Looking for some new reading material

Cafe Society
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I really enjoyed Kraken. It’s utterly bizarre and meandering, but Mieville’s prose is unrivaled.

He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton’s head got in the way, was kraken.

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Embassytown is what I was thinking of. Haven’t read Kraken yet.

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It’s a dark comedy about an impending squid apocalypse. As you might expect.

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Yeah, Embassytown!

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The Rivers of London series is a bit like that, but without all the (bad?) puns and such.

Great series. IMHO better than O’Brian.

Those started out great but then dropped off, she fell in love with Napoleon

The first one i have and it is fabulous…

Started out great, but fell off. Not unusual in long series.

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By coincidence, my son gave me the Great Book of Amber for Christmas, which contains all 10 novels. I had read the first five a long time ago and really loved them, but hadn’t read the second five before. I’m about halfway through book 7 and am still enjoying it, although I can see why some people feel the quality drops in the later books. I would still strongly recommend at least the first five books, and maybe all of them.

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I fully concur, and would add “Last Year”.

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Here are some that I just finished. Some of them are really fantastic. (I’m not a literary critic, I just enjoy a good book)

The Witch Elm by Tana French. A psychological mystery set in Ireland with some highly unexpected twists. I plan to read more of her work.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Exactly what it says on the tin. I plan to read more of her work. Interesting conceit, and a very interesting & likeable protagonist IMO.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel by Ottessa Moshfegh. This one can’t be properly explained, you just have to read it. I plan to read more of her books.

The Candy House: A Novel by Jennifer Egan. Very worthwhile, this is the sequel to A Visit From The Goon Squad both of which were good. There is some understated humor that’s easy to miss.

Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister. Probably won’t end up on the enduring classics list, but it’s a fun read.

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Oh, I’ll have to check this out. It sounds interesting.
puzzlegal, what would you recommend from Barbara Hambly? I have a 3-4 of her other fantasy books, but not any complete series.
HMS_Irruncible, yes, most of my books are fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, but I am open for anything.

I’m up to book 4 of the Murderbot series. I really like it and am going to finish the series. Some creative writing here.
The mad scientist’s guide to world domination was very very funny.
Wee Free Men seemed a bit slow paced for Pratchett but I enjoyed it. I’ll probably get the rest of this series at some point.
I recently read the Salmon of Doubt, which has a bit where Douglas Adams talked about authors who influenced him, and mentioned P.G. Wodehouse. So I picked up Introducing Jeeves: six classic stories. This is some seriously funny writing, and my reaction is “wait, I love British comedy and writing, how come I have never heard of this before?”. It’s about a Brit and his butler Jeeves in New York City, writing style seems to be very similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby:
Jeeves disapproves of the check suit, and Wooster says “But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.” Jeeves responds “Doubtless to avoid him, sir.”
Dracula was awesome! It was much slower paced than I expected, and focuses on the group hunting Dracula rather than the count itself, but I loved it!
Arthur is handed a 3 foot stake and a sledgehammer by Van Helsing, and told to drive it through Un-dead wife Lucy’s heart.
“So that, my friend, it will be a blessed hand for her that shall strike the blow that sets her free.
To this I am willing, but is there none amongst you who has a better right?
Will it be no joy to think of hereafter in the silence of the night when sleep is not,
‘it was my hand that sent her to the stars,
it was the hand of all she would herself have chosen,
had it been to her to choose?’”

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I haven’t posted on here for a while, but thought I’d write about some books I’ve picked up recently. And maybe share some other books I’ve liked, for anyone looking for new words…

  • I have read 20,000 leagues under the sea by Jules Verne. Also dug out this tiny square childrens condense versions of that and H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, those are probably the oldest books I have (from when I read them). I love 20,000 Leagues, Vernes descriptions of aquatic life are colorful, beautiful, and fascinating. I wish there was a version with English names of the marine life though.
  • The Great Gatsby - Re-read this for the first time in a good while. Forgot how short it is, I have a smaller print edition that’s only 115 pages. F. Scott Fitzgeralds descriptions of people and the way they move/dress/talk are hilarious.
  • Got another Jeeves book by P.G. Wodehouse with a couple of novels and some short stories. Kind of funny reading The Great Gatsby between Jeeves books, they’re both set among the hoity-toity of New York in the 1920s, but such completly different versions of the same place and time from different authors.
  • I’ve been slowly re-reading Terry Pratchett’s discworld series from the beginning. I finished Unequal Rites, but these older trade paperbacks are getting brown and falling apart. I’ve been trying to get the nicer Softcover/Hardcover editions with my book purchases, and I think I’m going to spring for better editions of my Discworld at some point. Interesting to read about Terry Pratchetts diagnosis being tied to his writing deterioration. I remember thinking that he’d gotten more serious at some point, but going back to the beginning of his work you can really see a difference in his writing style. Equal Rites was his 3rd discworld book, Wee Free Men was much later, and both told the same story (overall) of a young girl with witch and magician abilities. But Wee Free Men seemed very drawn out and slow paced, but IMO Equal Rites had me cracking up 3-4 times almost every page. Just something interesting to think about, going back into the series from the start.
  • I got Bored of the Rings in high school and thought it was funny, but couldn’t find it for a re-read so I got another, then found that there have been more Harvard Lampoon parody books: Bored of the Rings (1969), The Wobbit (2013), and Lame of Thrones (2020) are now mine. They also have parodies of Twilight and The Hunger Games, which I don’t think I’d be into. It’s cheap satire and sometimes lame wordplay, not high end humor, but it is funny.
  • I saw a link to Eoin Colfer’s book And Another Thing on Amazon. It was being promoted as “the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series”, with a quote saying something about how it “was approved by Adams’ family” and “the Sixth book in the HGTTG series”. Um, WHAT? Er, thoughts/knowledge anyone has on this?
  • I am ready to pick up books 7-8 in Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries. So, there are 8 short books in the series, and they are also sold in pairs of two and referred to as “Volumes”. So Volume 1 is books 1-2, Volume 2 is books 3-4, etc. I really like the writing in this series, how Martha Wells uses the Murderbot’s boredom with human interactions to gloss over petty quibbles, travelling time, etc. I am definitely going to get some other books from Wells, I like her style!
  • The Invisible Man and the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde are on my lists and I’ll probably grab those sometime this year.
  • Issac Assimov’s I, Robot series is also high on the list. I’d like to get it a nicer Softcover box set sometime this year.
  • Digging through my shelves, I somehow have 2 old copies of Awesome Comic Fantasy, a series of short stories from various authors. The first story is about a princess whose suitors keep dying in the difficult and dangerous quests her dad, the King, put them through. That was written by John Cleese and Connie Booth. I didn’t know either of them were writers. Lot of other great authors and stories there.

I’m still sorting though the above recommendations, and I’ll grab more of them as the year goes on. Thriftbooks (add the Double Yoos and the Com) has been a great source, thank you again for mentioning it. It’s a big difference in price over amazon, plus they don’t use space child monkeys for labor or whatever other horrible things amazon does.

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with all the sci-fi, have you read Octavia Butler, who has won awards for her writing, or Tananarive Due? For a Black male perspective, Samuel Delany

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Of course, I meant “hardback”, not “hardcore”. Incidentally, many (and probably most) longtime science fiction fans have more than 69 books on their shelves. If someone who has $564.50 to spend right at the moment and wants to put some things on their shelves that take up less space there than 69 mass-market paperbacks, buy these Library of America books and have enough books not taking up a lot of space on your shelves that will probably allow you to spend the next couple of years just reading them.

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Looks like I found some stuff to put on my birthday/Christmas wishlist. A Ray Bradbury boxed set? He’s my favorite. Philip K Dick? I’m in.