want to read.

It's true that all my favourites of his were the SF ones, and for the past decade or so Sleator had been writing much more supernatural/horror-ish-toned works which aren't really to my taste, but I don't think the apparently precipitous drop in quality is due to that, or my old faves holding up under the nostalgia filter (I reread some of them recently and it doesn't look like they were visited by what writer Jo Walton calls The Suck Fairy and besides he was listed for some major kidlit awards for some of those ones, too, back in the day).

I think it really is a case of the combination of the new subgenre limiting what you can really do with your imagination within the subgenre conventions and typical reader expectations and Sleator's deteriorating writing ability (he was getting pretty old and was sickly near the end, according to his Wikipedia entry) not being inclined to do any more cool stuff like really and truly exploring the implications of, say a lifestyle application of Einstein's Twin Paradox (IN YOUR BACKYAAAAARD!) to sibling rivalry, or doing When LARPers Attack!, or the usefulness of an Escher-esque Skinner Box and Pavlovian conditioning in training orphans in your dystopic future to become SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER (maybe) with some nods to the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments, or even homages to Flatland with bonus chemical chirality thrown in.

Because, I dunno, somehow battling the cursed cellphone and the zombie soul-snatcher seem kind of staid compared to that.

Although maybe a book about evils of standardized testing as a future quality-of-life determiner in conjunction with systematic bureaucratic corruption and graft resulting in the creation of an underclass of desperate opportunity-less masses excluded from the elite gated communities and run on the actual physical labour of exploited illegal immigrants* has greater resonance for today's teens than I would have thought.

Actually, the really worrisome thing is not that Sleator's final few books aren't that great (which is understandable at the tail end of a career), it's that the back blurbs provide him with a lot of praise and recommendations for them from respectable major book review outlets (likely chosen for flattery, but still).

If this is what's considered the good stuff for YA speculative fiction nowadays, then I have this morbid curiosity as to just how terribad is the mode?!?!

* That would be Sleator's The Test, read several weeks prior to this.

[MickeyC]

Originally Posted by alansplace

Last night I finished reading Ready Player One! An engrossing story with great characters, and it's happening in a fantastic and interesting environment. Couldn't put it down!

Totally agree about Ready Player One! Could not put it down either.