Eagle Time Reading List

Have you read Harry Potter? If not, I guess I would recommend. I can’t help much, though.

Any Ursula (K) Le Guin is a solid pick.

Also I read it ages ago when I was a kid but So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane is also the start of a pretty fun series

I'm currently on vacation myself, and have been reading Dune and rereading The Name of the Wind series (which has already had plenty of discussion in this thread). I can highly recommend both.

Dune has a few issues, being as old as it is (rather silly names for future tech, kinda dated and fixed gender roles), but overall it's very good. And if you consider those issues in the context it was written... those particular things are considerably better than many novels written during the same era, and everything else was completely revolutionary, and vast improvements. Dune kickstarted modern sci-fi as we know it, and the few differences that it didn't update were ironed out in the following decades.

Time to some of my vaguely-guilty pleasure scifi/fantasy reading over the past 10 years in the hopes that at least some of it is on your library app, Reyweld. Plus a bonus really good non-fiction read.

For some fun and generally very well-written fantasy I'd recommend the Mistborn series + Elantris + Warbreaker (the latter two being standalone novels) by Brandon Sanderson. He also has a Epic Fantasy Series he's started that's three books in (The Stormlight Archive) but that's slightly heavier going and not complete. They're all really neat, if you want a standalone thing I'd probably go for Warbreaker first, whereas the original Mistborn trilogy is good easy-to-get-into series fare.

The Lightbringer Series is also neat, takes the usual fantasy genre stuff and puts a sorta more unlikely protagonist in than usual. Also has a neat magic system going on.

The Gentleman Bastard series is a pretty wild, Fiasco-like fantasy romp. It's got a (fantasy world) con-man running around fantasy world, so if that sounds interesting you'll probably like it.

Hugh Howey's Wool Trilogy is super interesting and I don't want to say too much about it bc it runs quite a bit on mystery, but our protagonists are people who live in a sealed-off Silo where anyone who wants to go outside gets to - but they never get to come back inside.

The Last Policeman trilogy is about a cop, as the title implies, so not that great out the gate. I'd still give it a rec though bc it's about a noir-ish detective who has gotta solve ONE LAST CASE before... a meteor hits the earth and probably wipes out civilization as people know it, in 6 months. Also falls prey to some of the usual apocalypse tropes of 'some people will invariably be mean', but not to the extent that it's reveling in it like, say, The Division series of video games (and there's plenty of folks who don't fall prey to that).

Final recommend for now: for an extremely good and interesting non-fiction read, you (and everyone else reading this) should read Risk Savvy, which is an extremely good read by a scientist who studies risk and how people perceive risk. He talks about how that influences our decision-making and why a lot of organizations tend to mislead people or enact bad policies (even accidentally) because of it. It's a REAL good learning experience.

Brandon Sanderson is very good, although his plots tend to be a little formulaic, at least between Elantris, Mistborn, and Stormlight, the ones I've read most recently.

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Man of low or despised class with hard life but strong spirit discovers he has access to an ancient hereditary magic usually restricted to the upper class, and teams up with a politically savvy female struggling with her multiple identities and traumatic past, and a kindly royal figure (may be the same as one of the other characters) with unconventional interests, usually scholarship, history, and the lower class.

They work together to bring heart to the lower class and cause some kind of uprising, only to discover that their enemy was just a troubled individual/group of people doing their best to prevent the real Big Bad from uprising, but that guy's seeping influence was what made them succeed in the first place and now they have to beat the guy they helped set free. They do so by tapping into its ancient counterpart, and in the process a bunch of their peasant friends get the magic the main characters started with and one of the main characters becomes/approaches a god.

Seriously, this applies almost completely to all of them.

My favorite thing about Sanderson is the little short stories he includes in the chapter interludes, often containing secrets about the plot or even the wider universe. They're interesting on their own as well.

I'd love to write/read an entire book of short stories like those, which was my original intention for Songs of Sand, Sea, and Sky before I lost motivation, due to having my wisdom teeth removed right before I was going to write the second update.

Yeah that's a good point re: Sanderson themes, I think Warbreaker departs a bit from that formula which might be why I liked it so much.

UPDATE:

I have now checked out So you want to be a wizard, Mistborn, and Steelheart.

Books I checked that were not available: All of Earthsea (any every other Le Guin), The Name of the Wind, Lightbringer, Gentleman Bastard, Risk Savvy.

I have read Harry Potter, and have started Dune before but not been able to get into it. Thank you everyone for these first suggestions.

Ah yeah I forgot to mention Steelheart etc., that's more of a strange superhero postapocalyptic scifi thing which I didn't like quite so much but it's still an alright read.

Glad you got some stuff though :>

Since I didn't actually say much about the actual story of Dune, I'll provide a brief summary. The first third is economic warfare between scheming interplanetary noble houses (a topic I find utterly fascinating), and through the rest of the book it transitions to an even mix of standard elements of science fiction and fantasy.

The book centers around the fictitious, ultra-valuable superdrug/"spice" called "melange" which prolongs life and increases mental, psychic and interpersonal abilities, but will kill you if you stop using it. It's also only produced on an awful desert planet that's hospitable enough to not justify spacesuit use or biodomes, but nasty enough that it really would be easier if they were used. The key difficulty is the extreme lack of water.

A lot of the story, especially the end, focused on the duality of water and spice. Those who lived on Dune ate and even breathed the constant spice that suffused the planet, but took great care to conserve any water. Spice users not on Dune generally had little difficulty obtaining water, but had to constantly order inordinately expensive shipments of spice to keep themselves alive. It's even revealed late in the book that

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the great sand worms that produce and protect the spice throughout different points of their life cycle are actually responsible for the arid conditions. Sandworms in the early part of their lifecycle will suck up all of the water from the air and ground, leaving it barren. However, water is poisonous even in small quantities to older worms, and the proteins and byproducts produced by most Earth life are poisonous to all of their life stages.

So if you want spice, you can introduce sandworm larvae on a terrestrial planet, but you'll transform a paradise into a wasteland. And if you want a livable planet, you can cultivate patches of Earth life which will naturally spread, but will destroy your source of the most valuable substance in the galaxy.

You can have water or spice. Never both.

REYWELD READ "DOROTHY MUST DIE" !!

imagine the wizard of oz but something went terribly terribly bad after the ever after

Vis a vis Sanderson: I really like Mistborn. Haven't read any of his other full-lengths, but I intend to get into Stormlight someday. There's just something about how thorough everything is and the names he creates; something like the ancient looming evil power being called The Deepness is an archetype of what I wanted books to be like when I was a kid constantly reading fantasy. And I love how obsessed he is with religion.

Currently I have, and have read most of, Arcanum Unbounded. It's "short" stories from his many different worlds, mostly more describable as novellas. It has one long Mistborn thing and a long Stormlight thing which I'm trying not to read since I haven't read any Stormlight yet. It also has the theology of how all these worlds were created, which is kind of a strange story, but apparently they're all related; I'm not totally sure how I feel about that. I have mixed feelings about the stories in general. I really like reading them, but sometimes I think, "Okay, Sanderson, yet another magic system that you explain to us, and none of these characters would talk like that in real life." The story I just started (as well as the last one I can read without spoilers), Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell, I love so far, though. It's world is completely new for the story, and no one's used magic yet, they just have to follow superstitions to ward off magic.

My favorite magical realism author is Kelly Link. She's very influenced by what I guess I'd call pop-cultural fantasy, less high fantasy and more our own world having weird stuff in it (think Buffy for example), but her stories don't have plots that are trying to be plots - their characters just slip and slide further into the weirdness. Her latest collection, Get in Trouble, is probably as good as any she's ever published. Highly recommended.

pride and prejudice and zombies is a terrible book do not read
it tries so hard to be flavourful like "oh what if posh people in 19th century england were forced to fight zombies while maintaining the status quo"
the book does not do it justice at all

I Have a friend who is Constantly trying to get me into The Stormlight Archive but he's Spoilered me on a Lot of the elements that I'd have liked to Discover for Myself in an Attempt to get me into it. So It's like :/
I'd still enjoy it Probably, Because I enjoyed some of Sanderson's Non-Stormlight Stuff But, Eh

AS For Book Recs Of My Own, I Suggest The Dresden Files, Which are a Sort of Crime Noir Detective thriller style Thing Set In Chicago, Where Our Protagonist and Viewpoint, The Titular Harry Dresden Has to Deal With The Mafia, The Police, And All Sorts Of People Gunning for his life.

Also, He's A Wizard and most of the Nasties he's dealing with are some variety of supernatural. It's got a fairly solidly Built system of magic and The Supernatural parts are generally pretty well done

I think this is the most current book conversation thread we have?

The last couple of months I've been trying to read The Locked Tomb series which is really good but also deeply irritating in some very specific ways.

I'm like a third of the way through Nona and a combination of loss of inertia and looming dread at the inevitable end to this pleasant domestic situation has caused me to stall out entirely.

My offering to the thread is Middlegame by Seanan McGuire. Its a story about a pair of kids manufactured to embody the fundamental forces of the universe and their intertwined lives as they grow up and realize their purpose. It is probably the best work of one of my favourite authors.

i thought it was funny when you posted about harrow on tumblr and the comments in that were like "the book is lying to you"

ive been reading the works of japanese mystery author, Seishi Yokomizo who created funny detective man kosuke kindaichi, he rules, he keeps getting in situations and the inugami curse has one of the most chilling endings ive ever read and its just really good to read a mystery book where i really do get it but also its like "idk dude some places are just fuckin cursed"

pushkin vertigo whos been publishing these translations also put out the decagon house murders which is like, one of the greatest mystery books of all time lol

i think i changed my mind about The Locked Tomb as a series.

Just in case anyone cares where I've landed on The Locked Tomb is that I think that its a fun set of characters to sort of think about and form headcanons around but every book is sort of awful to read in its own unique way and if Alecto is written how I'm dreading it will be I'm just going to read a plot summary somewhere or something.

I'm back to reading Seanan McGuire books again, 17 books deep into her longest running series and I'm having a good time.