Need help finding something to read.

[J. Alexopoulos]

Okay, hopefully some of you can help me with this dilemma I'm having (I apologize if you've read some of this before in another thread):

My background:
I'm a big fantasy fan, my old favourites being: Tolkien, Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan.

The only fantasy I've never liked has been Terry Goodkind and Karen Miller (DO NOT READ KAREN MILLER)

I read George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, and it blew my mind. It may have ruined the entire fantasy genre, especially fantasy that follows the traditional Heroes Journey template.

Stories that I've tried to read the following but have given up from boredom:

Raymond E Feist - Riftwar
Robin Hobb - Assassins Apprentice/Journey
Steven Erikson - Gardens of the Moon
R Scott Bakker - The Darkness That Comes Before
Mercedes Lackey - Arrows of the Queen
Stephen King - Hearts in Atlantis

Please note that I also read this Karen Miller's Innocent Mage. I almost gave up reading. Completely.

So if anyone has any suggestions for original stories that don't follow traditional templates, hit me. GRR Martin has also turned me onto main character deaths/realism components not usually seen in mainstream fiction. While I do enjoy fantasy, please feel free to suggest stories outside the genre. I've started to read Brandon Sanderson's Elantris and it seems okay, but I'll be done pretty soon.

So, in summary, HELP ME!



Eternally grateful,

John

[Newt]

I highly recommend Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker fantasy/ alternate history series. It is set in an alternate version of the United States in the early nineteenth century. It's humorous and engaging with fun characters, but also includes much serious discourse on ethics, religion, and the nature of reality.

Also, some good works that are technically science fiction but with a fantasy feel: Card's Homecoming Saga; David Brin's Uplift Storm trilogy; C. J. Cherryh's Faded Sun trilogy; and Gordon R. Dickson's Childe Cycle.

[kdmelrose]

Greg Keyes' The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone saga might be up your alley.

[j giar]

I finally cracked open McCarthy's The Road and read it in two days. Couldn't put it down. It's not in the fantasy genre you asked for but it's probably one of the best books I've ever read. That's only my opinion by the way.

[jedipencil]

Mercedes Lackey..... :yuk:

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child books are good if you tried to read Merc Lackey.....

http://www.prestonchild.com/

[J. Alexopoulos]

Wow,

Thanks for all the great input everyone. Greg Keyes happened to be at the local store, so that's happening once I'm through with Elantris.

I'm going to try and make it through everyone's suggestions.


Thanks,

John

[BJCochran]

Joe Hill 'Heart - Shaped Box' the book is really good.

[J. Alexopoulos]

I finally cracked open McCarthy's The Road and read it in two days. Couldn't put it down. It's not in the fantasy genre you asked for but it's probably one of the best books I've ever read. That's only my opinion by the way.

I looked it up. I love post-apocalyptic.

[DemolitionSamurai]

Check out Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. One of my wife's coworkers loaned it to me a few years back. It's not a short book by any means, and each page is filled with so much information but I barely slept at all for several days because I couldn't put it down. I'm pretty sure my coworkers thought I was going crazy when I'd come in, eyes bloodshot, rambling about extradimensional houses.

Jedi, you should pick it up, too, if you find yourself liking Illuminatus and other postmodern type stuff.

[pi0trov]

It's not quite post-apocalyptic (almost) and it's not quite fantasy (yet), but I highly recommend S.M. Stirling's Emberverse series, starting with Dies the Fire (http://www.amazon.com/Dies-Fire-S-M-Stirling/dp/0451460413/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239091725&sr=8-1). One of my favorite authors - and if you enjoy it, there's plenty to keep you busy (5 books so far in the series, with at least 4 more planned).

[jedipencil]

Jedi, you should pick it up, too, if you find yourself liking Illuminatus and other postmodern type stuff.

Will check it out! :) (Illuminatus is hard to read though, like trying to understand a really drunk person talk....)

[DemolitionSamurai]

House of Leaves is a lot easier to read, but there's a lot of depth to it. Basically, the narrator finds a book written by a blind man about a documenary that may or may not exist and it all goes nuts from there. It's kind of three stories in one. It's about the narrator and his crumbling life, it's about Zampano, the blind old man who wrote the book, and it's about Will Navidson and his family from the documentary. It's kind of a love story disguised as a horror novel.

From the wiki:
"Many things are hidden within the text of the book. Going through the first letter of footnotes 27 through 42 spells the author's full name; the first letter of footnotes 46 through 57 spell his surname. Portions are written in alternating short and long paragraphs which turn out to be Morse code that correspond to the text. A seemingly random list of names on pages 64–65 (Second Edition) produce a code when the first letter of each of the individual's last names are added together, spelling out the phrase "A LONG LIST" A letter from Pelafina to Johnny on pages 620-623 (Second edition) contains seemingly randomized capital letters strewn throughout it, which, when combined, spell out the phrase, "A FACE IN A CLOUD NO TRACE IN THE CROWD." Some codes, like the author's name, are simply fun to notice. Others actually have an impact that gives greater depth and meaning to the portion being read. One of Pelafina's letters includes a coded message apparently addressed to Zampanò, which reads: "My dear Zampanò, who did you lose?" The endpapers of the US hardcover edition of the novel contain hexadecimal characters, which are actually an AIFF audio file of an excerpt from Poe's track "Angry Johnny" when saved as a file in a hex editor."

In most cases, ergodic literature is a gimmick trying to sell the author's intelligence, but it really worked here. I need to actually buy the book so I can take my time with it since I just blasted through it the first time. A lot of people I know who have read it say the same thing as me in that it kind of consumes you while reading it. I was thinking about it for weeks after finishing it and its by far my favorite story where the house is a major antagonist. The scene where they're measuring the house and it's several inches wider on the inside than it is on the outside ends up being a scarier idea than any number of monsters and ghosts could ever be.

[jedipencil]

Wow.... I didn't understand any of that....but it certainly sounds mindbending. Easier than Illuminatus? Well then, I shall have to try it. :)

[J. Alexopoulos]

I finished Gregory Keyes' Briar King. Pretty good. I'd give it a 8/10GeorgeRRMartins. It also kept me interested enough that I'm going to buy the next book. Thanks for the recommendation KDM.

I also picked up The Road, so now that exams are done, I'm going to kick off a summer of hard core reading with that.

[J. Alexopoulos]

The Road was awesome. It took me a while to get used to his writing style (no commas, plenty of disjointed sentence fragments, no quotation marks) but once I read about 40 pages, I was hooked.


Thanks for the recomendation

[j giar]

The Road was awesome. It took me a while to get used to his writing style (no commas, plenty of disjointed sentence fragments, no quotation marks) but once I read about 40 pages, I was hooked.


Thanks for the recomendation

Yeah...same thing happened with me. But once I got used to it and got in, I couldn't stop. And you're welcome. :thumbs:

[Lord Fejj]

The ScarNight trillogy by Alan Campbell is a little different. I read the first two (Scarnight and Iron Angel) and getting ready to order the third from the bookclub. Sort of a bizarre steampunk fantasy kinda thing.

(Illuminatus is hard to read though, like trying to understand a really drunk person talk....)
Stick with it, it gets better.

[jayvee]

I just read "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy ("No Country for Old Men") and it was pretty good, a post-apocalyptic survival story about a man and his son (identified only as "the man" and "the boy" throughout) that will be a movie starring Viggo Mortensen in October--you know, if you like to read the book before you go watch a movie. Plus, it reads fast once you get used to McCarthy's narrative style.

[HaphazardJoy]

The only fantasy I've never liked has been Terry Goodkind and Karen Miller (DO NOT READ KAREN MILLER)


YES, FINALLY! Oh dear God, I read Karen Miller's Innocent Mage duology and wanted to claw my own eyes out in the process. It was so easy to read, and I had both books on hand, so I just finished, but I felt stupider for having done so. Then I look again at Amazon's reviews and everyone had given it 5 stars, what bullshit.

An excerpt from my review:
"Rather than draw us through a sequence of events that teach us about the true nature of her characters and this created world, Miller seems content to spell it out for us... bluntly and repeatedly over the course of over a thousand pages. We're given a cast of characters whose intentions are painfully clear to the reader, or, if they are dishonest, excruciatingly elaborated upon to hammer in the fact that they are as such. It's political fantasy without the cleverness and credibility, combined with the pop fantasy aspect, only without the charm and voice. George R. R. Martin meets Terry Brooks, minus the positive aspects of either author. "

I really enjoyed the first couple Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth books, the second one especially, but quickly lost interest beyond that. I hate when characters gain godlike powers without any penalty, it just gets boring. Likewise, I'm a big fan of Raymond Feist, and have read several of the Riftwar books without getting bored.

Alright, onto suggestions. I'll start with Stephen Hunt's The Court of The Air. I'm halfway through this book, and already eagerly awaiting the next two. I picked it up from the jacket, and it's really exceeded expectation. It's steampunk with elements of magic and artificial intelligence mixed in, that with some interesting characters and artifacts mixed in, and a story calling on notes of cosmic horror and political intrigue, all told with expert prose and dialogue... I'm sold. Hell, I'm recommending the book even though I still have a couple hundred pages left.
If you haven't already read any of his work, I'll just give a flat out recommendation for anything by Gene Wolfe. Namely The Knight and The Wizard, which combines classical fantasy elements with some Norse mythological elements and Christian symbols into a dreamlike telling of a boy who is transported to a different world and transformed into brave knight (which sounds rote and obvious, but this book can hardly be called either), and The Book of the New Sun quadrilogy, which is a mix of fantasy and sci-fi involving a torturer and executor named Severian who might just end up being the savior of the world. Gene Wolfe is easily the best writer in literature today, deftly working mysteries and puzzles to be sussed out in between the lines of enthralling genre stories. I started one of his other big series, the Soldier books, and enjoyed it, but had read too much of his stuff back to back and felt like moving on to something else. That one is about a Roman mercenary who is brain damaged in a skirmish, and as a result has lost his short term memory and gained the ability to see the spirits and gods that filled the ancient world, so he keeps a journal day by day of his journeys as he seeks to repay a debt to the Goddess that he can't even remember. The fact that this guy has people who write thesis papers on his works, and write books which examine his work that fetch big bucks second hand (the Lexicon Urthus was up to over $200 for a while before the second printing), that says something about his depth and complexity and worthwhileness.

Good reading!
-D

[J. Alexopoulos]

I can't believe that you read two Karen Miller books.

I have sad news for you: You are stupider for reading them. I've spent the past three months trying to forget the 300 pages I read. My IQ is slowly rising.

Those are some pretty bold statements you're making about Wolfe, especailly after mentioning George RR Martin and Brooks earlier in your posting. I'm assuming that it can't possibly live up to the hype.

That being said, I think I'll put The Knight on the list with some of the others, see which ones my local shop has...

Thanks.

[HaphazardJoy]

I won't go so far to assume that he's the Jesus of fiction and that you'll adore him. Still, I doubt anyone who'd give him an honest chance would be let down, so please let me know what you think when you've read The Knight.

[RandallFlagg]

I'd recommend A. Lee Martinez's Gil's All-Fright Diner. It's not really like most of the stuff mentioned. It's got some Lovecraftian influences, great humor, and it's really just a good buddy book. Wikipedia description:

"In the backwards Southern town of Rockwood, a vampire and a werewolf arrive in a run-down old truck. They come across Gil's All Night Diner, a 24-hour diner built in the middle of nowhere, the only nearby landmark being a somewhat vacant cemetery. While taking a break from driving (having nearly run out of gas) they discover that the diner is the target of continual zombie attacks.

The manager of the diner, Loretta, offers them a job: help her out with some things around the diner (and maybe help solve the zombie problem), and she'll give them some money to be on their way. Needing the money, they accept."

Trust me, I love it.

[J. Alexopoulos]

My rating for the books that have been recommended, that I've read:

The Road - 9/10
Briar King - 7/10

I'm almost done the 3rd of the 4 Gregory Keyes novel.

I also bought Wolfe's, The Knight, so it's up next.

After that, I'll probably check out either:
House of Leaves,
Dies the Fire
or
Gil's All-fright Diner.

I've read and enjoyed CJ Cherryh, and Orson Scott Card before, so they'll probably be on the pick up list soon.

Has anyone read any other Cormac MacCarthy?

[J. Alexopoulos]

I finished the Greg Keyes Kingdom of Thorn and Bone series. Not bad. I definately thought that the first two books were the best of the four.
I found that the last two books were a bit scattered and poorly organized, but Keyes managed to wrap it up better than I thought he could in the final 20 pages.

SUGGESTED READING:

Kingdom of Thorn and Bone Series: 6.5/10
The Road: 9/10

[J. Alexopoulos]

Just finished Gene Wolfe's The Knight (http://www.amazon.com/Knight-Wizard-Book/dp/0765313480).

The writing was good enough, but the disjointed plot progression made it tough for me to follow. I think a key concept I could not believe was the fact that Sir Able is a kid (even though that is explained repeatedly throughout the book). It may have required too mystical of a leap from me. I think I'll put it away with a post-it and read it again in a few years.

Still, for a book I didn't like reading, it was pretty good.

Review:

The Knight - 7/10

BOOKS READ:

The Road (http://www.amazon.com/Road-Movie-Tie-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/0307472124/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244572455&sr=1-1) - 9/10 - Cormac McCarthy
The Knight (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765313480/ref=s9_simz_gw_s0_p14_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=0N2RFK9321DRKE93VDYT&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938131&pf_rd_i=507846#) - 7/10 - Gene Wolfe
Kingdom of Thorn and Bone Series (http://www.amazon.com/Briar-King-Kingdoms-Thorn-Bone/dp/0345440706/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244572436&sr=1-1) - 7/10 - Greg Keyes <--Bumped it up. But no further!

[HaphazardJoy]

I think a key concept I could not believe was the fact that Sir Able is a kid

Did you catch the part very early on where he lays with Disiri and awakens a man? That kind of plot conceit is very common in fantasy, the whole powerless young man being whisked away to a fantastic world and finding himself no longer a boy, but a strong and capable man. It's a key concept in a lot of fantasy, high and low. Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Twain, Dickson's The Dragon and the George are perfect examples, and the mentalities present in characters like Conan or Tarl from Norman's Gor books are less literal boy-to-man examples, but the characters are clearly driven by adolescent desires. The precedent was laid before him, but of course Wolfe turns it on its ear a little. He'd later do the same thing for hardboiled detective stories with An Evil Guest, a sci-fi mystery/horror where the main character is actually the mysterious woman who hires the incredible detective and toys with the affections of both him and the "villain", and lacking an understanding of a lot of her motivation, we wonder if she is, in fact, THE femme fatale.

The disjointedness can be hard to follow, it really flows in a very dream-like manner, but then part of the fun of Wolfe's writing is that he alludes to meaning greater than what our narrator tells us. There are countless allusions to mythology, most of the characters' names have roots in dead tongues. I'm halfway through his Soldier series, and I've taken notes all along and occasionally looked things up and found it quite interesting. The Soldier series is fun enough on it's own, but having a deep understanding of Greek mythology and the languages of the time would be helpful... I was delighted to find some fun details by looking up some Scythian words and myths. Mani the cat's name is the same as the word for "moon" in Norse myth, a common device in Wolfe's work, especially since he often toys with hints at characters being shapeshifters (dare I say wereWolfes har har). Anyway, there's a lot to miss, and a lot more to enjoy a second time through, but I'm glad you enjoyed it that much anyway. If you do decide to go back to it at some point, make sure to pick up the second half of the story under the title The Wizard.