Book Recommendations?

Aubrey/Maturin is a great suggestion! Love that series.

If you feel the need to understand every part of it and have never touched a line on a boat before, A Sea of Words is a good companion.

I’d sailed before, so I knew a lot of the terms, but I also let some just wash over me. Not everyone is able to do that.

WizardM0de wrote:

Can anyone recommend a series to get completely, hopelessly lost in for about a year and a half? I’m talking irresistible character-driven page-turning escapist insanity. I don’t want real life, I want to disappear from it.

Sorry to hear what's going on.

What about Bujold? Quite a few books in the Vorkosigan series, but her other worlds are fun, too. I really like her new Novellas that shes been putting out in her "retirement", focused around a man who accidentally receives a demon not intended for him, and has to learn to deal with it's chaos magic as it makes him functionally a wizard.

Kushiel's Dart Kindle edition by Jacqueline Carey is on sale for $1.99 today. Any recommendations?

Natus wrote:

Kushiel's Dart Kindle edition by Jacqueline Carey is on sale for $1.99 today. Any recommendations?

I ended up getting rid of my copies of the series...and I hang on to most books.
It was a somewhat interesting world, but I really didn't like the sadism in the sex scenes and that made it such that although I did read two or three books in the series, I wouldn't recommend them.

They just kind of make my skin crawl when thinking about them.

Natus wrote:

Kushiel's Dart Kindle edition by Jacqueline Carey is on sale for $1.99 today. Any recommendations?

Her spin on Lord of the Rings is excellent though, if other books of hers are on sale. The first one is Banewreaker, just a 2 book series.

MathGoddess wrote:
Natus wrote:

Kushiel's Dart Kindle edition by Jacqueline Carey is on sale for $1.99 today. Any recommendations?

I ended up getting rid of my copies of the series...and I hang on to most books.
It was a somewhat interesting world, but I really didn't like the sadism in the sex scenes and that made it such that although I did read two or three books in the series, I wouldn't recommend them.

They just kind of make my skin crawl when thinking about them.

I read it after a couple of friends raved about it... and I didn't like it at all. I am the furthest thing from a prude you could possibly imagine, and yet the book made me feel dirty. But lots of people like it, so I am by no means indicative of its appeal, I guess.

MathGoddess wrote:
Natus wrote:

Kushiel's Dart Kindle edition by Jacqueline Carey is on sale for $1.99 today. Any recommendations?

I ended up getting rid of my copies of the series...and I hang on to most books.
It was a somewhat interesting world, but I really didn't like the sadism in the sex scenes and that made it such that although I did read two or three books in the series, I wouldn't recommend them.

They just kind of make my skin crawl when thinking about them.

Thank you. This whole "Imma out-grimdark the other authors by outdoing GRRM with the sex scenes and torture" is so not my thing.

Natus wrote:

Kushiel's Dart Kindle edition by Jacqueline Carey is on sale for $1.99 today. Any recommendations?

I got partway into the first book, and stopped, and this was before I even got to any of the sex. I could just tell that it was going to be some twisted sh*t, and didn't have any interest in going further. I'm okay with sex in fantasy books: it's not incredibly common, but it's not normally bothersome. Sado/masochism, though, is a set of kinks that I definitely do not have.

The quality of the writing seemed otherwise decent, but I was finding the overall tone repellent even before things really started to happen. I noped on out of there.

I'm in the middle of Book 2 of Angus Watson's West of West trilogy, and I'm really enjoying it. The first book took a few chapters to really get going, but once all the characters became familiar and the plot took off it grabbed me hard. It is very loosely based on Viking incursions into North America, but with some magical/fantastical flair. Very enjoyable, with some interesting twists and genuinely laugh out loud moments.

Note that the trilogy is not complete - Book 3 is still in work but hopefully due out at the end of the year.

Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' is $2.99 on kindle today. Brilliant stuff.

https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Claw-F...

My book club is trying to find a book that meets a weird intersection of requirements -- alternate history; written by a woman; written by a POC.

I'd love to find a few choices that hit all three, but anything you can recommend that comes close would be great.

(Also, the goodreads search engine is Not Useful -- I can't find any way to convince it to give me lists with useful intersections.)

We did read Rebecca Roanhorse's _Trail of Lightning_ last August.

There are parts of the Wild Cards anthology books which are written by women and POC (and women POC), but they're mixed in with white guy writing as well.

Jo Walton wrote an alt-history Nazi England trilogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farthing_(novel) (white woman)

Haven't read it so I can't tell you if it's any good, but Everfair by Nisi Shawl probably fits the bill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisi_Shawl#Everfair

"Everfair is an alternate history of the African Congo, Europe, and the United States, during the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, where Shawl's science-fictional turning point is that "the native populations (of the Congo) had learned about steam technology a bit earlier."[12] Her novel imagines that British Fabian Socialists team up with African-American Christian missionaries to purchase land in the Congo Basin from Leopold II of Belgium, thus creating a speculative new nation in her version of history, where citizens could experiment with the freedoms they had lacked in their original homelands, as well as benefit from this key technology of the industrial revolution, that of steam engines. "

Dread Nation would work.

I'll also recommend Book Riot for reading suggestions. I'm working on their Read Harder challenge this year....and here's their link to some suggested alternate history books. Dread Nation is on there

https://bookriot.com/2019/01/04/read...

Only some of the stories would completely fit the bill, but N. K. Jemisin's "How Long 'til Black Future Month?" sounds close.

I've finished the A Darker Shade of Magic series by Victoria Schwab. A very solid trilogy with an interesting and unique worldbuilding.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I've finished the A Darker Shade of Magic series by Victoria Schwab. A very solid trilogy with an interesting and unique worldbuilding.

I liked these a lot, as well. I think they were recommended here a long time ago.

Katy wrote:

My book club is trying to find a book that meets a weird intersection of requirements -- alternate history; written by a woman; written by a POC.

I'd love to find a few choices that hit all three, but anything you can recommend that comes close would be great.

(Also, the goodreads search engine is Not Useful -- I can't find any way to convince it to give me lists with useful intersections.)

We did read Rebecca Roanhorse's _Trail of Lightning_ last August.

A local female oriented bookstore is probably a good resource for this as well, in Chicago we have Women and Children First, you might have a something similar.

Katy wrote:

My book club is trying to find a book that meets a weird intersection of requirements -- alternate history; written by a woman; written by a POC.

I'd love to find a few choices that hit all three, but anything you can recommend that comes close would be great.

(Also, the goodreads search engine is Not Useful -- I can't find any way to convince it to give me lists with useful intersections.)

We did read Rebecca Roanhorse's _Trail of Lightning_ last August.

Doing the Book Riot Read Harder challenges?

I read Dread Nation for my alt history which is written by a black women. It was quite good and I think would be a good book club discussion.

firesloth wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

I've finished the A Darker Shade of Magic series by Victoria Schwab. A very solid trilogy with an interesting and unique worldbuilding.

I liked these a lot, as well. I think they were recommended here a long time ago.

Yes they were, which is how they ended up on my reading list. I quietly mine this thread constantly.

Yeah, those are quite good, but I don't think they're finished yet. Folks who don't want to jump in before there's a definite ending might want to hold off a bit. She's writing quickly and there's no reason to think she won't finish, and even now you won't be left hanging, but it's not all the way done yet. If she follows her past publishing history, the next one might be out within a couple of months. (12-15 months for each, so far, she's been working pretty fast.)

I particularly enjoyed the female character in this series; I liked her goals and her lack of shame in having them. She wants what she wants, and if that seems weird to other folks, oh well. There will be a ship, dammit, and she will be the captain. She doesn't try to justify it, that's just what she wants to do. It hasn't happened yet, but I'm sure it eventually will.

Oh, and I just finished a non-fiction book: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Jonathan French. It's a very interesting, slightly alternate view of how humanity came to be. The common belief has been that we developed a big brain and taught ourselves how to cook, but it's Mr. French's argument that this is exactly backward, that it was cooking that gave us the calories we needed to grow our big brains.

He lays out the case quite carefully; it's intended for laypeople, not scientists, so it's not rigorous or jargon-filled, but it's pretty complete. He examines other possibilities, but settles on the view that it was probably the habilines that first started cooking. On an evolutionary timescale, creatures that develop a new food source adapt to it extremely quickly, and he argues that it looks most likely that it was cooking that caused the change from the habilines to Homo Erectus, and shaped Erectus' development in many ways. He also ties cooking into marriage and the fundamental expectation by so many hunter-gatherer tribes that women are supposed to cook for men. He doesn't like this very much, and in fact seems slightly horrified, but lays out the case carefully. I won't get into it here because it could derail this thread, but I found it to be a very interesting, and slightly saddening read.

One takeaway from the book is that the more processed a food is, the more calories we can extract from it. This is true both in terms of cooking and in terms of how finely it's ground. The finer the milling in flour, for instance,, the more completely our gut absorbs it; well-cooked, finely ground flour is absorbed almost totally. If you eat raw food, you will probably eventually die of starvation; even with the ability to buy anything you want in a modern supermarket. A raw diet doesn't seem to sustain us anymore, our guts have spent a couple million years evolving to digest cooked food, but a highly processed diet sustains us too much, and we get fat.

Calorie totals on the back of packages are decent estimates only, because we don't really know how well things absorb. They've done a fair bit of experimentation, but nutrition science is still inexact. You could get two foods with identical calorie totals on the label, but one could transfer substantially more energy to you.

In general, if you're trying to lose weight, moving to harder, less processed foods, and ones that are cooked less, will probably help. If you need to gain weight, the more processed, the better. The calories on the label aren't a hard truth, they're approximate, so if you're not maintaining the weight you want, that approximation may not be working for you with the specific foods you're eating.

Mr. French also backs Michael Pollan's thinking about nutrition: "Eat food, mostly plants, not too much." And by "food", he means to buy actual whole foods and process them yourself. Don't buy things with "pea protein", buy things with peas. Don't buy apple juice, buy apples. Like that. Buy the entire food, not just a ground up, hyperprocessed part of it.

It's a little slow and a little dry, and I read myself to sleep at least ten times working on it, but overall, it was worthwhile. It's written well, and I never felt bored, but as a bedtime book, it was first-rate at knocking me out.

DiscoDriveby wrote:
Katy wrote:

My book club is trying to find a book that meets a weird intersection of requirements -- alternate history; written by a woman; written by a POC.

I'd love to find a few choices that hit all three, but anything you can recommend that comes close would be great.

(Also, the goodreads search engine is Not Useful -- I can't find any way to convince it to give me lists with useful intersections.)

We did read Rebecca Roanhorse's _Trail of Lightning_ last August.

Doing the Book Riot Read Harder challenges?

I read Dread Nation for my alt history which is written by a black women. It was quite good and I think would be a good book club discussion.

Hers are not alternate history, but has your book club tried anything bu N.K. Jemisin? She’s a fantasy author, and although her novels are fairly new (within the past 10 years), they’ve been nominated for, or won, many major awards.

qaraq wrote:
WizardM0de wrote:

Can anyone recommend a series to get completely, hopelessly lost in for about a year and a half? I’m talking irresistible character-driven page-turning escapist insanity. I don’t want real life, I want to disappear from it.

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series about the Royal Navy in and around the Napoleonic Wars. It's the sort of thing that isn't necessarily to everyone's taste, especially the details about ships and sailing, but if it registers with you, you'll grow a new space in your brain dedicated to them.

Maybe not escapist as O'Brian really puts his characters through the wringer, but they are such great characters.

I burned through C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series, but never touched O'Brian. Gonna have to rectify that because you're right: there's something about sailing ships that's just cool.

As for other escapist recommendations I'd toss out David Weber's Safehold series or Taylor Anderson's The Destroyermen series.

Nevermiiiiiind

Nevermiiiiiind

LastSurprise wrote:
DiscoDriveby wrote:
Katy wrote:

My book club is trying to find a book that meets a weird intersection of requirements -- alternate history; written by a woman; written by a POC.

I'd love to find a few choices that hit all three, but anything you can recommend that comes close would be great.

(Also, the goodreads search engine is Not Useful -- I can't find any way to convince it to give me lists with useful intersections.)

We did read Rebecca Roanhorse's _Trail of Lightning_ last August.

Doing the Book Riot Read Harder challenges?

I read Dread Nation for my alt history which is written by a black women. It was quite good and I think would be a good book club discussion.

Hers are not alternate history, but has your book club tried anything bu N.K. Jemisin? She’s a fantasy author, and although her novels are fairly new (within the past 10 years), they’ve been nominated for, or won, many major awards.

As a matter of fact, I just finished N.K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season," and I thought it was outstanding.

OG_Slinger, I’m pretty sure it was in “Fleet Tactics” that a combat vet noted that while Aubrey is a solid portrayal of a stolid leader with just the right lack of imagination, Hornblower would have been beached with a nervous breakdown after his first close-quarter action. In other words, you should see the contrast between the two pretty clearly.

Malor wrote:

Yeah, those are quite good, but I don't think they're finished yet. Folks who don't want to jump in before there's a definite ending might want to hold off a bit. She's writing quickly and there's no reason to think she won't finish, and even now you won't be left hanging, but it's not all the way done yet. If she follows her past publishing history, the next one might be out within a couple of months. (12-15 months for each, so far, she's been working pretty fast.)

Are you talking about Victoria Schwab's Shades of Magic series? If so, the trilogy has a very definitive ending. While there may be more books to follow, there is no reason to wait on them. The three books are very much a self-contained story.

Katy wrote:

My book club is trying to find a book that meets a weird intersection of requirements -- alternate history; written by a woman; written by a POC.

I'd love to find a few choices that hit all three, but anything you can recommend that comes close would be great.

Something by Octavia Butler may be what you're looking for. Many of her sci-fi novels are set in historic settings, although they're not alternate histories in the larger sense.