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:Â 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.
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary series is great.
Seife’s “Proofiness” and “Zero” are good non-fiction. You’ll never trust quoted numbers again.
I like Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series.
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s “Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)” is a great exploration of current media and political culture. Similarly, Schultz’s “Being Wrong (Adventures in the Margin of Error)” overlaps a bit, but describes many other situations.
Ooh, books, my favorite topic!
Anne McCaffrey is magnificent, I started with the Harper Hall trilogy and went on to read everything she had in print at the time.
I am currently working my way through Seanan McGuires urban fantasy, I am loving the Incryptid series.
I have a weakness for well written kids lit (so much is NOT well written, sadly. I work in a bookstore and it’s almost painful sometimes to see what two dimensional dreck washes up on the shores of my beloved children’s department.) . I am really loving Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood and co series. Majorly creepy ghost stories with an excellently characterized young lady ghost hunter as protagonist.
I also adore The Westing Game as an intro to mystery for young readers. I think I just like that it treats kids as though they are perfectly capable of thinking through the puzzle and grasping complex concepts.
Huh. Imagine that, every one of my recommendations features smart, capable female protagonists. Who woulda thought?
For… Reasons, I am going to recommend the following:
Just about anything by Lucy Snyder for the Fantasy/Horror set.
Just about anything by Cecil Castellucci for SciFi, Comics, and real world YA.
@ Anne Lewis, Jib Creatr
Awesome name
I have “violent Basque librarian” on Google alerts. I mean, who doesn’t?
Sadly, I think we’re all depending on katz to write that novella, since this is the first time that alert has pinged me.
Hope you’re all well!
Hey, is it true that there was a bomb threat at Milo’s UCLA event? The only source I can find is on Breitbart.
Oh! I nearly forgot to talk about Gail Carriger! She does these steampunkish teen novels about a young lady who is sent to finishing school because her family thinks she is quite unladylike. When she arrives, she finds that “finishing” has another entirely different meaning at Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. Etiquette &Espionage is the first.
In the nonfiction arena, I recently read 1491 by Charles Mann. He challenges a lot of commonly held views of Native American culture pre-Columbus. Much of the information he presents supports the idea that the Americas were quite civilized and probably culturally equal to the cities of Europe of the time.
OMG, I hit the cloudiah beacon and I didn’t even realize it! HI!!
@WWTH:
The Willows is an amazing story. Kudos for mentioning it. It’s one of those that everyone should read.
For my money, the best horror story out there is The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
@Buttercup:
You mentioned Italo Calvino! I must now do the happy dance. That dude is fantastic. Have you read his other work?
Will be good to have you back. Missed your take on the douchcanoes of the world.
Speaking of douchcanoes – how about a post on those of youtube as in this piece:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jun/02/how-video-pranksters-are-cashing-in-on-the-abuse-and-harassment-of-women?CMP=share_btn_tw
Not that you have any shortage of course…
(is there a better OT contact point than this? Sorry if this is not an approved suggestion route)
IIRC, that should be an extremely violent librarian disguised as Basque shepherd* in Australia.
* not the dog breed
@ Eyes on the Right
I just read Angry White Men, and I really liked it. I feel like it helps me understand my dad a little better. I’m only half-kidding (at most) when I say that-he’s very conservative and could be said to have some similarities to some of the men Kimmel profiles, and the book really helped me better understand that many of these men are as angry and resistant to societal change as they are because they’re afraid of becoming irrelevant.
As seen in Jean-Luc Godard’s amazing film Alphaville.
Hendrake, on The Fifth Season:
Well… yes and no, but let’s avoid spoilers! The book is indeed fantastic, and I’m looking forward to the second volume. You can read a bit of it over on Nora’s Patreon, if you have the courage (I’m avoiding it until I can read the whole thing).
Dalillama:
The whole series is worth reading. The writing can be a little uneven, and I’m not sure the basic premise makes any sense, but it’s a good read nevertheless.
I’m currently reading The Fireman, by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son). The world (ours, near future) is in danger of ending, due to an epidemic which causes spontaneous human combustion. I won’t make the mistake of recommending it before I’ve finished it, but so far it’s very good.
I used to almost inhale a book in a single sitting, so it was rarer for me to say I was “currently reading” anything. But noawadays I seem to only read on my commute, and this makes me feel strangely guilty, like I’m betraying my bibliophile younger self.
Totally the dog breed.
Speaking of stories, can any of the very clever people on here suggest a (semi) plausible way of killing off the entire population of a planet before they would have time to notice?
Just has to be theoretically possible. Not too worried if it needs an engineering solution we don’t yet have.
Ta.
EJ (The Other One):
Never thought of that as horror, but it can certainly be taken that way. Particularly when you reflect on what it means for your own life. Le Guin is masterful, as always. In just a few words, she paints a picture so vivid you feel you’ve always known that place, and yearn to live there… and then she slips the knife in, so sharp you almost don’t feel it at first.
I will second (third? fourth?) Steven Erikson’s series Malazan Book of the Fallen. Bonus: series is complete so you don’t have to wait around for the next book to be published LIKE I HAD TO FOR YEARS ARGHHH SO FRUSTRATING.
Also, The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes is amazing. She’s published three other books. I’ve read two of them: Zoo City (won the Arthur C Clarke Award) and Broken Monsters (which is fantastic). Bonus: she’s from my homeland.
@Josh
I love Stephen King-I feel that he does a terrific job of writing realistic characters in fantastical and horrific situations. The closest I’ve come to a bucket list is that I’ve made it an admittedly very lofty goal to own one copy of each of his works by the end of my life. Have you read his latest short story collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams yet? It’s great, and “The Dune” has probably the twistiest ending I’ve read so far this year.
Alan:
Take a look at Charlie Stross’s Iron Sunrise. Its description of a deliberately induced supernova is really compelling.
@Alan
How big a population are we talking? What types of technology do they have access to? How much collateral damage is acceptable? Do you mean just the sapient, tool using population, or everything that lives?
Depending on the answers a nearby (within <30 light years) supernova will probably do the trick; enough gamma radiation will kill pretty much anything that's not underwater. Realistically, it'll probably take a couple days before everyone actually dies, but the damage is going to be done basically instantly, and since it's approaching at the speed of light, there's really no way to get advance warning that it's coming, barring some kind of superscience.
@ moggie
I’ll check that out. A super nova induced mass extinction (well, gamma ray burst anyway) was something that I used once before in a story. Some very nice scientists helped me out with describing exactly what it would look like. They also spotted a huge flaw in my premise, but they were very clever.
@ dalillama
It needs to be able to be triggered instantly and kill off every conscious human before they realise; collateral damage is irrelevant. Appreciate that might be a tall order. Just has to be theoretically possible; the technology they have will be whatever it needs to be. 🙂
@Alan
Short of a supernova, a bigass flare of the local sun would do the trick just fine. Alternately, accelerate a moderate-sized rock to a significant fraction of c on the right vector.. This has a significant chance of actually destroying the planet, but you did say that collateral damage was no object.
ETA: Wait, I missed the ‘triggered instantly’. In that case, a big wodging chunk of antimatter in some kind of containment vessel will work; if it’s big enough, the caveats above regarding relativistic rocks applies.
@ dalillama
Anti-matter might be a good one. Stick some sort of matter/anti-matter bombs in orbital satellites and then make up some effect analogous to EMP (that actually kills people)? Yeah, like that. Or might go with some sort of ‘dark energy/regular energy’ thing. It’s a bit of a maguffin so don’t need to explain how it works, just that it does.
Cool, cheers.
ETA: just realised that ‘orbital’ is a bit redundant. That’s the level of scientific literacy you can expect from me though.
@Alan
It’s called ‘a horrible wave of powerful gamma rays’ and you don’t need to make it up; it’s one of the side effects of a big matter-antimatter reaction. Also, if there’s enough of it up there, ordinary heat could get pretty fierce too.
@ dalillama
That’s perfect then! Thank you! 🙂
ETA: Er, that’s ‘perfect, as in the story idea; rather than as a real concept.