I want to see what people on Lemmy are reading. Can be unique in terms of lore, concept or even the cover. Mine are invisible monsters, battle royale and horrorstor. What about yours?
NK Jemisin’s trilogy, that starts with The Fifth Season.
(I can never remember if the proper title of the trilogy is Broken Earth or Shattered Earth!)
Thank you!
Broken earth!
I think it did Something quite novel. I honestly didn’t absolutely love it while reading it but I also couldn’t stop thinking about it for awhile after. I feel that speaks some volume to what it does.
Anything I’ve read by NK Jemisin has left my brain utterly reworked in the most fantastic of ways!
I’ll throw Locked Tomb Trilogy.
It’s a good mystery series that’s well paced (for me) in that I had my moments of realisation only about a chapter before each reveal most of the time.
One of the books is written in second person, and it’s about an unreliable narrator, so that’s… fun? I spent a lot of my time, when not reading the book, wondering who the ‘I’ was to narrative’s ‘you’, then not being able to answer how the ‘I’ knew the things the ‘I’ knew, so ‘I’ couldn’t be the ‘I’ I think ‘I’ am. But no-one else makes sense, and the second guessing continues.
Also, doesn’t do mystery through vague language much, which I dislike most of the time. The viewpoint characters are doing their best, you know what they know, it’s just they don’t know enough yet. You never really zoom out into an omnipotent narrator, to then not describe what’s happening beyond vibes.
All the characters are unlikable though, the universe is unlikeable, it does unlikeable things to everyone, so their unlikability is undertandable at least. But, if you can’t get past a purposefully unlikeable cast, that might be a barrier. I don’t want to meet any of them (the ones I would be most willing to meet, I’m sure I just don’t know well enough), but I’m content reading about their exploits, or rather how they’re exploited.
Wow! Gonna check it out! Thanks!
Probably The Silmarillion. It reads like a fucking poem that goes on for hundreds of pages.
Gomna give it a try. Thank you!
Beyond Good and Evil
Flowers for Algernon
Read that book and it destroyed me.
Only book to make me cry.
Children of Time was an interesting concept that I thought came together well. It’s a science fiction book with a split narrative where one half is about science experiments on a distant planet, and the other is about a colony ship that is searching for a new home. Because of the vastness of space, there are long stretches of time that are covered (I believe the book ultimately takes place over a thousand years). The two narratives overlap at different points.
Dungeon Crawler Carl may have one of the weirdest and fun plots I’ve read in a while. A guy named Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat named Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk are given the opportunity to be on the galaxy’s favorite game show. The show is very similar to an RPG with fighting monsters, level ups, rare items, etc. Also, due to unfortunate timing, Carl is participating in the game without wearing any pants.
I came to Children of Time via the path: A Fire upon the Deep -> A Deepness in the Sky -> Children of Time, which makes some kind of sense. The former two are by Vernor Vinge.
A Deepness in the Sky has some very obvious similarities - vast stretches of time, a specific kind of alien being, and certain kinds of encounters with them.
I read it first and I think I enjoyed it more, although both were very good. One weird little niggle I had with Children of Time was using the same name for characters across different generations. There was some in-text justification for it that I don’t remember and didn’t convince me.
Yeah, that name thing threw me for a loop for a while. The explanation was that >!memories are passed down through generations, so they kept names as well since they are kind of a continuation of the same person!<. I also read the second book, Children of Ruin, and it also plays around with similar names for different reasons. If the trend continues, I expect similar on the other books in the series.
I’ll need to read the other books you mentioned. They sound interesting! I’ve come to enjoy the books I’ve read with people living through long stretches of time. It’s a completely different genre, but Circe by Madeline Miller also deals with this.
I thought though that the original justification for the name re-use was not that? Maybe I have forgotten something though. But as I remember it the thing you’re referring to wasn’t actually mentioned at all until after the first name re-use so it would’ve been difficult to use it as a reason.
Children of Ruin is also a good read, and the stuff about language there was also reminiscent of some elements in A Deepness in the Sky.
One thing I found unsettling (and not necessarily in a positive way) in these books is how things were going to shit on some of these ships. I found it unnerving for some reason…
Thanks.
Martian Time-Slip by Philip K Dick - PKD is always pretty weird, but I found this one especially so. Time travel experiments by unlikable characters that involves abusing schizophrenic and autistic children.
Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie - First of the Imperial Radch series. Told from the perspective of an intelligence that’s truly different than ours (even though it is ostensibly human). It made a lot of waves for having genderless characters, but that only scratches the surface of how strangely the narrator relates to the humans they’re dealing with.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer - First of the Southern Reach series. A group of 4 unnamed individuals go to investigate a reality distorting phenomenon and reality gets heavily distorted. This one declares right up front that it’s going to get strange and does exactly that.
Did you read all books from the Annihilation series? I think i should give Annihilation another try.
I have read the original trilogy. They’re very different from Annihilation and it can be a little jarring. I really enjoyed them, and would easily recommend the whole series.
I feel like I need to reread the trilogy to try the fourth book.
There is a fourth book? Damn, i didnt expect that.
Krabat by Ottfried Preußler. It had quite the dark undertone. A constant present real threat and dagger hovering over every character. This dark tone is present from page 1 to the end. As a teen it quite formed me retrospectively. Worth a read for teens but also older. I do not want to spoiler anything. But im saying that murder, willful starvation and death are ever present topics even in lighter moments of the book.
The Kanguru book Series. Sooo much fun reading! The third book was not mine very much. Still want to read the new 5th book. Lots of satire and hilariouse. Read it on the train and i had to hold back laughter so often!
Then The Capital. I was suprised how scientificly analytical it is writen and worded. Planing to read my copy of The Critiques of Kant, lots of Leibnitz (but he wrote mostly in french so i have to learn french first), Hume, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Hegel, Lock, Hutcheson and Berkeley
But also some stuff about architecture like De Architecttura and Palladios Quattro Libri Dell’ Architectura
Thanks! Gonna give a try.
I only realised what the mill was milling when the man with the red feather came when I read Krabat as an adult. Then I looked a bit more into it and realised that this would actually happen in real life.
Yep. This book is quite dark for its target audience if you think about it
China Mieville’s The City and the City would be my pick. I started with him on Kraken, and while I might prefer that book it’s essentially his version of “Kitchen Sink” Urban Fantasy, where the moment you understand it’s supposed to take place in a version of London where everyday magic is hiding in plain sight the rest of the book is easy enough to wrap your head around
Not as much with “The City,” basically it takes place in a pair of micro-states that overlap each other and it’s a murder mystery where the victim was a graduate student who was on the verge of uncovering the truth about the secret history of the double city. I went into it thinking that I understood how the world worked and soon realized that the whole point is it’s not supposed to make sense
I the city and loved it. It took a while for me to start enjoy the reading but it was worth it.
Mieville has so many fantastic books, he singlehandedly got be back into reading a couple years ago.
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway.
The book Is set in a near future Britain where surveillance is omnipotent and the accused are interrogated by detectives who read their thoughts.
A suspect dies during an interrogation, highly unusual, so a detective is brought in to investigate the case. She begins to review the thoughts of the suspect and finds not just the suspects memories, but whole other persons whose lives intersect and intertwine created a tapestry narrative that runs counter to reality.
It’s a really Interesting read. I will fully acknowledge its overly long and needed a strong editing pass. But I first read it a decade ago and I still think about it regularly.
I’ve read a lot of Harkaway. More than a couple of his books I gave up trying to understand what’s happened and go along for the ride, then try piece together the chronology on a re-read.
Gone Away World is a coming of age story, that is the story of a coming of an age, then it’s a coming of existence, then there’s Mimes that drink milk (for some reason). Sure Nick, take me where we’re going, I’ll figure it out later.
Love dystopias. Thank you.
Library at Mount Char is bonkers. I loved it. It made me realize I like stories that dare to go big.
Thanks! Its on my TBR
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murikami. It’s not just the story but also the writing style that I found captivating. But it’s the story too. It flirts between the real and the surreal.
I also have ADHD and find reading really hard. I hate it because I really like learning.
Murikami has a beautiful prose.
Astonished to see no mention of FEERSUM ENDJINN by Iain M Banks. It’s one of his few standalone SF novels and its… Weird. Oh boy is it weird. Multiple parallel interweaving narratives that connect up in truly bizarre ways, a story that takes place across different planes of existence/reality, and parts of narrated entirely in phonetic block capitals like the title. And that’s before even getting into how mind-bending the setting is. It’s weird, it’s brilliant, it’s easily the strangest book from an already strange writer. Absolutely recommended, though it’s not unlikely you’ll get to the end and think “What the fuck did I just read?”
I can imagine its a wild ride during the reading.
City of Glass by Paul Auster is one of my favorites. A novelist gets a phone call from someone who misdialed them, trying to reach a private detective. The novelist decides to wing it and pretends to be the detective, getting hired to tail someone the client suspects will attempt murder.
I don’t want to spoil too much, but it gets very weird and metatextual. It’s a very surprising and sorrowful mystery novel.
And if comics are more your taste, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli did a very good adaptation of the novel back in 1994. Looks like it’s been out of print for a while, but if you can find it, the ways Mazzuchelli renders the story are absolute magic.
I really enjoy mystery books. Thnkx
Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko. Really weird, abstract and interesting. Anyone labeling it as Dark Academia or a magic school book is both completely correct and dead wrong at the same time.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar both have very interesting concepts and great executions.
When it comes to interesting concepts in fantasy/sci-fi, Adrian Tchaikovsky has some bangers. Elder Race, Children of Time, or Alien Clay are some random example recs.
China Mieville’s New Crobuzon trilogy is really out there too. 2nd book is the best and can be read independently but does spoil some things from the first.
Thank you for the suggestions. Gonna check them out.
