Book Recommendations?

Thanks for the warning words. Will go ahead and start with ATfW and look forward to Polaris.

Just pouring on the praise to Robear. Nicely summed up!

Why thank you!

I'd also suggest not reading them all in a row. I read the first 5 back in January and while I enjoyed them all, eventually you start to notice that similar plot points seem to happen in each book.

Yep. They are comfort reading, really. Drag one out when you're in need of some stability in your life.

10 female fantasy writers to read after Game Of Thrones ends

Always love a good list of things to add to my list.

farley3k wrote:

10 female fantasy writers to read after Game Of Thrones ends

Always love a good list of things to add to my list.

Tamora Pierce was one of my favorite authors growing up. At least her earlier stuff is firmly young adult, but I have read them in the last 5-6 years and thought they held up well. Definitely my favorite quartet is the pictured one, Protector of the Small, it's the third one in the Tortall universe and while I do recommend starting from the Alanna quartet they are reasonably self-contained.

Each of the first three Tortall quartets focuses on a girl/young woman (the first and third start with the character around 10, the second's character is somewhere around 14). The Circle of Magic books have four main characters with pretty equal screen time.

I've been planning on picking her stuff up and seeing where she's gone since I dropped off, but her books are usually pretty expensive on Kindle, I need to take advantage of my library.

Can recommend Sarah J. Maas. I devoured her books.

I've read all of those women with the exception of the last two. I checked out Nimona from the library not long ago but haven't gotten to it. Sabaa Tahir I've not had any contact with.

I don't know why every article has to be related to GRRM at the moment. IMO, none of the ones listed are really like GRRM at all. Good writers, but not near the same style.

I think there is at least a comparison to be made with Robin Hobb. Nowhere near as gratuitous as George RR Martin, but she does tend towards darker themes than many fantasy works. But, yeah, comparing the "coming of age" Tamora Pierce books or Bujold, to George RR Martin? Probably facepalm worthy.

Yonder wrote:

I think there is at least a comparison to be made with Robin Hobb. Nowhere near as gratuitous as George RR Martin, but she does tend towards darker themes than many fantasy works. But, yeah, comparing the "coming of age" Tamora Pierce books or Bujold, to George RR Martin? Probably facepalm worthy.

I agree she's not always nice to her characters, but there's nowhere near the cast to keep up with, nor the political machinations.

From people I've read, Sanderson is really the only one that approaches GRRM's fantasy complexity today, and it's not quite the same.

Like GRRM or not, he spends a lot of time to build layer upon layers with his ASoFaI books. Probably to a fault if getting books out is any kind of measure of success

What about K J Parker?

So I finished a new one a couple days ago, The Grey Bastards, by Jonathan French, and I've been struggling since with how to verbalize my reaction to it. It wasn't much like I expected it to be, and it's really had me thinking, off and on, ever since.

What sold me on it was this idea: "like The Black Company, but with half-orcs." Okay, I figured, I'm in, what the hell. And it is a little like The Black Company, but it's sort of... an echo of an echo. They're in distant shouting range, but the similarities are far fewer than the differences.

So, here's maybe not the first thing I learned, but the most important one: half-orcs are an ugly concept. Not that they themselves are ugly, but the idea of half-orcs is ugly. All half-orcs are the product of rape, normally by an orc male on a human female. And orcs are monstrous, subhuman, but able to impregnate human women. The resulting half-breed is instantly recognizable to either species, and hated at least by humans, dunno about orcs.

I never realized what a thin allegory this was. I didn't really play them in my D&D days, and I can see why they were removed in Second Edition as a player race. Tolkein's original idea was pretty bad to begin with (the cross being done by Saruman's magic), but the AD&D version that includes rape by near-humans to make monstrous offspring has some intensely uncomfortable parallels with scary viewpoints in the real world.

But French plays it straight. What would this look like? He's clearly starting from the AD&D basis. He adds a few critical bits of extra info: you can't abort a half-orc fetus without killing the mother (else there would be very few half-orcs in the world, so it's a necessary prerequisite to having enough to form even tiny societies), and that half-orc males are sterile. Females are usually sterile too, but not always, and very occasionally you'll see one of them get raped by another orc to make a 'thrice', a 3/4 orc. These extra details actually do matter, they're not just fluff filler.

So half-orcs that get born are mostly hated, and mostly killed by their mothers. Some of them show mercy; essentially none of them raise their children themselves, but they will sometimes give them up to half-orc orphanages. The protagonist, Jackal (an assumed name), was one of these, and has grown up and prospered in his 'hoof', attaining the status of rider. He has his own war boar (a weaponized version of a beast of burden in this world), as that's what was available to ride when his slave forebears broke their chains mid-battle and rode to fight an orc invasion. Most of them were killed, but they did well enough that the humans allowed them to populate a border area on the edge of orc country, let them keep their boars, and now they patrol and fight them off in exchange for their freedom and the ownership of the lands they inhabit. Or so Jackal has been taught, anyway; he'll find that there was just a bit more to it than that.

Now, all that backstory is not just dumped on you, like I just did. It's pretty skillfully woven into the fabric of the book. You hit the ground riding, more or less, and things move right along, with filler info showing up quietly when needed. Jackal's in a hoof of nine riders, and they're headed out of a brothel when they get accosted by a local human garrison; human soldiers also patrol these lands, but not very many. And one of them starts demanding they show proper respect to a noble, starts asserting dominance and demanding that the half-orcs crawl around and abase themselves before his glory. He doesn't live long.

The rest of the book is a long, long chain of fallout from killing a human noble, and it goes in some very unexpected directions. The first major plot point was incredibly obvious before arriving, and the supposed twist wasn't much of a twist at all. It was certain sure that people weren't going to react the way Jackal thought they would, and he was clearly making a huge blunder, and I very, very nearly put the book down there. But I just, just barely kept on with it, and lo and behold, it started to get better. The plotting got downright clever in the second half. That first big arc was not well done, but the back half... that was actually good. I ended up being glad I read it, even though I came so close to dropping it. I did end up skipping multiple pages somewhere near the middle, on at least two occasions, before picking it back up.

The world is very coarse. This is a book with constant dick jokes. It makes perfect sense, given the background these folks came from; they are soldiers, and this probably the area in which it's most like the Black Company. The constant banter back and forth is pretty amusing, but singularly focused. (probably just like the real thing would be.) This is not bedtime reading for the kiddos.

The world itself is grimdark, a really nasty piece of work on the whole, but Jackal... isn't. He and his fellows are coarse in the extreme, but most of them are pretty decent people. Jackal is genuinely trying to do the right thing, even though he doesn't ever verbalize it to himself or anyone else. And his buddies are mostly on board with his choices. His squad really isn't cruel. They're tough and take zero sh*t from anyone, nobles included, but they're not mean.

Their leader, though? He's pretty dark. Jackal and he aren't getting along because of it, which complexifies things a mite.

This is probably the weirdest book review I've done in this thread, partly because it's such a weird tale. It's hard to explain. It's a lot of things at once; the author, in his afterword, calls it a 'mutt of a book', and I can't imagine what else to call it. The tale is unusual, things are often kind of a muddle, there's a lot of really yucky concepts bound up in the whole half-orc thing, but.... for all that, it was worth reading.

And, you know what? I wasn't sure of that at first. I think I've only arrived at that conclusion after talking my way through it here. It might be worth reading just to get a solid picture of how awful that original AD&D idea of half-orcs even was. I'd certainly never thought about it before, or at least not more than superficially. Getting a picture of what it actually means was sobering.

There's a sequel to it this year, called "The True Bastards", coming on October 8...

Whoa. Finally got Tiamat’s Wrath, latest of The Expanse novels, from the library.

Holy crap, that may be the best of the series. Wow.

Love how the authors manage to make you feel for and with the characters.

Now we wait...

Finished Neal Stephenson's Seveneves again yesterday. I enjoyed the journey but felt the destination left something to be desired. I know that's often the way with Neal, but in this case to my mind it really just petered out in the final part. I'm sure some people would get annoyed with the way the middle of the book played out as well, but I still found it entertaining.

2 weeks till Fall!

ranalin wrote:

2 weeks till Fall!

Nice timing! Didn't realize that was that close to release.

I started and finished Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon while travelling on business for a week.

Really didn't enjoy it. If it hadn't been the only book I had with me (and I was in Japan, so couldn't easily pick up a different book), I'd have likely given up partway through.

I've been trying to define what I didn't like so starkly about it. There's a bunch of magical realism that turns up for no reason partway through

Spoiler:

e.g. turns out the main characters have had superpowers since they were kids, because who knows why. Ancient gods physically manifest in one chapter, aren't explained, then are barely mentioned again.

The character's sole motivations seem to be "help the author move the story along". The aliens are kind of rubbish. All-powerful, but passive and lame. The story ends rather than concludes. There's a very big cast of characters, but as a result, the reader spends little time with each, and it's tough to care about many of them.

All in all, one of the most tedious first contact stories I've read in a long time.

https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/...?

Thoughts on this list? I've only read 13 of them, and have added a few more to the list.

charlemagne wrote:

https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/...?

Thoughts on this list? I've only read 13 of them, and have added a few more to the list.

My first thought was that the list is really way more than only 50 books since many of those books are part of a series and if you want to read the whole series...

There are a number of books on this list I haven't yet read myself!

charlemagne wrote:

https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/...?

Thoughts on this list? I've only read 13 of them, and have added a few more to the list.

I'd say it's a mix -- what sort of fantasy books do you usually enjoy?

I've read most of the list. There are certainly a few I didn't care for, and a few I enjoyed a few decades ago that may not hold up to a re-read. (And shock! I like Stephen King more for his short fiction than his novels.)

charlemagne wrote:

https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/...?

Thoughts on this list? I've only read 13 of them, and have added a few more to the list.

I think it has too broad a definition of fantasy.
I consider urban fantasy / supernatural books as distinct from traditional fantasy.
I adore the Ilona Andrews series, really enjoy Patricia Briggs, kind of like Kim Harrison....all in the urban fantasy genre.
These books have a very very very different feel from “traditional” fantasy like David Eddings, Tolkien, Hobb, Feist and McCaffrey.
I view graphic novels differently, although Monstress is absolutely graphic novel fantasy and excellent.
And I’d never look for The Stand in a fantasy section.....much more post apocalyptic and horror (there definitely are scenes that have stayed with me and I read it over 30 years ago.)

But there are a number of good books there.

There are some absolute turds in there too, like Terry Goodkind's series

So this Joan Didion real good.
Slouching towards Bethlehem was very very good.

Tanglebones wrote:

There are some absolute turds in there too, like Terry Goodkind's series

I was going to say that I didn't notice any real stinkers in the bunch that I knew of, but I must have missed the Goodkind. That throws it all into question.

kazooka wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:

There are some absolute turds in there too, like Terry Goodkind's series

I was going to say that I didn't notice any real stinkers in the bunch that I knew of, but I must have missed the Goodkind. That throws it all into question.

In fairness to the list, going back, that's the only turd I can identify. I just haven't read about a dozen of the newer ones.

Maybe the reason so many of us missed the Goodkind is that we were previously so traumatized by it that it just no longer exists in our reality. While a non-traumatized person might see it listed, a traumatized person just sees a nothingness that blends in with normal surroundings.

Tanglebones wrote:
kazooka wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:

There are some absolute turds in there too, like Terry Goodkind's series

I was going to say that I didn't notice any real stinkers in the bunch that I knew of, but I must have missed the Goodkind. That throws it all into question.

In fairness to the list, going back, that's the only turd I can identify. I just haven't read about a dozen of the newer ones.

I'm giving some strong side eye to all the urban fantasy with rad 90s covers, but yeah, as far as things I've read, that's the only thing that stands out.

Honestly, I stopped reading the list when I spotted the Supernatural Romance books. For me, that's too wide a filter. (Don't get me wrong, I am fine with that genre, but it's not fantasy, it's romance.)