Recommend me Books! (Part Deux)

Jay

Jay

https://www.halforums.com/threads/recommend-books.27512/

About 2 years ago I created a thread to recommend me books, now 20+ books later... I'm on my last 2 books... and the one I'm reading 100 pages in doesn't interest me much. I'd like to be prepared for the winter with a stack of books so once again, I'm lining up a whole bunch of books to purchase of Amazon and I'm looking for some suggestions from you folks.

Like I mentioned previously, I like fantasy or semi-fantasy books. Though I'm not limiting myself to that this time though I love it. I have enjoyed R.R Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice, as well as R.A Salvatore's Drizzt D&D Series even though it's written in a far less than ideal way. My favorite book series was the Darksword Trilogy written a few decades age by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (I did not like their DragonLance series at all however) but the series I follow now is The First Law and pretty much anything Joe Abercrombie writes.

Can you suggest me a book series to watch? But before you suggest anything.... tell me a bit of the books... don't just recommend me an author please.
 
HCGLNS

HCGLNS

1. Have you consulted the Halforums Review section on Books?

2. Stormlord series very nice with a fresh view on magic. Has some explicit and shocking tones, but nice characters. Interesting political drama as well. 4/5 Hobos recommend it.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

I don't remember if I've already recommended these, so I'll give you three.
Let me know if you've read any of them and I'll replace that suggestion.

Midworld - Alan Dean Foster
Bill, the Galactic Hero - Harry Harrison
The Legacy of Heorot - Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle/Steven Barnes

--Patrick
 
Chad Sexington

Chad Sexington

Jay said:
But before you suggest anything.... tell me a bit of the books...
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https://www.halforums.com/threads/recommend-books.27512/
I feel you, Jay.

If you enjoy non-fiction at all, I have to recommend The Columbian Exchange by Alfred Crosby. It's a history of ecological changes in the New and Old Worlds resulting from plants, animals, farming knowledge/methodologies as a result of the explorers from Europe arriving in the Americas. I know, I realise it sounds like a boring premise -plants moving around?- but it is really fascinating to learn about all sorts of ways in which the world was changed. I never knew, for instance, that potatoes aren't native to Ireland, or where the word 'buccaneer' comes from (French pirates cooking pigs on something called a boucan).

For some easy, but funny reading, I recommend just about anything by Christopher Moore, in particular his trilogy of books Bloodsucking Fiends, You Suck, and Bite Me which follow the lives of various people in modern-day San Francisco and how they are affected by the presence of an ancient evil vampire and newly-minted but not evil vampire. The two cop characters who become involved are hilarious and possibly the highlight of the series for me.

Just about everything Moore writes is a humorous fantasy-mixed-with-modernity story, all with the same wry sense of humour. There are a few exceptions, Lamb, for example, is the "Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal," and is a satirical (and irreverent) take on the 'missing' part of Jesus' life from the Bible.
 
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Dave

Dave

Staff member
Dave said:
Brandon Sanderson. Anything.

Patrick Rothfuss. Kingkiller Chronicles.
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Replying to my own post because I didn't explain everything. Thanks for pointing that out, @Chad Sexington!

Brandon Sanderson - The Stormlight Archive - Great new series that is absolutely amazing. The characters are all multi-dimensional and the magic system is unique. The world is thoroughly thought out and the plot does not drag. Smart characters act smart. The dialogue is sometimes a bit too modern for my tastes, but that's a minor gaff. The only real problem with the series is that it's supposed to be 10 books long and the second book just recently came out. So finishing it will take forever. But holy shit it's good.

Sanderson - Mistborn series - Again, Sanderson is a great writer who fully fleshes out his worlds and has unique ideas on how magic works. In this series it has to do with the ingestion of certain metals that do different things. Like Sanderson's other works, the characters have their own personalities that are real and not just painted in. Take the Belgariad for example. Eddings had to have every character be of a different nationality and come together just to show how well he'd thought out the different areas of his world. He basically shoehorned them together and it was not a natural fit. Sanderson doesn't do that. If there are different nationalities they are there for a reason, not just thrown in because he wanted to show how diverse his world is. The whole series is out so you don't have to wait on these. Also note that there's another book in the series that comes years after the first trilogy ended and I'm not sure I liked it. The genre changed pretty severely from classic fantasy to a fantasy western type and I didn't think it meshed well.

Patrick Rothfuss - Kingkiller Chronicles - Told by a famous hero, Kvothe, on how he came to be the larger than life hero the stories tell him to be. Some things are real, some are lies. It's a trilogy and only two books are out at this point so I don't know if the ending will live up to the promise, but even if it only goes half way it'll be worth reading. Note that the only really fleshed out character is the hero himself, but that's not a surprise since he's telling it all from his standpoint.
 
Dei

Dei

I disagree with Dave because he didn't like the start of the second Mistborn trilogy and that makes him wrong. ;)
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Dei said:
I disagree with Dave because he didn't like the start of the second Mistborn trilogy and that makes him wrong. ;)
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I just didn't like the juxtaposition of fantasy/western. It's probably also why I hate the Dark Tower series, which I think is utter and confusing crap.
 
Dei

Dei

Steampunk. You hate Steampunk. Still wrong!

Also, I recommend Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson as well. It's a series about what happens to the world when a bunch of people suddenly gain superpowers and turn into giant assholes. 2nd book is coming out in January.


Dresden Files by Jim Butcher if you have not been reading that series. Modern Fantasy with snarky wise cracking wizard in Chicago and his motley crew of allies. If you like White Wolf type things/Buffy type things this will probably appeal.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Dei said:
Steampunk. You hate Steampunk. Still wrong!
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I love Steampunk. Like the old Shadowrun books. Love them. But they aren't really hard westerns, either. Like old west with magic. At least not the ones I read were.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

PatrThom said:
Midworld - Alan Dean Foster
Bill, the Galactic Hero - Harry Harrison
The Legacy of Heorot - Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle/Steven Barnes
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Dave said:
Replying to my own post because I didn't explain everything. Thanks for pointing that out, @Chad Sexington!
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Doing the same, though I had assumed he was merely asking us to name specific books rather than generically naming authors.

Midworld is one of many, many books set in the universe that lives in Alan Dean Foster's mind. He has written dozens of books which take place in what he calls the Humanx Commonwealth. Midworld is a standalone title, so you won't be left having to track down other parts of some series, and you won't accidentally spoil any of the other books, either. You could read the blurb or reviews online, but I'll just say it's a well-done story of a jungle planet, its inhabitants, and outsiders. If you enjoyed the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, you will probably enjoy this book.

Bill, the Galactic Hero is a straight-up critique and satire of The Man, the military, and bureaucracy in general. Oh, and it's the entertaining story of a farm boy who goes on adventures, too. Harry Harrison has other books which explore similar themes (most notably The Stainless Steel Rat), but Bill is probably the least highbrow, playing stronger to the comedy side of things than SSR. It's no less effective, though. If you enjoyed the movie Biloxi Blues, you will probably enjoy this book.

The Legacy of Heorot is a collaborative effort which chronicles the experience of a colonization party sent to a distant planet. The original colonists are slightly handicapped as a result of their long term in suspended animation, and the fact that the new planet has some violently unpleasant surprises for them does not make things any easier. If you enjoyed the movie Alien, you will probably enjoy this book (and I doubt that's really much of a spoiler).

All three of the titles above are gateway novels and either have sequels a-plenty or multiple other books which expand the universes within, so if you end up liking them, there's plenty more depth to plumb.

--Patrick
 
HowDroll

HowDroll

Dave said:
Replying to my own post because I didn't explain everything. Thanks for pointing that out, @Chad Sexington!

Brandon Sanderson - The Stormlight Archive - Great new series that is absolutely amazing. The characters are all multi-dimensional and the magic system is unique. ...

Sanderson - Mistborn series - Again, Sanderson is a great writer who fully fleshes out his worlds and has unique ideas on how magic works.
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Sanderson's books read like video games, and I don't mean that in a good way.

Jay, have you read Wool by Hugh Howey yet? It's basically like a novel about people inside of a Fallout 3 vault. Pretty sure you'd love it. (Also, don't know if you've checked out Abercrombie's Half a King yet, but it's also really good. Not First Law-tier IMHO, and a bit slow to get going, but still a solid read.)
 
CrimsonSoul

CrimsonSoul

Backwards Compatible is a book about 2 gamers that play an mmo together and fall in love. It really really really is a good book!
 
HowDroll

HowDroll

Dave said:
Wow! Condescending and wrong all in one post! Good thing you're smart or that would have been like a YouTube commenter trifecta.


:rofl:
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Way of Kings -- there's a war, but they're not primarily concerned with killing each other BECAUSE REASONS -- they instead hang out on opposite sides of the battlefield and every so often race to kill monsters that randomly spawn so they can be the first to kill them and loot their crystal hearts. I'm pretty sure there's a WoW PVP battlefield exactly like that (and if not, there should be, because it actually sounds fun to play. Reading about it over and over for ~1000+ pages, not so much.)

Mistborn -- it is so like a video game that they are literally making an action RPG video game of it. Characters have to stock up on various elements to use their abilities, defy physics, etc.? I could seriously imagine exactly how that shit would have mapped to a console controller.


You are, of course, welcome to your opinion about Sanderson -- but your opinion is wrong ;) (To be fair, I liked Mistborn a lot better than Way of Kings, which I couldn't even finish. I love long books, and I love worldbuilding, but the pacing on WoK was absolutely atrocious and I gave up around the 60% mark.)
 
Dei

Dei

I will say that I struggled through WoK as well, since the pacing sucked until about 2/3 through, but WoR was better. I honestly prefer Brandon's YA stuff to Stormlight. Sorry. This may change as more books come out.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
See, I LOVE the Stormlight Archive books. I think they are right up there with the greats in the genre. And yes, they fight for reasons other than to win, which is kind of the point of the second book (and near the end of the first). He really gets into why the Parshendi are how they are and why the Brightlords aren't trying to win the battle. You're reading too much into the battles when the main focus there is more on the political aspects.

I think you are doing the books a grave disservice.
 
HowDroll

HowDroll

Dave said:
See, I LOVE the Stormlight Archive books. I think they are right up there with the greats in the genre. And yes, they fight for reasons other than to win, which is kind of the point of the second book (and near the end of the first). He really gets into why the Parshendi are how they are and why the Brightlords aren't trying to win the battle. You're reading too much into the battles when the main focus there is more on the political aspects.

I think you are doing the books a grave disservice.
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That totally may be the case. I couldn't make it that far in -- and it's very rare that I don't finish a book. After many hundreds of pages of very little forward momentum in the plot, I gave up -- for every plot or setting element I found compelling (and, to be fair, there were some), there was one that annoyed me (many of them gender-based) or tested my suspension of disbelief. I might give it another shot in a few years if the later books in the series are consistently well-reviewed, but if Sanderson can't sustain the 10-book series he has planned, I'd rather not waste my time on earlier books that weren't really to my taste.

Reverent-one said:
Well, by that logic, LoTR is totally like a video game, there's been what? Dozens of games based on it?
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Have you actually read Mistborn? It's nothing like Lord of the Rings. Mistborn's magic system involves characters who drink metal-based potions to unlock various specific talents (and using them basically drains the respective mana pools for each ability), and then defy physics to jump around buildings and stuff. It could be adapted to a (to be fair, very interesting) video game with almost zero modification.

Lord of the Rings (and Game of Thrones, for that matter) have been staples of the fantasy genre for decades, so yes, it's natural that developers would want to adapt those properties into video games. However, this is very much the exception -- very, very, very few fantasy series are actually adapted into games. The only other one I can think of is The Witcher. Mistborn's game devs have their work cut out for them.
 
Reverent-one

Reverent-one

HowDroll said:
Have you actually read Mistborn? It's nothing like Lord of the Rings. Mistborn's magic system involves characters who drink metal-based potions to unlock various specific talents (and using them basically drains the respective mana pools for each ability), and then defy physics to jump around buildings and stuff. It could be adapted to a (to be fair, very interesting) video game with almost zero modification.

Lord of the Rings (and Game of Thrones, for that matter) have been staples of the fantasy genre for decades, so yes, it's natural that developers would want to adapt those properties into video games. However, this is very much the exception -- very, very, very few fantasy series are actually adapted into games. The only other one I can think of is The Witcher. Mistborn's game devs have their work cut out for them.
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Did you actually read the part of your post I was responding too? That point was specifically that the fact that it was being made into a video game was evidence that it was like a video game. That is horrible logic for the reason that I was pointing out, since other works, like LoTR, also have video games. I didn't make any comparison to LoTR other than that. I wasn't arguing with the fact that Mistborn's magic system can be adapted fairly easily compared to some other fantasy magic systems, since it can. It's abilties and limits are well-defined and understood, as opposed to being vaguely defined and open ended in what it can do. It's more like superhero powers in that sense. But that doesn't have much impact in the quality of the books.
 
HowDroll

HowDroll

Reverent-one said:
Did you actually read the part of your post I was responding too? That point was specifically that the fact that it was being made into a video game was evidence that it was like a video game. That is horrible logic for the reason that I was pointing out, since other works, like LoTR, also have video games. I didn't make any comparison to LoTR other than that. I wasn't arguing with the fact that Mistborn's magic system can be adapted fairly easily compared to some other fantasy magic systems, since it can. It's abilties and limits are well-defined and understood, as opposed to being vaguely defined and open ended in what it can do. It's more like superhero powers in that sense. But that doesn't have much impact in the quality of the books.
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Other works -- all two of them?

Good golly, some of you Sanderson fanboys are a bit touchy, aren't you?
 
WasabiPoptart

WasabiPoptart

Blood Song by Anthony Ryan. It's the first part of a trilogy. Reads a lot like Patrick Rothfuss's books and apparently Brandon Sanderson (btw -I've only read part of Way of Kings. I hated it and didn't even bother to finish it, so I'm only adding this comparison since I see it so often.). This was part of my review on Goodreads:

The book is very well written. The setting is not our world, but yet familiar enough that you wonder if they could be in a specific country. The characters are interesting and have some weight to them. You start to care about the major characters and root for their well-being.
Yet, at days end this is a very typical fantasy novel. A child is abandoned or turned over to be an apprentice of some sort. He/she has a gift that is unknown until later or forbidden (or both). There is a battle where the lines of good vs. evil are not so clearly drawn. Our intrepid hero does what he/she thinks is best, though it often means suffering for the choice that's been made. A passionate love, friendship thicker than blood, great enemies, and so on.
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I also mentioned in my review that I read this close to 600 page book in just over 2 days. I could not put it down.
 
HowDroll

HowDroll

Lord of the Rings was not turned into a video game because of anything having to do with its plot or world -- it's because it is the most popular fantasy franchise of all time and, because it has such a large fanbase, has a built-in way to move copies of the game. (The same can be said for the runner-up contender, Game of Thrones.) Yes, both series have a great depth of lore (much more than Mistborn), but that's true of many other fantasy series as well, and there aren't game publishers lining up to adapt those.

Mistborn, while popular, is relatively new (especially in comparison to LoTR or GoT) and doesn't have the track record or fanbase of a lot of other long-running fantasy series. Why, then, turn it into a video game instead of the Malazan Book of the Fallen or Kingkiller Chronicles or the First Law series? I don't think it's a great leap to assume it is, in fact, because the magic system resembles something out of a video game -- which was my original assertion to Dave, and he told me I was wrong. Pointing out the one exception to my statement doesn't make what I said illogical when the reasons LoTR has been repeatedly adapted to a game format are very different than the reasons Mistborn is being adapted -- especially considering the fact you can count the number of fantasy series that have been adapted to video games on one hand.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
If they made a Malazan based game it would suuuuuuuuck! Especially if the plot is even half as confusing as the books are.

And I said you were wrong because you said it was a bad book, not because of the magic system. And I was a-playin'.
 
WasabiPoptart

WasabiPoptart

Also the Rain Wild Chronicles by Robin Hobb is a great series. It's four books about dragons and their keepers, coming of age, fighting against societal norms, enemies that are not obvious, loving who you love and a sentient boat. I really liked her Farseer trilogy. She makes her characters 3 dimensional and easy to like or hate or at least understand their motives. A few places seemed to drag, but the story overall was good enough to keep me looking forward to the next book.
 
HowDroll

HowDroll

Dave said:
If they made a Malazan based game it would suuuuuuuuck! Especially if the plot is even half as confusing as the books are.

And I said you were wrong because you said it was a bad book, not because of the magic system. And I was a-playin'.
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THIS IS SERIOUS BSNS[DOUBLEPOST=1411763195,1411763100][/DOUBLEPOST]
WasabiPoptart said:
Also the Rain Wild Chronicles by Robin Hobb is a great series. It's four books about dragons and their keepers, coming of age, fighting against societal norms, enemies that are not obvious, loving who you love and a sentient boat. I really liked her Farseer trilogy. She makes her characters 3 dimensional and easy to like or hate or at least understand their motives. A few places seemed to drag, but the story overall was good enough to keep me looking forward to the next book.
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Have you read her new Farseer book yet?
 
Reverent-one

Reverent-one

There's not just one exception to the idea that "they're making X into a videogame, this provides some evidence that it's just like a video game". Tons of action movies get video games, Star Wars has tons of video games, Harry Potter has video games, The Legend of Korra is getting a video game. I could go on and on. Again, going by the logic of the argument I was quoting, all of those things are "so like video games".

Also, when it comes right down to it, LoTR and Mistborn are being made into games for the exact same reasons, which is because publishers think they can get a workable game to sell and make money. If the Mistborn books were totally unpopular, do you think they'd be getting a game, regardless of how easy the mechanics are to represent? No, they wouldn't, clearly it's fanbase is a factor as much as LoTR's fanbase is a factor in why it gets games.
 
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