So hey. I’m not officially back on duty yet — I’ll be back sometime in the next couple of days — but I thought I’d seed a little discussion here with what I’m calling The Official We Hunted the Mammoth Book Recommendation Thread.
Which is pretty self-explanatory, so have at it! Any genre, old or new. I will probably gather up the various suggestions for a later post or page.
And, yep, the book in the pic up there is a real book that exists, written by a fella named Peter Cheyney, and which you can buy on Amazon for the low, low price of $2,986.69. No, really.
That’s for a new copy. If you’re some kind of cheapskate, you could pick up a used copy instead, for a relatively thrifty $86.90.
Here are the first couple of paragraphs of the book, courtesy of Amazon, so you can have some idea what you’ll be getting for your money:
Is it hot!
I aint never been in hell, but Im tellin you that I bet it aint any hotter than this Californian desert in July.
I am drivin along past Indio an I figure that soon I am goin to see the Palm Springs lights. An I am goin some the speedometer says eighty. If it wasnt so hot it would be a swell night; but there aint any air, an there was a baby sand storm this afternoon that caught me asleep an I gotta lump of the Mojave desert or whatever they call it stuck right at the back of my throat
I strongly urge you to go to Amazon and click on the “look inside” tab to read more of Mr. Cheyney’s hardboiled prose.
Within the few short pages available in Amazon’s preview, the book’s narrator (tough guy private dick Lemmy Caution) not only manages to eat a lump of sand; he also orders a hamburger (at a hot dog joint) and some ham and eggs (at a second joint). It’s not clear if he eats any of the hamburger before splitting, but you’ll be glad to know that he at least starts eating the ham and eggs.
Oh, he also calls a guy a “sissy” and gets his ass kicked.
I know the book sounds truly amazing, but before you click the “buy” button, let me make a little counteroffer: if you’re really intent on spending $2,986.69 on a book titled “Dames Don’t Care,” pay me that amount, and I will write an entire new book by that name in the style of the original, more or less. For $86.90, I will write a (very) short story in the same style.
Or you could post book recommendations in the comments below. That’s good, too.
Here’s the full cover for Dames.
I like this one because it shows how to remove a fedora.
http://cv01.twirpx.net/0768/0768006.jpg
https://badreputation.org.uk/2012/11/09/found-feminism-hands-off-womens-self-defence-1942-style/
Someone on a book thread on a different site mentioned that she was about to start reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and I though, “Ooh! I need to re-read some Shirley Jackson.”
Just about to finish The Leftovers, which someone recommended an embarrassingly long time ago – before it was picked up as a TV show.
Also, if you enjoy cheap and mostly (deservedly) forgotten fantasy and sci-fi, check out https://schlock-value.com/.
Full disclosure, the reviewer is a buddy of mine. He picks up cheap books at used book stores and reviews them. It’s fun.
I’ll drop my favorites, not all that recent.
American Gods, Neil Gaiman (it’s an odd book but really good, won awards in multiple genres when it came out)
Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut. Love Vonnegut generally and these are my two favorites of his.
and even though he was a racist shitbag H.P. Lovecraft stuff, basically invented a horror sub-genre and imo most of it holds up well still. Personal favorites: The Doom that Came to Sarnath, The Cats of Ulthar, The Music of Erich Zann, The Call of Cthulhu, Pickman’s Model and one of the few horror genre things that put me on edge even in bright sunny daylight The Colour Out of Space.
I’m currently rereading Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence.
Fair warning: it is breathtakingly Orientalist, to the point where the great Edward Said has risen unbidden to the top of my pile of things I need to reread next, but it’s still a great adventure story.
I’m currently reading “Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape” by Susan Brownmiller (1975). It’s generally credited as the book which changed public attitudes about rape. I like it but it’s very difficult stuff at times. For the bit I’ve read through (to Chapter 4 at this point) Brownmiller is basically studying rape throughout recorded history, including as many primary sources as she can, with the result that five or six depressingly similar accounts of say, rape by Klansmen, will appear in one after another. I suppose I find this exhausting to read because it speaks to how common rape really was/is/continues to be.
I also recently read “Shrill”, a memoir by Lindy West. That was more fun to read – or at least, it had a lot of jokes in it. I especially liked the part where West talked about standing up to Dan Savage (her boss at the time) about the fat-phobic remarks he published ca. 2004.
I also read “The Seven Daughters of Eve”, but I didn’t really enjoy it. It was sort of a pop-sci introduction to biochemistry, so to me the descriptions of say, what DNA is, or who the Iceman is, or what PCR does, felt over-simplified and all over the map. To be fair I haven’t finished that one yet so maybe it improves later on when the author starts discussing his own research in mitochondrial DNA. Still IMO there’s nothing in there you couldn’t learn by browsing Wikipedia.
In fiction, I recently read “A Darker Shade of Magic” by V.E. Schwab. I had a lot of fun reading that and would recommend it to anybody who enjoys the Harry Dresden serial novels.
Joe B: I feel the same way about Lovecraft. My current favorite short stories by him are “At the Mountains of Madness” and “A Shadow Out of Time”. That said Mountains of Madness still showcases a lot of Lovecraft’s weird racist ideology – the relationship between the Elder Things and shoggoths seems like a not-so-subtle allegory about what Lovecraft thinks of human race relations.
I’ve got nothing. The most recent book I’ve read was the Princeton Review GRE prep book, three years ago. :/
I’m currently reading ‘United States of Jihad’ by Peter Bergen. Other interesting books I’ve recently read:
* ‘King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa’ by Adam Hochschild
* ‘America’s Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States’ by Stuart Wexler
* ‘Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era’ by Michael Kimmel
* ‘The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism’ by Edward E. Baptist
* ‘The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan’ by Rick Perlstein
* ‘Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town’ by Jon Krakauer
* ‘Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution’ by Linda Hirshman
I’m looking forward to reading ‘Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America’ by Ibram X. Kendi.
Sadly, I lost track of ‘modern’ fantasy back in the Eighties as a teen. Almost everything was either Tolkien ripoff or parody series that beat the jokes to death. However, I do love Terry Pratchett and Tanith Lee, both now sadly departed. The Science of Discworld series is good for a basic understanding of science beyond at least what US schools teach
Speaking of Tolkien and parodies, Bored if the Rings is awesome.
Lovecraft’s contemporaries and pen pals Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith are IMO more enjoyable writers and while not free of problematic elements, still much less objectionable than him.
Another favorite of mine from the time, though not from the pulps is Thorne Smith, who specialized in screwball supernatural comedy. Some of his works were adapted for movies, Topper and I Married a Witch coming to mind.
I recommend N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season which, by the way, is nominated for the Hugos.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19161852-the-fifth-season
It’s a fantasy book set in a extremely geologically active world where the magicians (orogenes in the books) are capable of starting and stopping earthquakes and volcanoes, and are feared, despised and treated as second class citizens. It has good representation of LGBTQ and polyamourous people and I loved it to pieces. By the end of the book I cried a lot.
The viewpoint characters are three orogene women and one of viewpoints is conveyed by second person narration.
I should also add a Content Notice for lots of stuff (including child death, implied rape, grief, systematic oppression, etc.).
I’ve been reading “the well beloved” by Thomas Hardy and finally got sucked ( who the hell gets “ducked” auto correct, hmm? Just who?!) into the GoT vortex of unputdownability.
Which is a real word. So there
Lois McMaster Bujold recently published the latest installment of the Vorkosigan Saga, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, and I enjoyed it immensely.
I haven’t been reading as much in these last three years as I used to, because I have two little darlings to occupy my time, so my list is short. Sorry.
The last proper books I’ve read were the Vampire Diaries series, all of which I devoured in 10 days, and which I wouldn’t dare recommend to anyone unless I knew for sure that they loved trash. If you do happen to be a lover of trash, it’s 6 brainless books of YA urban fantasy vampires making out. My mind enjoyed the vacation.
The last non-fiction was really Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. Warning! A cast of hundreds of named characters.
@ Alan Robertshaw, I think this lady could have removed a trilby as well
http://i.imgur.com/KdyKG8o.jpg
@ playonwords
Indeed. That cartoon is based on Edith Garrud. One of my heroines. Well worth reading up on. There wasn’t a lot about her until recently but that does seem to be changing now.
I’ve been a shit head and hardly read anything for the past year. I don’t know why. Typically I’m a big reader. This is the first time in my life I’ve gone long stretches without reading.
I feel like a bad person 🙁
I recently finished Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. The premise is covered in the first sentence: “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason”. Thereafter, in concerns itself with the consequences, which include a rain of fragments rendering the Earth uninhabitable in the next couple of year. CN for the near-total extinction of the human race; it gets damnably depressing at times.
Also Wool , by Hugh Howey, which opens up in a post-apocalyptic community living in what might be an old missile silo.
For less apocalyptic stuff, I recommend the Rivers of London series (For Yanks, the first book’s issued in the States as ‘Midnight Riot’, in which rookie London cop Peter Grant winds up on the magical enforcement squad, which he never previously knew existed.
More later.
Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula books are wonderful if you like meta. (Lots of violence, though.)
Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series is good, and I’m just getting into her Lovecraftian Borden Dispatches.
For non-fiction, Queen Emma and the Vikings by Harriet O’Brien was a great read. Suzanne Lebsock’s A Murder in Virginia is fascinating, and the ending was not at all what I thought it would be.
Also, Tang dynasty poetry is beautiful.
Good call, Dalillama.
@WWTH
That sounds like a bad case of something I have too.
I hear the remedy is an especially good read. So this might be the place.
Personaly when it comes to fiction I read a lot of the works of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
I just finished the fourth book in the Death Gate Cycle and I’m loving the character development shown by the main Character Haplo
I found a crazy book on mental health which had been donated where I work. It was published in the sixties and had chapters on women being devious hysterical psychopaths and homosexuals being violent sociopathic deviants. I thought maybe I should throw it in the bin, but I decided not to as it shows how extreme the views were of the medical profession during that time. I guess similar books might describe women or black people as mentally ill if they demanded equal rights.
IT, by Stephen King. One of my favorite horror stories ever. The book is superior, but the TV movie is also pretty good.
First, easy recommend: Machine of Death. A collection of short stories with a shared concept – there’s a machine that will tell you how you die – but not when – with 100% accuracy, though not always with 100% specificity. There’s no specific continuity other than that (in fact, there’s two conflicting “machine origin” stories included), so each author is free to explore what kind of world they imagine such a machine would produce.
Next, a bit more particular recommend: The Malazan of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson – an incredibly dense, 10 volume fantasy epic that I just recently finished. It’s not the easiest series to read – it basically drips with in media res and Erikson does not hold your hand, but you’re rewarded if you persist and pay attention. I recommend giving it until the end of the 2nd novel before passing judgement; the first is a great book and will give a good idea of what’s to come, but the second is where Erikson really shows the depth of what he’s capable of (and will probably make you cry).
Some notes on the content:
-Fairly unique take on the fantasy setting; it avoids most LotR-esque world building tropes (there’s some rough elf analogs, but they’re unique enough in their own right). Erikson is an anthropologist and archaeologist, and you can tell he takes great care in crafting the people, cultures, and histories that make up the ‘verse. There’s plenty of apostrophes in names, but they actually tend to serve a cultural/language purpose, rather than just to make things sound fantasy-y.
-It can get really really brutal and/or disturbing at times. One of the overarching themes of the series is the consequences/horrors of war, and some of the shit he explores gets dark. One consolation is that Erikson at least tries to use these scenes for more than just to be gritty or edgy, but that doesn’t necessarily make the scenes themselves less disturbing (nor does it mean he’s always successful).
-I wouldn’t call the books specifically progressive, but there are certainly some progressive elements. There’s a good gender distribution, and women are written as people. Same-sex relationships are presented without comment, and gender roles are largely presented as constructs of the fictional cultures (e.g. a fully egalitarian mercenary group recruiting women from a city where women aren’t allowed to serve in the guard). He unfortunately doesn’t entirely avoid the “rape as catalyst for character development” trope, and while he handles it with more nuance and complexity than most, I still found it disappointing and in most cases unnecessary.