Book Recommendations?

I got a ways into Wild Cards, but I burned out pretty hard on them. I found I just didn't care much for the shared worldview; they were kind of depressing books, without any real payoff to make the downer worth it.,

edit, much later: and note that I got nine or ten books into the series, I really gave it a chance. There were parts that I liked a lot, but I eventually realized that the tales had become a slog, and that I'd lost interest.

Tanglebones wrote:

... I love the Wild Cards books way more than Asoiaf

Because they are actually good and not just description porn.

Seriously though, I've only read a couple of the short story anthologies and enjoyed them way more than I did the 2.5 books of ASoIaF I got through.

So we all know he’s going to Robert Jordan this, right? At least Sanderson will have steady work.

Michael wrote:

So we all know he’s going to Robert Jordan this, right? At least Sanderson will have steady work.

I would be okay with that. I am pretty sure Sanderson is actually Multiple Man based on how much he can write.

I don't know that Sanderson would be the right person to finish ASoIaF. Maybe Erikson.

Malor wrote:

My guess was that he had a successful series, the most successful he'd written, and was milking it to sell more books.

This seems pretty uncharitable and there really doesn't seem to be any evidence for it. I've been reading the series since it came out and I am frustrated that it hasnt ended but nothing about Martin has ever screamed "I'm in it for the money".

I dont actually think Martin would let anyone else finish his series, other than the TV show.

I would say no sequel for 15 years says all that needs saying.

NathanialG wrote:
Malor wrote:

My guess was that he had a successful series, the most successful he'd written, and was milking it to sell more books.

This seems pretty uncharitable and there really doesn't seem to be any evidence for it. I've been reading the series since it came out and I am frustrated that it hasnt ended but nothing about Martin has ever screamed "I'm in it for the money".

Going off on wild tangents with characters that are mostly unimportant in earlier books was a huge tell, to me. I think it was about book 4 that I realized he was just padding his word count, he wasn't interested in actually finishing his tale. That's where I stopped reading, as the similarity to Robert Jordan was so powerful.

I am, admittedly, less charitable about his underlying motivations in not wanting to finish, but he's a professional author who's been at it for a lot of years, and he should know perfectly well how to stay focused and keep his plot size manageable. Heading off to chase minor characters struck me as conscious and deliberate. There were also a couple of quotes, back then, that hinted pretty strongly that the tale's commercial success was definitely part of why the books were being drawn out, but it's been enough years now that I've lost the specific memory.

If he's lost in the weeds now, trying to bring all these threads together, well.... he's the pro that put himself there. I don't think Jordan had much professional experience, but Martin's been at it for decades. Jordan was ill and kind of a noob, and AFAIK Martin's health is fine and he's got immense experience to draw on.

edit: plus, it's been seven years since the last book. If he really wanted to finish that tale, he'd have put something out by now.

The Kitty Norville series is finished. I enjoyed the whole run. She's doing a young adult series now...dystopian future. I liked the first and have the second on hold.

The Greywalker series was also fun, different, and is finished.

And the final book in the Ilona Andrews Kate Daniels series comes out in a week (happy dance)!

Under One Banner, book 4 of the Commonweal series by Graydon Saunders, was just released. I'm just a bit more than halfway through, and so far it's everything I could have wanted from a new entry.

This is a fairly obscure series that, as far as I'm aware, is infamous in the circles in which it is known at all. Saunders's writing style may be charitably described as distinctive. He tends to be pithy to the point of distraction. He can drop important information in the space of a sentence, without elaboration or remark, and expect the reader to just keep up. (One of my favorite descriptions says of the first book, "It makes a heroic, but ultimately unsuccessful attempt at pretending to be written in English.") Exposition is close to nonexistent. That the series is self-published may count as another black mark in the eyes of some.

However. I kind of love these books.

The first book is The March North. One could comfortably slot this book into the genre of military fantasy. At a high level, it's about a nation called the Commonweal, and a military unit out on a seemingly quiet edge of things that finds itself needing to repel an invasion. To assist with this, they are assigned a few sorcerers of terrible might.

The central element of the setting is the Power, the system of magic with which most of the world has been shaped. It turns out that when you get a many thousands of years of the world occasionally producing inconceivably powerful sorcerers, who promptly start conquering everything they can, the result is a world that is a thoroughly unpleasant place to live, being swamped with the terrible magical detritus of every past sorcerer who thought it would be a great idea to (say) breed a hardy species of vine that could literally choke the life out of their enemies; or new species of people who are bred to serve them; or swans, oh god the swans.

The Commonweal, for various reasons that I won't explain here, is the one approachingly bright spot in the world (at least that we hear about). Its founding principles are no rule by sorcerers and no slaves. One of the more fascinating parts of these books is their answer to the question of how you can design an equal society when a tiny minority of your population consists of sorcerers that could, in other circumstances, carve out a nation for themselves without really trying.

All that said, the first book is a relatively straightforward military adventure with sorcerers, magical railguns, and a five-ton fire-breathing battle sheep named Eustace. The second and third books take us to wizard school, and are a different sort of book entirely.

Harry Potter this is not. A Succession of Bad Days is about a class of students who possess a great deal of talent for the Power, but, for one reason or another, have managed to live their lives without being trained in its use. After their talent is noticed, they're informed that if they aren't properly instructed, the statistics are abundantly clear that they will be dead by the age of 40. Some of them are uncomfortably close to this deadline. Grow up or die becomes a refrain repeated a few times throughout the book.

But the thing that sets this book apart is that a great deal of their course of instruction has to do with civil engineering. There's a lot of talk of drainage and and canals and just how sorcerers with their degree of ability can maximally benefit the civilization in which they live. Making wondrous magical artifacts is generally less useful than designing the techniques and tools that allow other, less unusually gifted groups of people to do the same.

This sort of thing very much does not appeal to all readers, but I enjoy the heck out of it. The third book, Safely You Deliver, is very much a continuation of the second book, though it expands the point of view beyond the second book's class a little more.

So now we have Under One Banner, book four. This book gives us a new protagonist, whose point of view is closer to that of a normal person than we've seen before. As the book opens, Eugenia is recovering from an accident in which their talent for the Power was burned out of their brain, in a completely literal sense; a chief worry is that some of the leftover ash in their brain might make it into their bloodstream and give them a stroke. Now they're trying to find something useful they can do, in what time is left to them.

I'm enjoying it a great deal. If you've made it this far through these books, then you probably will, too.

They are not on Amazon? What kind of weird book is this? Does the author not like money?

Oh, yes, if what I described above is not weird enough, these ebooks are sold in most places that aren't Amazon. Here is book 1 on Google Play. This is deliberate on the part of the author, who disapproves of Amazon on principle. I have the sense that he does not rely on sales of these books for his livelihood.

Malor wrote:

Hah, now I'm feeling clever for dropping that series several books ago. My guess was that he had a successful series, the most successful he'd written, and was milking it to sell more books.

His fortune's made, you'd think he could just finish the damn thing now.

I started and abandoned GRRM almost a decade ago, while in grad school -- which is not to brag, but to reveal how ridiculously slowly he writes. At the time, I had two reasons: one, I felt like he was writing so slowly that his series could turn into another Wheel of Time, and I definitely didn't need that in my life. And two, while I don't have a problem with some violent and heavy material, I need at least the possibility that something good will happen in the characters' lives. I think this last part was influenced by reading Terry Goodkind's parade of horrible main-character-abuses in the Sword of Truth series, though I would eventually come to loathe that series for other reasons (yet strangely, I finished it).

Anyway, on the topic of recommendations, I read and loved Six Wakes earlier this year, and have been singing its praises since. It is a story about a generational starship on a journey to settle a new planet, crewed by a team of six clones. In Six Wakes' near-future, clones are a vehicle for immortality, and can inherit their predecessor's memories through, essentially, a backup-and-restore of data, but there are some pretty serious restrictions on cloning (like, no multiples of people). The story opens with a murder mystery, as one of the crew apparently went berserk and killed the rest. Another crew member took the final act of hitting the reboot button, reviving each crew member as a clone in a 20-year-old body -- but no one backed up their memories during the prior 30 years or so of space flight, so they're all flying blind (so to speak). It's an interesting concept, and all of the characters' lives are woven together in ways unknown to them when they first wake up.

Going back a bit to the Black Company discussion - book one is the TOR free ebook of the month

https://www.tor.com/2018/08/27/downl...

LastSurprise wrote:

I started and abandoned GRRM almost a decade ago, while in grad school -- which is not to brag, but to reveal how ridiculously slowly he writes.

Yea someone recommended that I read ASOIAF back when I delivered pizza when I was 23. I am 39 now and the series still isn't finished.

Started We Are Legion (We Are Bob) yesterday and I'm 2/3 finished already. Very good stuff and I plan to read others in the series. I haven't had any of the laugh-out-loud moments most of the reviews talk about, but some light-ish sci-fi is just what the doctor ordered after slogging through both Malazan and Wheel of Time.

Suttree was pretty good if you can get past the racial epithets and sexism.

A new Drizzt novel! I know they are very basic in their writing but I grew up reading him, even got to play Everquest with R.A. Salvatore himself (and Curt Schilling), so I have a love for anything Drizzt.

Finished Magic Triumphs the new and final Kate Daniels book. Overall enjoyed it, had some minor nitpicks with it, but if you've read the previous nine books, there's no reason not to read this one and see how it all wraps up.

I just finished Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed and totally loved it. Its a fantasy series set in a fictional Islamic world. Quite a refreshing change from the usual. The plot and characters are all very well done and fit well together. But, be warned, it is the first book of a series and the other books haven't been released yet. You may want to hold up if you are the type that waits for all books to be published to start.

TAZ89 wrote:

I just finished Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed and totally loved it. Its a fantasy series set in a fictional Islamic world. Quite a refreshing change from the usual. The plot and characters are all very well done and fit well together. But, be warned, it is the first book of a series and the other books haven't been released yet. You may want to hold up if you are the type that waits for all books to be published to start.

He's too busy writing comics and while his comics are great, I just want to throw money at him until he writes another novel.

oilypenguin wrote:
TAZ89 wrote:

I just finished Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed and totally loved it. Its a fantasy series set in a fictional Islamic world. Quite a refreshing change from the usual. The plot and characters are all very well done and fit well together. But, be warned, it is the first book of a series and the other books haven't been released yet. You may want to hold up if you are the type that waits for all books to be published to start.

He's too busy writing comics and while his comics are great, I just want to throw money at him until he writes another novel.

This!

Clumber wrote:

Finished Magic Triumphs the new and final Kate Daniels book. Overall enjoyed it, had some minor nitpicks with it, but if you've read the previous nine books, there's no reason not to read this one and see how it all wraps up.

Really looking forward to having her explore the world with other characters.

NathanialG wrote:
Clumber wrote:

Finished Magic Triumphs the new and final Kate Daniels book. Overall enjoyed it, had some minor nitpicks with it, but if you've read the previous nine books, there's no reason not to read this one and see how it all wraps up.

Really looking forward to having her explore the world with other characters.

If you haven't already, pick up Magic Stars a novella featuring Derek & Julie. Short but very fun read.

Clumber wrote:
NathanialG wrote:
Clumber wrote:

Finished Magic Triumphs the new and final Kate Daniels book. Overall enjoyed it, had some minor nitpicks with it, but if you've read the previous nine books, there's no reason not to read this one and see how it all wraps up.

Really looking forward to having her explore the world with other characters.

If you haven't already, pick up Magic Stars a novella featuring Derek & Julie. Short but very fun read.

I'd also strongly recommend reading Iron and Magic before Magic Triumphs. I had great fun with Triumphs

I'm not usually one who listens to books, but my sister gifted me Robert Harris's Imperium, about the rise of the Roman orator Cicero. It was AMAZING, both the book and the narration. I am definitely going to purchase the following two books in the series, and I am now a confirmed Robert Harris fan.

Imperium is also very historically accurate, at least as far as I can tell. It's everything an historical novel should be.

TAZ89 wrote:

I just finished Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed and totally loved it. Its a fantasy series set in a fictional Islamic world. Quite a refreshing change from the usual. The plot and characters are all very well done and fit well together. But, be warned, it is the first book of a series and the other books haven't been released yet. You may want to hold up if you are the type that waits for all books to be published to start.

I just read it and really enjoyed it as well. While it's the first of a series, it feels like a complete story. The characters you're meeting have already had full, tumultuous, lives of adventure before the events of this book, which actually helps alleviate the sense that you're at the start of some long epic.

Awhile back a couple people were talking about a new sci-fi novel that had some comparisons to Columbus. Not sure if we got discovered by sci-fi alien Columbus or if the humans were putting together a new expedition. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

No, but that reminds me of an Orson Scott Card novel involving Columbus and time travel that I really enjoyed: Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The premise was that a couple time travelers were trying to prevent Columbus' voyage to the Americas, which resulted in . . . well, all the death, suffering and enslavement that we know about. It had a delightful twist part-way through:

Spoiler:

As it turned out, our timeline with Columbus' voyage, as we know it, resulted from time travel interference. Further investigation revealed that the earlier batch of time travelers were trying to prevent a different, but similar problem: that the Aztec empire would have taken over the Americas, then sailed across the sea and conquered the world. The resulting worldwide death, slavery, and ritual human sacrifice was deemed bad enough to justify the slavery and mass death that we know in the Americas. After all, our world eventually developed a sense of human rights and ended such practices (in our timeline), but that might never have happened under the Aztec empire.

Of course, the time travelers from our timeline tried to work out a way to avoid both fates.