A friend of mine recently asked me to recommend some reading material to her. Since this isn't the first time it happens, I figured I might as well write a little entry with my favourite reading material. Each book will have a description under the cut. Most are taken from amazon, with my comments added here and there. Enjoy, and tell me if you like them.
Offbeat comedy and zaniness
Terry Pratchett – Discworld novels
There are more than 25 books in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. The series takes place on the flat world of the Disc which is carried on the backs of four elephants standing on the great Turtle, A'tuin, as she swims through space. On the Disc mariners who attempt to sail over the horizon, in fact, sail over the edge. The Disc is home to magic and many magical creatures and beings abound, gods, dwarfs, trolls, vampires, zombies, werewolves, wizards, witches and more. Pratchett has an unmatched skill to describe an ordinary situation is a completely original and offbeat way. I believe that what makes the books so enjoyable to read are the secondary characters that pop up once in a while.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld books can be grouped into categories depending on who the primary characters are. I tend to think of the categories as the Wizards of the Unseen University, the Witches of Lancre, Death, and the City Watch. Most of the Discworld books fall into one of these categories. Click here to view a suggested reading order for the Discworld novels.
The Discworld books are jewels of humorous fantasy. The most enjoyable Discworld books involve the City Watch, Guards, Guards, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Fifth Elephant and The Night Watch. The Death series are also good for many a laugh, with Mort, Reaper Man, The Hogfather, Soul Music, and Thief of Time.
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett – Good omens
Pratchett and Gaiman may seem an unlikely combination, but the topic (Armageddon) of this fast-paced novel is old hat to both. Pratchett's wackiness collaborates with Gaiman's morbid humor; the result is a humanist delight to be savored and reread again and again. You see, there was a bit of a mix up when the Antichrist was born, due in part to the machinations of Crowley, who did not so much fall as saunter downwards, and in part to the mysterious ways as manifested in the form of a part-time rare book dealer, an angel named Aziraphale. Like top agents everywhere, they've long had more in common with each other than the sides they represent, or the conflict they are nominally engaged in. The only person who knows how it will all end is Agnes Nutter, a witch whose prophecies all come true, if one can only manage to decipher them. The minor characters along the way (Famine makes an appearance as diet crazes, no-calorie food and anorexia epidemics) are as much fun as the story as a whole, which adds up to one of those rare books which is enormous fun to read the first time, and the second time, and the third time
I'd recommend all of Christopher Moore's books, but these two are a must:
Christopher Moore – The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
Reading a Christopher Moore novel is a little like eating a potato chip–it's hard to stop at just one. And you don't have to look beyond the titles to understand the allure; who could pass up a book called Practical Demonkeeping or Island of the Sequined Love Nun? Each of Moore's tales skewers a particular literary genre. In Coyote Blue he nailed New Age fascination with Native American religion; in Blood-Sucking Fiends: A Love Story he put a new twist on the classic vampire tale. The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove is a companion piece to his first novel, the hilariously twisted horror story Practical Demonkeeping, and readers of that book will recognize the setting, Pine Cove, California. In addition, Moore includes plenty of his patented weird sex, occasional gross-out death, several off-kilter but nonetheless affecting love stories, and some fabulous secondary characters.
In a nutshell, the plot revolves around a gigantic prehistoric lizard whose slumber deep beneath the ocean surface is interrupted by a radioactive leak from a nearby power plant. At the same time, a woman in Pine Cove hangs herself; the local psychiatrist (who has been prescribing antidepressants to everyone in town with gay abandon) decides the suicide was her fault and yanks everyone's medication; and an elderly black blues singer named Catfish Jefferson arrives to perform at the Head of the Slug saloon. Into this already strange brew mix one schizoid former B-movie starlet, a pot-head town constable, a bereaved local artist, a biologist tracking anomalous behavior in rats, a crooked sheriff, and a pharmacist with a bizarre sexual fixation on sea mammals, and you have a recipe for the kind of madness Moore does so well
Christopher Moore – Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story
Here's something different: a vampire novel that's light, funny, and not at all hackneyed. Between scenes of punks bowling frozen turkeys on the graveyard shift in a supermarket, or snapping turtles loose in a loft and gnawing on designer shoes, this novel has comic charm to spare. But it also packs an appealingly downbeat message about the consumer culture. Jody never asked to become a vampire. But when she wakes up under an alley dumpster with a badly burned arm, an aching neck, superhuman strength, and a distinctly Nosferatuan thirst, she realizes the decision has been made for her. Making the transition from the nine-to-five grind to an eternity of nocturnal prowlings is going to take some doing, however, and that's where C. Thomas Flood fits in. A would-be Kerouac from Incontinence, lndiana, Tommy (to his fiends) is biding his time night-clerking and frozen turkey bowling in a San Francisco Safeway. But all that changes when a beautiful, undead redhead walks through the door … and proceeds to rock Tommy's life — and afterlife — in ways he never imagined possible
Hard Sci-fi
Vernor Vinge – A fire upon the deep
In this Hugo-winning 1991 SF novel, Vernor Vinge gives us a wild new cosmology, a galaxy-spanning “Net of a Million Lies,” some finely imagined aliens, and much nail-biting suspense. Faster-than-light travel remains impossible near Earth, deep in the galaxy's Slow Zone–but physical laws relax in the surrounding Beyond. Outside that again is the Transcend, full of unguessable, godlike “Powers.” When human meddling wakes an old Power, the Blight, this spreads like a wildfire mind virus that turns whole civilizations into its unthinking tools. And the half-mythical Countermeasure, if it exists, is lost with two human children on primitive Tines World.
Serious complications follow. One paranoid alien alliance blames humanity for the Blight and launches a genocidal strike. Pham Nuwen, the man who knows about Countermeasure, escapes this ruin in the spacecraft Out of Band–heading for more violence and treachery, with 500 warships soon in hot pursuit. On his destination world, the fascinating Tines are intelligent only in combination: named “individuals” are small packs of the doglike aliens. Primitive doesn't mean stupid, and opposed Tine leaders wheedle the young castaways for information about guns and radios. Low-tech war looms, with elaborately nested betrayals and schemes to seize Out of Band if it ever arrives. The tension becomes extreme… while half the Beyond debates the issues on galactic Usenet.
Vinge's climax is suitably mindboggling. This epic combines the flash and dazzle of old-style space opera with modern, polished thoughtfulness. Pham Nuwen also appears in the nifty prequel set 30,000 years earlier, A Deepness in the Sky. Both novels are highly recommended, as this is some of the most original material I've read in years.
David Weber – The Honor Harrington series
David Weber's Honor Harrington series is up to its 10th novel, narrating the conflicts between the Royal Kingdom of Manticore Alliance against the People's Republic of Haven. Central to this series is Admiral Lady Honor Harrington. The series follows her career from lowly ensign, to captain, to admiral. Though sometimes slightly repetitive in its plot, the series is nonetheless excellent. This is space opera at a scale never before seen. Weber has room to expand subplots and secondary characters and bring to the reader a feeling of depth and completeness seldom seen in science fiction novels. Character development is one of the strengths of this series, with actors growing in stature from unimportant secondary characters to major players in the “Honorverse.” Politics, love, war, cynicism, celery and plenty of exploding spaceships.
Richard Morgan – Altered carbon
In the 25th century, it's difficult to die a final death. Humans are issued a cortical stack, implanted into their bodies, into which consciousness is “digitized” and from which-unless the stack is hopelessly damaged-their consciousness can be downloaded (“resleeved”) with its memory intact, into a new body. While the Vatican is trying to make resleeving (at least of Catholics) illegal, centuries-old aristocrat Laurens Bancroft brings Takeshi Kovacs (an Envoy, a specially trained soldier used to being resleeved and trained to soak up clues from new environments) to Earth, where Kovacs is resleeved into a cop's body to investigate Bancroft's first mysterious, stack-damaging death. To solve the case, Kovacs must destroy his former Envoy enemies; outwit Bancroft's seductive, wily wife; dabble in United Nations politics; trust an AI that projects itself in the form of Jimi Hendrix; and deal with his growing physical and emotional attachment to Kristin Ortega, the police lieutenant who used to love the body he's been given. Kovacs rockets from the seediest hellholes on Earth, through virtual reality torture, into several gory firefights, and on to some exotic sexual escapades. Morgan's 25th-century Earth is convincing, while the questions he poses about how much Self is tied to body chemistry and how the rich believe themselves above the law are especially timely.
Cyberpunk
Neal Stephenson – Cryptonomicon
Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods–World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. “When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first…. Of course, to observe is not its real duty–we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed…. Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious.”
All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes–inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe–team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties. If you're a geek, you have to read this book.
Neal Stephenson – Snow Crash
From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet–incarnate as the Metaverse–looks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist–hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible. From the moment I picked up this book and read the first few pages, I was hooked and read it almost in one sitting.
Dennis Danvers – Circuits of Heaven
The shape of the future is the Bin: an ideal world re-created in a computer. With the exception of a few religious fanatics and crazies, most of the people on Earth have left their bodies behind for eternal life within the machine. Existence outside of the electric utopia has become crude and primitive. Nemo is one of the holdouts, despising the virtual world ever since his parents abandoned him so they could join it. But when he visits them on his twenty-first birthday, he meets Justine and falls in love. Nemo must decide whether to join her in the computer or try to forget that she exists. His decision becomes more complicated when a fanatic group decides to use him to infect the computer with a virus that will supposedly shut off access between the two worlds.
Fluff reading
These are books that are fun to read, even if they're not at the height of the literary world. These are like candy, and most can be read in a weekend :)
Laurell K. Hamilton – The Anita Blake series
Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series is now up to 11 books. It is set on an alternate Earth where magic works and vampires and werewolves are real. The series revolves around Blake, a tough-as-nails yet sexy zombie-raiser and vampire executioner. Throughout the series, she becomes more deeply enmeshed in cruel plots and counterplots, her tangled personal life only becomes more demanding, more wrenching, and more erotically fraught. Readers should start with the first book and read them in order of publication, as subsequent books usually start where previous ones end – even if some backfilling is included in each book.
Laurie R. King – The Beekeeper's Apprentice
Sherlock Holmes takes on a young, female apprentice in this delightful and well-wrought addition to the master detective's casework. In the early years of WW I, 15-year-old American Mary Russell encounters Holmes, retired in Sussex Downs where Conan Doyle left him raising bees. Mary, an orphan rebelling against her guardian aunt's strictures, impresses the sleuth with her intelligence and acumen. Holmes initiates her into the mysteries of detection, allowing her to participate in a few cases when she comes home from her studies at Oxford. The collaboration is ignited by the kidnapping in Wales of Jessica Simpson, daughter of an American senator. The sleuthing duo find signs of the hand of a master criminal, and after Russell rescues the child, attempts are made on their lives (and on Watson's), with evidence piling up that the master criminal is out to get Holmes and all he holds dear. King ( A Grave Talent ) has created a fitting partner for the Great Detective: a quirky, intelligent woman who can hold her own with a man renowned for his contempt for other people's thought processes. There are 6 books in the series.