Book recs, you say?egosomnioJanuary 27 2010, 20:59:40 UTC
I always recommend the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher - eleven books so far (see here for the specific books; it probably isn't strictly necessary to read them in order, since a lot of the main concepts are explained pretty much once a book, but you'll get a lot of spoilers about previous books if you go out of order). Urban fantasy / hardboiled detective, with lots of geeky references and some fun silliness (including the Pizza Lord's Guard, which is a bunch of faeries loyal to the protagonist; and the immortal battle cries "I don't believe in fairies!" and "Polka will never die!") thrown in despite it getting pretty dark at times. It's been described on TV Tropes as an entire series of Crazy Awesome. So keep an eye out for those.
Snowcrash, by Neal Stephenson, is crazy sci-fi, kind of like a Gibson novel put in a blender with some laughing gas and a copy of the first Matrix movie.
Job: A Comedy of Justice, by Heinlein, is sort of a religious satire. Alternate realities, Heaven, Hell, other afterlifes, and deities being inveterate gamblers all play a part.
Most things Bordertown are good. Mostly anthologies of short stories, it's a shared-world urban fantasy series. Little bit of everything you might expect to come across in urban fantasy.
If you've ever got a lot of free time, George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire is an epic (I am not using that word lightly), barely-fantasy series. Serious, dark, and long, but very good. Still in the works, and being made into an HBO series at the moment. Starts with A Game of Thrones.
The Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser is also good. Not sci-fi/fantasy, but historical satire. The protagonist is an absolute cad - a bullying, self-serving, cowardly, deceitful, womanizing, cowardly, racist (it's set mostly during the middle of the 19th century, so he's probably actually a little less racist than a significant portion of the population was, but still), boozing, and cowardly glory hound. Imagine if the biggest two-bit thug in the background of some other book was given a sharp wit and let loose in his own series - that's pretty much what this is (the Flashman character is adopted from an antagonist in a book published in 1857). I wouldn't worry about the order at all in this one, since they're not written in chronological order and Flashman references events in previous and later (and never written) volumes indiscriminately.
Of course I also enjoy old hardboiled detective books, like those by Raymond Chandler and Dasheil Hammett, but those are hardly everyone's cup of tea. Lovecraft is always good for weird horror. There are a couple of books of recollections and what not from Richard Feynman (possibly best described as a whacky scientist; he's the sort of guy who got bored while working on the Manhattan Project and decided to learn safe cracking to screw with security - good idea to check the blurbs on anything by him if you're not looking for treatises on quantum electrodynamics or the like) that are entertaining and good for when you've just got ten, fifteen minutes at a pop to read.
Snowcrash, by Neal Stephenson, is crazy sci-fi, kind of like a Gibson novel put in a blender with some laughing gas and a copy of the first Matrix movie.
Job: A Comedy of Justice, by Heinlein, is sort of a religious satire. Alternate realities, Heaven, Hell, other afterlifes, and deities being inveterate gamblers all play a part.
Most things Bordertown are good. Mostly anthologies of short stories, it's a shared-world urban fantasy series. Little bit of everything you might expect to come across in urban fantasy.
If you've ever got a lot of free time, George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire is an epic (I am not using that word lightly), barely-fantasy series. Serious, dark, and long, but very good. Still in the works, and being made into an HBO series at the moment. Starts with A Game of Thrones.
The Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser is also good. Not sci-fi/fantasy, but historical satire. The protagonist is an absolute cad - a bullying, self-serving, cowardly, deceitful, womanizing, cowardly, racist (it's set mostly during the middle of the 19th century, so he's probably actually a little less racist than a significant portion of the population was, but still), boozing, and cowardly glory hound. Imagine if the biggest two-bit thug in the background of some other book was given a sharp wit and let loose in his own series - that's pretty much what this is (the Flashman character is adopted from an antagonist in a book published in 1857). I wouldn't worry about the order at all in this one, since they're not written in chronological order and Flashman references events in previous and later (and never written) volumes indiscriminately.
Of course I also enjoy old hardboiled detective books, like those by Raymond Chandler and Dasheil Hammett, but those are hardly everyone's cup of tea. Lovecraft is always good for weird horror. There are a couple of books of recollections and what not from Richard Feynman (possibly best described as a whacky scientist; he's the sort of guy who got bored while working on the Manhattan Project and decided to learn safe cracking to screw with security - good idea to check the blurbs on anything by him if you're not looking for treatises on quantum electrodynamics or the like) that are entertaining and good for when you've just got ten, fifteen minutes at a pop to read.
Um. That's all I've got right now.
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