Better Than Wolves Forum

Hey guys, started doing longish train journeys again and would like to know the sorts of things you guys have been reading and what recommendations you might have.

Some things I've read recently are:

Jack Reacher Series: Have read about 10 of the series and while I did enjoy them, they did tend to get a bit formulaic after a while. E.g. Ex-Military cop drifter is minding his own business when X happens. He doesn't want to get involved in X but then something happens that compels him to get involved in X and invariable ass kicking ensues.

Silo Trilogy: Really enjoyed these. Awesome post-apocalyptic world where people now reside in giant underground silos that house whole cities. Very mysterious.

Ready Player One: Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. The world the book creates is fantastic, as is the story. The cringey teenager vibe I got from it not so much. Same goes for Armada. Read a couple of chapters and got the same vibe, no thanks.

The Martian: Awesome sci-fi and quite funny. Plenty been said about it already.

Lexicon: Odd book about poets who use words as weapons and are masters of persuasion. Really enjoyed it though.

Finn Fancy Necromancy: Mash up of fantasy and the modern world, quite a fun and endearing book. Worth a read.

Ancillary Justice: Critically acclaimed sci-fi novel. I also have no fucking idea what was going at any point in the book.

If you like Sci-fi, have you read Larry Niven's short stories yet, like Neutron Star? I highly recommend them. Also, The Mote in God's Eye is wonderful.

If you have an e-reader, give Nausicaa (manga) a read too. I rate it above most good novels as one of the greatest works of sci-fi in history, if not one of my favorite books (and I've read some of the great writers of our time). Don't take my word for it, it was also the seminal work to inspire people like Jean Giraud.

I also really like some of the victorian-era stuff, like Edgar Allan Poe. Murders on the Rue Morgue is especially great, as it's basically the prototype for later detectives, such as Poirot or Sherlock Holmes (but in my opinion, Poe's detective is better). Jekyll and Hide is a must-read victorian novel too of course, but you've probably already read that one in school.

Nausicaä was great.

But here are my recomendations:

The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss. The story is nothing new, the typical medieval fantasy story. But the writing style of the author makes the book to stick to your hands until you finish it. The first one, 880 pages in 3 days.

And some Japanese light novels.

Spice And Wolf by Isuna Hasekura. The story follows a merchant in a medieval fictional country that travels north with the company af a great wolf in human form. The economical intrigues were pretty interesting.

Kono subarashi sekai ni shukufu wo. After death, a Japanese teenager gets resurrected in a world that follows the rules of the typical fantasy RPG. This one has great comedy and jokes a lot about the tropes of the genre. Not high literature by any means and is very japanese in the mainstream anime sense, but if you like that style it's a good laught. The first 4 volumes have been adapted to an animated series.

Here's a few, pulling from memory:

Dresden Files: Modern fantasy following a wizard who works as a detective in Chicago. They're decent, although I can't help but feel like Dresden is written as if he were a horny teenager instead of someone in his mid 20s-late 30s (depending on the book).

Discworld: "Comic fantasy" set on a disc supported by four turtles on the back of a giant turtle. I enjoyed most of the books in this series, and suggest reading them in chronological order, although you could also just read the various storylines separately, as there's minimal overlap between them. The first couple are somewhat weak, but they're great for worldbuilding. Raising Steam (the last book in the series), however, is a pretty safe pass as IMO it lacked a lot of the charm of the older ones - possibly because it was more about writing a love letter to trains than it was about telling a story on the Disc.

Honorverse series: Military scifi following the career of an officer in a space navy (and the politics around that and an opposing republic). It's an okay read, although the main character's a bit of a Mary Sue.

RCN series: Similar idea to Honorverse, but the main character and his crew are much more the focus, the politics are approached more from an intrigue point of view, and the ships (and therefore how they're used in combat) are quite different - where Honorverse has tallships in space, RCN has submarines in space.

Ready Player One: This book felt... masturbatory is the only word that comes to mind. So much "DAE like the 80s". It felt like Cline was trying to do what Halliday did in his book.

The Martian: I enjoyed it. I especially appreciated that (aside from the impossible windstorm that set the book's events into motion) everything in it felt possible, assuming there was funding for Mars missions.

Since you guys mentioned some japaneses books, I would also recommend Juuni Kokuki, or the Twelve Kingdoms series by Fuyumi Ono. It's really, really good, and it was also adapted to anime, although, not all books were covered in the anime. I find the main character development on the first book particularly good, but don't wanna give too much away... It's a "paralel reality" kinda story like Narnia, heavily inspired on chinese mythology.

If you liked Lexicon (aside from reading Max Barry's other excellent books) you may love Neal Stephenson. REAMDE reads like a grown up Ready Player One in a more realistic setting and Snow Crash is almost a definitive work of Cyberpunk speculation along with it's sort of sequel The Diamond Age.

I also cannot recommend Steven Brust highly enough. His Vlad Taltos series is phenomenal. He plays around with narrative style so every book in the series has a subtly different style or follows a different viewpoint and the tapestry it results in is one of the most richly developed worlds you'll ever encounter. His prequel series written in the style of Dumas was also great fun.

Peter Clines is another little known favorite. 14 is an amazing book for reasons I cannot go into without touching on spoilers. It's best to go in blind. If you like it, you may also enjoy his Ex-Heroes series, which follows super heroes in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse

Most books by Dan Abnett. The Eisenhorn and Ravenor omnibuses to be sure.

http://www.bookseriesinorder.com/dan-abnett/

I had a terrible time after 2000 getting into novels that would hold my attention. I stumbled upon books written for the Horus Heresy that detail a galactic rebellion.

Some books are overly simple but a few of the authors truly shine.

Dan Abnett writes in a way that captures your full attention and breaks format in satisfying ways.

The books about Eisenhorn and Ravenor inparticular are an additional part of the 40k lore fleashed out by Abnett. He details the systems and operations of the Inquisitorial heiarchy of governance operating with near supreme authority. The books focus on two lifetimes worth of operations and adventure painting an epic story arc.

My personal favorites are The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and most of HP Lovecraft's work. At the Mountains of Madness and Colour out of Space are particularly good ones from Lovecraft.

I don't always agree with his politics, but I've never read a Heinlein story I didn't like.
Kim Stanley Robinson is always good as well, despite his few books.
Also, I don't know how many of you read the old Animorphs series as a child, but all of them are freely available in E-Book format with the blessings of the author herself (according to the source I obtained the link from): http://animorphsforum.com/ebooks/
The books themselves are about a small group of 90's teens taking on an alien invasion with a focus on guerilla warfare, PTSD, and various shades of grey.

If you like Sci-Fi The Expanse is definitely really good. There's currently also a TV show based on it on syfy, though I've only read the books.

Since you have lots of time, I recommend The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Very long series but amazing. some people feel like it drags in some of the later books, and I don't think they are completely off base. But the last few books make up for any of that. By extension, anything by Brandon Sanderson (who finished WoT after Jordan died and did that very well) is going to be good as well and he is incredibly prolific.

The Alchemy Wars by Ian Tregillis is wonderful. A magitech alternate history where Christian Huygens created clockwork automatons, and the Dutch rule everything but Canada, the home of the exiled French kingdom. The French have also mastered applied chemistry. The background is largely a conflict between Catholics (French) and Calvinists (Dutch); free will and determinism. It’s set in the early 20th century, but the presence of perpetually acting automatons has stunted other technologies. It’s *almost* steampunk, but steam power is entirely absent.

Besides all that background, it’s very well written, and I highly recommend it.

Huh that actually seems quite interesting i'll have to give that a look.

For something completely different, I would like to recommend the novel Beyond Sleep (Nooit Meer Slapen). It is as far as I'm concerned W.F. Herman's greatest work*, an incredibly slow-paced introspective trip with a degree of paranoid intensity that I can only describe as "2001: A Space Odyssey-esque."

*Upon posting I realized that I am not so sure of this claim. The God Thinkable Thinkable the God (De God Denkbaar Denkbaar De God) is also pretty amazing, a straight up literary acid trip.