and St George!
Apr. 23rd, 2013 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livBack in 2010, I celebrated St George's day by setting up a book-recommending meme. I had a lot of fun with it, and discovered some cool new books, and expressed my fluffy-liberal-patriotism in a way that feels comfortable to me. It seems to be in the spirit of ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
three_weeks_for_dw since people are making an effort to meet new folk, so I think I'll run it again.
The idea is that you comment and recommend me a book, and I will rec you one in return. If I don't know you you can give me some clues as to what you like, or you can let me guess based on a snap judgement from scanning your profile. I'll keep trying until I find something you haven't read and like the sound of.
For my tastes, here's 10 years of booklog, if you're really keen. I read most genres with some preference for science fiction. I want books with good characters, then plot tied about equally with interesting ideas, and I like beautiful prose but I'd rather have a book with merely functional language and interesting characters than the other way round. I don't particularly care for horror or most action / thrillers, especially not if there's graphic violence. But I'm willing to expand my horizons if you suggest something really good! In any case I'm very happy if you just suggest something that you yourself like and you think isn't well known. Oh, and as well as English I read French and can sort of manage Swedish if it's not too dense / old-fashioned.
Who's on?
three_weeks_for_dw since people are making an effort to meet new folk, so I think I'll run it again.The idea is that you comment and recommend me a book, and I will rec you one in return. If I don't know you you can give me some clues as to what you like, or you can let me guess based on a snap judgement from scanning your profile. I'll keep trying until I find something you haven't read and like the sound of.
For my tastes, here's 10 years of booklog, if you're really keen. I read most genres with some preference for science fiction. I want books with good characters, then plot tied about equally with interesting ideas, and I like beautiful prose but I'd rather have a book with merely functional language and interesting characters than the other way round. I don't particularly care for horror or most action / thrillers, especially not if there's graphic violence. But I'm willing to expand my horizons if you suggest something really good! In any case I'm very happy if you just suggest something that you yourself like and you think isn't well known. Oh, and as well as English I read French and can sort of manage Swedish if it's not too dense / old-fashioned.
Who's on?
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Date: 2013-04-23 09:37 am (UTC)Bertil Mårtensson's "Jungfrulig planet".
My distinct recollection is that it was quite readable, but it's probably been over 20 years since I last read it (in a completely different vein, Mårtensson's text book in basic logic is also quite good).
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Date: 2013-04-23 11:08 am (UTC)Have you ever read Dodie Smith's I capture the castle? Smith is more famous for writing the book that became the Disney cartoon 101 Dalmatians, but I capture the castle is about as different as it's possible to be. It's about a girl / young woman coming of age in an eccentric family.
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Date: 2013-04-23 09:56 am (UTC)...ok, maybe that doesn't work *hugs*
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Date: 2013-04-23 11:09 am (UTC)Talking of all the books, though, d'you think Grandfather will have enough to read in the home? Should we give him a Kindle or something when we come up next week?
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Date: 2013-04-23 11:22 am (UTC)It's a time-travel sf novel, with much of it set in a recognisable time-and-place (Bath, early 2000s), interesting female lead character, and very British. There is some scary/nasty gore but not too much for me to cope with. We bought it on a whim, in Bath, in 2004, and I loved it. I still love it. It's very suitable for St George's Day. I might read it when I get home.
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Date: 2013-04-23 11:43 am (UTC)Thinking of books to recommend you, I'm sort of rejecting several that have no decent female characters, because apparently my brain assumes you're less tolerant of that kind of thing than I am? Anyway, a book that doesn't have that problem: have you read Zadie Smith's debut novel, White teeth? Very much a time-and-place and very British book.
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Date: 2013-04-23 11:23 am (UTC)I also recommend Michael Innes, in particular "The New Sonia Wayward" which I read very recently.
I know you don't read much detective fiction but these are all so good...
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Date: 2013-04-23 11:47 am (UTC)Detective fiction that's doing something unusual with the genre: have you read Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policmen's Union? Having tested it on several of my friends I'm pretty convinced it's accessible to a non-Jewish audience. And very clever in lots of ways, and it also works as a whodunnit, I think.
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Date: 2013-04-23 12:52 pm (UTC)Have you read any Lisa Goldstein? You might especially like The Alchemist's Door which features John Dee and Rabbi Judah Loew. Her work is hard to describe but it all has strong feeling of the magic and mystery.
An author I really like who I have discovered in the last few years is Marie Brennan. Her latest book is called a Natural History of Dragons, which is about a women in a Victorian-ish society who wants to study dragons. One thing I really loved about it was the voice. It's her memoir written when she is quite a bit older, and well know thus more able to not conform.
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Date: 2013-04-23 05:04 pm (UTC)I think shall recommend you some non-fiction: have you read Rebecca Skloot's The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks? It's about cancer research so very relevant to me, but also about American medical history. And a pretty accessible read, even though the subject matter is fairly depressing.
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Date: 2013-04-23 01:32 pm (UTC)I have friends who won't read Asimov because he is 'sexist', but he is just reflecting the time he lived in - and by those standards I think he was less sexist than most.
Opus by Asimov
This provides the context for his writing as well as some interesting bits of history, religion and science,and of course his love of puns.
I didn't read it in one sitting, but the sections were just enough.
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Date: 2013-04-23 05:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-04-23 01:35 pm (UTC)You might like Paul Voermans' Weird Colonial Boy? It's sort of a dark Australian cousin of The Phantom Tollbooth.
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Date: 2013-04-23 05:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-04-23 01:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-23 05:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-23 03:00 pm (UTC)Things I tend to like include: Period settings, YA/midgrade novels, fairy tales, non-fiction on cultural history and music (especially regarding the US anywhere from the 1880s onward), stories with uplifting/hopeful messages, female main characters, classic literature, religious (especially Catholic) themes.
Things I don't to enjoy as much include: Secondary world fantasy, Twilight/Hunger Games and their respective knockoffs (basically any poorly thought out paranormal romance or dystopian fiction--though I do love good dystopian writing), stories where people live lives of quiet desperation and all secretly hate each other, ironic/superdark and ~edgy~ retellings of famous stories.
Things I'm reading right now:
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Yes I Can: The Sammy Davis Jr Story
Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
Les Miserables
The Ramsay Scallop
Et cetera, et cetera. ♥
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Date: 2013-04-23 05:24 pm (UTC)Let's see. Sherwood Smith's pair Crown Duel / Court Duel are good YA fantasy with a female heroine. From this description I think they'd be up your alley!
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Date: 2013-04-23 05:37 pm (UTC)In SF, I would recommand the Partials sequence, by Dan Wells. (Artificial human beings, plagues, and a humanity unable to reproduce)
Another favorite of mine is En famille, (the beginning of the industrial age) from Hector Malot (it's in the public domain). While it deals with some of the same themes as his more famous Sans famille, it's shorter and I find it more uplifting.
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Date: 2013-04-23 06:25 pm (UTC)I know more about what sort of films you like than books! How about Walter Jon Williams: Aristoi, which is one of the most original and very good SF pieces I've ever read?
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Date: 2013-04-23 06:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-23 06:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-23 06:51 pm (UTC)Your ability to read Swedish inspired my rec, which is Popular Music from Vittula (Populärmusik från Vittula) by Mikael Niemi. The novel is not SF; rather, it tells the story of a young boy living in the 1960s Pajala, in the Torne River valley in northern Sweden. It's told humorously -- it even exaggerates the humorous aspects of life in Pajala -- but it has something of a sad undercurrent. The novel was a huge success, which is why I'm reccing it. My own response to it was not quite as enthusiastic, though I did like it well enough. Maybe that's because it hit a bit too close to home. Not completely, of course, as I grew up on the Finnish side of the border twenty years later, but still it was far too recognizable as the environment of my childhood -- an environment I couldn't leave behind fast enough.
Nevertheless, I hope that's something you would enjoy. In fact, I think I'll reread it myself to see how I like it now.
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Date: 2013-04-23 10:05 pm (UTC)Based on your listing Heyer and Austen in your interests and knowing little else about you, have you read Jo Walton's Tooth and claw? It both captures the spirit of some period comedy of manners, and critiques the gender roles in them.
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Date: 2013-04-23 07:05 pm (UTC)Holophin by Luke Kennard, which is a small-press novella from a London poet, oh - and Venus as a Boy by Luke Sutherland?
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Date: 2013-04-23 10:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-23 07:47 pm (UTC)You've already made me a recommendation as I had somehow failed to spot there was a new Mary Gentle :-)
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Date: 2013-04-23 10:16 pm (UTC)I am sure you will get on well with The Black Opera, but in the spirit of the meme: how about Geoff Ryman's The child garden? Very good, very much assuming serious SF literacy, but there's a chance it's obscure enough that you might not have read it already.
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Date: 2013-04-23 09:26 pm (UTC)Ooooor, a more obscure French read might be Thérèse Desqueyroux by François Mauriac? Thérèse is a French woman accused of attempting to murder her husband but a not-proven verdict is found and her husband basically imprisons her in her own home and the story is about how she...crumbles mentally from it all and remembers how it all came to me. The character has so many layers and the language, omg the language.
SF, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. People move to Mars and try to colonize it. An 'us and them' attitude forms between Mars and Earth and people start turning on each other as people have different plans for the planet. In parts it is stodgy but it is also fascinating.
So many books simply because I don't know if my French ones are common or not.
I'd love some French recs if you have any? My books tend to be based on what education has given me. :)
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4691355 that might help on the what I read thing
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Date: 2013-04-23 10:24 pm (UTC)I have also read Red Mars, sorry to say! There aren't many writers with really similar strengths to KSR, but, hm, have you read James SA Corey: Leviathan wakes?
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Date: 2013-04-23 09:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-23 10:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-04-24 04:16 am (UTC)Your emphasis on good characterization reminds me of my favorite series of detective novels: the Nero Wolfe series, by Rex Stout. I don't really care much about the cases themselves; I read them for the narrator-character Archie Goodwin, who's, well, difficult to describe, but let me try: witty, dashing, noir-ish, comic, and very American. You can probably start reading just about anywhere in the series, but I'd avoid the first and last novels (Fer-de-Lance and A Family Affair) to start with. One of my favorites is Plot It Yourself.
Oh, and I second the rec for Christopher Priest's The Prestige. The book is quite different from the movie--much better and much creepier. If you like audiobooks, Simon Vance does a good reading of that one.
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Date: 2013-04-24 11:56 am (UTC)I have not read any of Nero Wolfe, thank you for the rec and the advice of where to start the series.
Based on your username and default icon, in the absence of much else to go on, I'm going to go for something a bit random: have you ever come across Geraldine McCaughrean's Vainglory? It is a historical novel set in the chivalric period, though not directly Arthurian. McCaughrean is well-known as a British children's author, she does a lot with retellings of myths which are very good. Her adult stuff is more obscure, but I really like Vainglory, both the setting and the characters are really well executed.
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Date: 2013-04-24 06:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-04-30 09:05 am (UTC)It's a coming of age story set 20,000 years ago, in what is now Siberia. The author doesn't patronise or sentimentalise her hunter-gathers; she's an anthropologist and these are real characters leading complex and interesting lives. The animal parts of the book are also really good. And if it helps at all, I hated Clan of the Cave Bear with a deep abiding hatred.
P.S. If you enjoy world-building at all, this book is wonderful.
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Date: 2013-04-30 05:13 pm (UTC)Have you read Keri Hulme's The bone people? It's quite distressing in that it's partly about racism and child abuse, but it's also really beautifully written and extremely original. Several of its characters are from Maori backgrounds and it has a really strong, haunting sense of both place and culture.
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