RaoulDuke79 Posted April 21, 2018 Share Posted April 21, 2018 44 minutes ago, Boyst62 said: #feels #nostalgia #takesmeback Also Indian in the cupboard af Yep....I think Indian in the Cupboard was required reading. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
{::'KayCeeS::} Posted April 21, 2018 Author Share Posted April 21, 2018 "The Dead Lands" by Benjamin Percy I didn't really like "Red Moon" (Percy's last book), but I suspect if I reread it I might appreciate it more. Percy is kind of infuriating because he is completely resistant to writing a book any way but his own, but that's also his brilliance: he has a real voice that sings from the page, and when you couple this with the fact that he is, whether you like his books or not, a really elite writer, then it's hard to really rag on him for writing love/hate type of books. He pulls no punches and calls it as he sees it. "The Dead Lands" is like a literary love-child of Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and Patrick Rothfuss: one part early Dark Tower novels for story gravitas, one part "The Road" for piquant emotional power, and one part "The Kingkiller Chronicles" for fantasy wherewithal. This novel is much more streamlined and focused than "Red Moon": the pages flow by very nicely, super-charged by his super-visual and oratory-like mode of description, which puts you into the scene-stew of the world in a way that very few writers can accomplish. Recommended for fans of post-apocalyptic literature, unless you like your nuclear and viral holocaust homogenized and whitewashed like a valium-bestseller. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gomper Posted April 21, 2018 Share Posted April 21, 2018 https://goo.gl/images/kF5Z66 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
{::'KayCeeS::} Posted April 21, 2018 Author Share Posted April 21, 2018 (edited) 4 minutes ago, gomper said: https://goo.gl/images/kF5Z66 "The Last Campaign" Edited April 21, 2018 by {::'KayCeeS::} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gomper Posted April 22, 2018 Share Posted April 22, 2018 31 minutes ago, {::'KayCeeS::} said: "The Last Campaign" Thanks! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeginnersMind Posted April 22, 2018 Share Posted April 22, 2018 This devolved into a mostly a sci fi and fantasy thread. The book that stunned me in the last year in that vein was Children of Time. Three mind blowing comcepts in sci fi woven together for a great story. Maybe the best stand alone sci fi novel I ever read. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
{::'KayCeeS::} Posted April 22, 2018 Author Share Posted April 22, 2018 (edited) 2 hours ago, BeginnersMind said: This devolved into a mostly a sci fi and fantasy thread. The book that stunned me in the last year in that vein was Children of Time. Three mind blowing comcepts in sci fi woven together for a great story. Maybe the best stand alone sci fi novel I ever read. It did not devolve, thank you very much!! Did you not see the last post before you? And anyway, you're recommending a novel by a guy who wrote a fantasy series about bugs! Yeah, I know him! Adrian Tchaikovsky! Not gonna lie, I've had "Children of Time" on my "to-read" list for a while now... We welcome all here, but if you're gonna be a douche about it.... please don't. Edited April 22, 2018 by {::'KayCeeS::} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeginnersMind Posted April 22, 2018 Share Posted April 22, 2018 4 hours ago, {::'KayCeeS::} said: It did not devolve, thank you very much!! Did you not see the last post before you? And anyway, you're recommending a novel by a guy who wrote a fantasy series about bugs! Yeah, I know him! Adrian Tchaikovsky! Not gonna lie, I've had "Children of Time" on my "to-read" list for a while now... We welcome all here, but if you're gonna be a douche about it.... please don't. Do you feel better for calling me a douche? I have made two contributions in this thread, both in science fiction, because that's what the vast majority of this thread is focused on. It was an observation. Try being nice today. You can help make the world, and this board, a better place. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Who Posted April 22, 2018 Share Posted April 22, 2018 I'll recommend some older works. Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy peters out towards the end (Peake was suffering from a degenerative disease.) Nonetheless, it evokes a dark world of Gothic gloom and dead ritual, along with poignant, perhaps Dickensian sentiment that some may find bathetic. I am a big fan of R.A. Lafferty. Past Master, Fourth Mansions, and Arrive at Easterwine are three of his better sci-fi offerings. His short story collection, Ninety-nine Grandmothers is also excellent. Unfortunately, all these works are out of print. The novels I mentioned are available at reasonable prices. Lafferty's Okla Hannali is still in print;. A tall tale history of a Choctaw Mingo (natural lord,) it is at times both hilarious and harrowing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
{::'KayCeeS::} Posted April 22, 2018 Author Share Posted April 22, 2018 "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco If you can relate to this novel, if it somewhat or somehow mirrors your own experience, then what may seem its opaqueness becomes lucid: a testament of a kind of inner transition from ego fever-dreaming to silent self-awareness. But even if you do not relate in this manner, it is still a fascinating literary quest-novel in itself, especially for occult history junkies or those who love grand, ambitious works written by genius-level intellects. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
{::'KayCeeS::} Posted April 26, 2018 Author Share Posted April 26, 2018 (edited) "The Third Bear" by Jeff VanderMeer "The Third Bear" is a collection of interconnected short stories: weird, to be sure, but perfectly so: clearly so and with astounding clarity-so. Horrific and uplifting and gorgeous and murky and sublime and brilliant and feelingful and astounding and grotesque and shining and murky and bright and glorious and sunk. Jeff Vandermeer will still be read many years from now, imo. He is a master of his craft, completely original. Also see his "Southern Reach Trilogy", the first book of which was recently made into a movie called "Annihilation" starring Natalie Portman. Edited April 26, 2018 by {::'KayCeeS::} Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
{::'KayCeeS::} Posted August 13, 2019 Author Share Posted August 13, 2019 Leland Crowe is a former lawyer turned PI, who got disbarred for punching a California Supreme Court Justice who happened to be having an affair with his wife. Sounds like a bummer, and it was, but he's really more at home as a somewhat shady, gray area investigator, doing jobs for his former boss, the one that fired him after the brouhaha went down. As our story begins, he's finishing up a case for said boss in a seedy area of town, and just happens to stumble upon a blond woman atop a car, fallen from the heights above. He also sell pictures to the tabloids, and the picture that he takes of the mysterious blond lady ends up sending him down a rabbit hole of intrigue... Jonathan Moore is one of <i>those</i> writers. You know, the really unsung ones, the excellent writers who don't bank it commercially, but are lauded by their peers and their dedicated, albeit smaller, subset of fans. He's known for writing sophisticated mysteries that bend the noir genre this way and that; his last three novels form a lose trilogy of stories set in San Francisco over the course of several years (with the last one being in the near future, with a sci-fi slant). "Blood Relations" is a more commercial offering than any of these last three; first of all, it's in paperback, where the last three were hardbacks. But second of all: it just has a more fluid thrillery pace and really sucks you into the story. Which is great, but what sets Moore apart from others is the really adept block-stacking of his story-building. Everything unfolds in as organic a way as possible. The telling of a PI investigating a case could never really be realistic, but the way Moore leads you through the happenings and introduces the clues give the reader a very clear sense of the stakes at play. There's never any point where something doesn't make sense, or seems unearned and shoehorned in. Details that would be passed over by another writer are introduced and made relevant. All this speaks to the technical strength of the writing, but Moore also has great style, atmospheric and tactile; I haven't read a lot of the classic noir novels, but Moore's style really feels like genuine noir, and not a facsimile. Like his previous novels, "Blood Relations" introduces some elements that are outside of the traditional crime scope, but in this case, they're not really genre elements as much as they are scientific ones, albeit perhaps stretched to give a plausibility that they might not realistically have. The biggest criticism that you could have here is this kind of stretching: in doing so, Moore introduces elements and situations that teeter on the edge of being too convenient. But that's okay in the end, because Moore is such a fine writer that the novel never suffers for this ambition. Which is a hard act to pull off, as being a stickler for such things, I often find writers shoot themselves in the foot when their reach exceeds the story's grasp. Recommended for neo-noir fans, especially those who like sophisticated, genre-bending type tales. You really can't go wrong here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Augie Posted August 13, 2019 Share Posted August 13, 2019 OK, I usually read pretty mindless stuff. I love Grisham, but he can’t write fast enough. Patterson, Baldacchi, etc. fill the gap. Got referred to “Where The Crawdads Sing” by a friend. TOTAL change of pace. About 2/3 through, and throughly enjoying it. It’s been a refreshing but emotional read so far. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EttaWilliams Posted August 14, 2019 Share Posted August 14, 2019 Finally, I found like-minded people and students. Thanks for all your recommendations. I will read it. Also, I found this great post to read and now, any book reports things to become easier. And my education too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LeviF Posted August 14, 2019 Share Posted August 14, 2019 Tampa by Alissa Nutting was a good piece of writing, and gave my soul the heebie-jeebies. I'm a sucker for debut novels generally. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Who Posted August 14, 2019 Share Posted August 14, 2019 (edited) I like this one, but I'm biased because I wrote it. Give it a look on Amazon. Sci-fi fantasy retelling of the Noah story. Edited August 14, 2019 by Dr. Who Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Benjamin Franklin Posted August 15, 2019 Share Posted August 15, 2019 This is mostly a sci fi thread so I’ll drop this in. This is one of the best books in the genre and fairly recent too. Its ideas and quality caught me off guard. Children of Time It is about a human-terraformed planet where the terraforming didn’t go quite right. Earth evolution gone a little sideways. The sequel is just out and is also very good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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