What have you read lately?

[Puget]

Does anyone have recommendations for escapist reading?

What kind of stuff do you like to read?

Open to any suggestions; willing to try a genre I haven't explored much

What I choose for escapist reading:

SF or Game of Thrones-style sword and sorcery

Weirdness/Oddities/Curiosities:
Nonfiction books of the 'surprising facts' or 'strange but true' type (can be on any subject really)
Short stories that take an unusual premise and run with it

Children's literature of the classic/wholesome variety

When I want escapism, for some reason I either want to be comforted or amazed and weirded out.

Some you might like if you haven't already read them:
Fantasy:
The Magicians trilogy (Lev Grossman)
The Rivers of London series (Ben Aaronovitch)
Just about anything by Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere, American Gods, etc.)
Likewise for V. E. Schwab (Shades of Magic trilogy, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)

Non-fiction:
Bill Bryson (At Home, The Body, A Walk in the Woods, etc.)
Mary Roach (funny popular science writing)

[ab_grp]

I also really enjoyed Lindsey Fitzharris's The Butchering Art, about the development of antiseptics in surgery. Lots of gross details. Read for the anecdote about the amputation that had a 300% mortality rate. (Yes, not a typo).

I just came across that anecdote recently! Interesting guy.

Smallcleanrat, another that ergative had recommended previously that you might like is The 100-Year-Old Man who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared (Jonasson), which is a delightful little semi-historical (?) fiction.  I think we discussed it more earlier on the thread.

And you may want to check out David Brin's The Practice Effect, which I thought was a really neat story assuming a different physical law were in effect and the consequences.  It's got action, adventure, romance, humor, suspense!

Those are the ones that came to mind when I tried to think of a books that are really engaging but not be too heavy.  Both are fairly brief.

[apl68]

For weird stuff, Jerome Clark's Unexplained:  Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena is one of the best.  Well documented, avoids ridicule, but has plenty of dry humor.  And some really, really good stories.

[Parasaurolophus]

SF or Game of Thrones-style sword and sorcery

Are you familiar with Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time? (It's recently been televised for Amazon. IMO, it's got the best system of magic you'll find in fantasy, and it may well be the most anthropologically-informed fantasy series out there.) It--and its author--are directly responsible for ASOIAF and GRRM getting published (and they get a few small nods throughout the series).

Another fantastic series is N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy, which has a lot of parallels to WoT. It's brilliant, but tragic.

Or, if you're in the mood for the grittier turn in fantasy since the aughts, Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen might be of interest. I found the first book slow, but the second and most of the subsequent installments gripping.

Somewhat more recently, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series is an interesting new take on the genre.


On the scifi front, I highly recommend Peter Watts's Blindsight, a rumination on the nature of the mind wrapped up as a first-contact story (also available for free, since it was published under a creative commons license). Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space universe will keep you busy for a while. Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy is fun, and the first book is a really interesting reflection on what it would be like for a hive mind to be stuck in a single body. Sue Burke's Semiosis is a fun colonization story where the plants take centre stage, and Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes have a cool scifi version of Beowulf set on a colony world, called The Legacy of Heorot (note, however, that they're--especially Niven and Pournelle--top-flight misogynists, and a decent bit of it leaks through). Adrian Tchaikovsky also has some great scifi, notably the Children of Time series (I think it's his best work).

Weirdness/Oddities/Curiosities:
Nonfiction books of the 'surprising facts' or 'strange but true' type (can be on any subject really)

I assume you're familiar with the work of Stephen Jay Gould?

Short stories that take an unusual premise and run with it

Isabell Fall's Helicopter Story (formerly I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter) is quite something. It was mostly scrubbed from the internet because people hadn't read it and thought it was a perpetuation of the anti-trans meme, but it fact it takes the meme seriously and imagines what would have to happen for something like that to work. It actually offers quite a sophisticated analysis of gender (and is clearly pro-trans). And Fall is a trans woman. It's a Hugo nominee, and can be found via the internet archive (or by PMing me).

[apl68]

I finally got around to reading our library's copy of The Colour of Time:  A New History of the World, 1850-1960, by Dan Jones and Marina Amaral.  It takes archival black-and-white photos and carefully colorizes them, using historical research to get the colors right.  The resulting images gain remarkably in terms of realism.  The images are well chosen, and the accompanying text gives fairly good potted histories of the places and events that the photos depict.

Ordinarily I'm not a fan of colorizing b&w images.  However, most historical images that most people have seen of the period 1850-1960 are of b&w photos.  This has tended to give everybody the mistaken impression that the people of that time lived in a black-and-white world.  Everybody supposes that the Victorians, for example, lived in black-and-white houses, and wore black-and-white clothes, and lived out their lives beneath dark and gloomy skies.  This collection of images helps to correct that impression.  I've long tried to imagine, when I see a b&w historical photo, what the scene might have looked like in color.  This book does it for you.

I'm partially color blind, by the way, but to the extent that I can see colors I like them.  I wonder what the book would look like to somebody with full color vision?

[onthefringe]

For specifically escapist reading, some of what works for me in those categories is:

Second vote for Ben Aaronovitch Rivers of London series (these are also phenomenal as audiobooks)
Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan series or Penric and Desdemona
Most anything by Seanan McGuire
Naomi Kritzer's Catnet books

Out of your listed genres
Georgette Heyer Regency Romances
JD Robb's In Death books

[Vkw10]

Does anyone have recommendations for escapist reading?

I second Bujold's Vorkosigan series and Penric series. People argue over starting point for the Vorkosigan series, but if you want adventure, Warrior's Apprentice is a good starting point. Bujold's good at writing series books that can be read out of order.

For wholesome children's stories, try classics like Anne of Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking. You might also enjoy Freckles by Gene Stratton-Porter, available on Project Gutenberg.

Robert Heinlein's Glory Road can be fun as sword and sorcery, if you skim over his political reflections/rants.

Check out H. Beam Piper's sci-fi on Gutenberg. I'm partial to Lone Star Planet. Paratime and Lord Kalvan are both fun, although they may require inter library loan requests.

James White's Sector General series is another older sci-fi series you might enjoy.

[ab_grp]

Now we are reading Malorie (Malerman), the sequel to Bird Box.  It's nice to switch genres.  I thought he pulled off the first book pretty well and am hoping that continues with this one.  I think I probably mentioned before that there are some interesting parallels with covid, masking/vaxxing, etc., especially with the difference in perspectives between those who lived before whatever the heck is going on and those who were born during it and have only existed in the current circumstances.

Finished this last night.  I wasn't sure where they were going to go with the story, but it was definitely a creepy and intriguing book.  Some parts seemed quite contrived and unbelievable (which sounds strange to say, given that the entire story is fictional anyway).  The end was mostly satisfactory, though it was a bit of a let down in some ways.  Still, I think it's got to be hard to create a coherent world and tale like this that aren't completely see-through or preposterous.  I was initially unclear about whether a sequel was needed, but this book explored other aspects of society post-Bird Box, interesting things to think about.

Now we are reading Dark Rosaleen (Michael Nicholson), supposedly a historically accurate novel about the Great Famine of Ireland. 

[mamselle]

Gorgeous escapist children's book:

   Pish, Posh, Said Hieronymous Bosch...

   https://www.abebooks.com/9780152622107/Pish-Posh-Said-Hieronymus-Bosch-0152622101/plp

I'm smiling just thinking of it...

M.

[mahagonny]

Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs

Mostly painful to read, but entertaining and real. A sort of autobiography. Sometimes the most intelligent people are also the ones plagued by mental illness and/or a dysfunctional family. (Not a new revelation, but vividly told.) The author is a voyeur and also maybe an exhibitionist (not in real life, but through writing). Now that I've read him I guess I'm a voyeur too. I feel like I've seen things I shouldn't see. But he lived through them, so he has the right.

[Stockmann]

Does anyone have recommendations for escapist reading?

I've cycled through my favorites so much I think they need to lie fallow for a while to become effective again.

I really need a way to be mentally someplace else for a while.

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

[FishProf]

Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs

Mostly painful to read, but entertaining and real. A sort of autobiography. Sometimes the most intelligent people are also the ones plagued by mental illness and/or a dysfunctional family.

Also read Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison, Augusten's brother, who was encouraged to write it by Burroughs after Robison was diagnosed (at 41?) with Asperger's. 

[apl68]

O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories of 1943, Herschel Brickell ed.  I found this at a thrift place a couple of months ago.  When I was growing up I read lots and lots of short stories.  I loved to read, and short stories fit my youthful attention span.  I found lots of reading anthologies around school rooms and at home.  Thanks largely to this, I recognized the names of close to half the mid-century writers represented here--people like Eudora Welty, Kay Boyle, James Thurber, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark. 

Having kept up somewhat with today's media and commentary about it, I can't help viewing this collection through the lens of the contemporary emphasis on "diversity."  From that perspective, the selection of authors here is an absolute travesty.  There's no racial diversity, little ethnic diversity, and not much more socioeconomic diversity (Most of the writers here were from the Northeast; nearly all went to the "right" sorts of colleges there).  When one gets annoyed at the absolutely endless, monotonous harping on "diversity" that we see everywhere today, it's worth reflecting on the fact that narrow ranges of literary and media voices like this were the norm until not so many years ago.  As wearisome as it can get, the advocacy of "diversity" does have a point.

It's not that the writers and editors weren't trying to be "progressive."  By the standards of the day you might even call them somewhat "woke."  Many of the writers here try to adopt the voices of people unlike themselves.  There are even a couple of stories that take a pretty sharp view of racial prejudice and injustice in America--this right in the middle of World War II, when there was an urgent stress on fostering national unity and patriotism.  The characters in the stories are actually pretty diverse.  But they're all being imagined by a narrow selection of writers who had a lot more in common with each other than with the characters they're trying to represent.

Which brings us to another issue of today.  If you belong to certain historically dominant groups, you are open to criticism for not having "diverse" casts in your writing.  But if you try to write about people different from yourself, your right to do so is challenged.  It's a no-win situation.  I wish the contemporary acceptance of diverse voices could be without so much of the contemporary emphasis on calling each other out and fighting over each other's right to be heard.  I also wish that contemporary literary voices, for all that they're far more racially and ethnically diverse than they once were, didn't still, in some respects, feel rather narrow--like it's still a self-selected group who, whatever its diversity in some respects, still has more in common with each other than with most of the rest of society.  It's enough to make one wonder just how much progress has really been made since 1943.

[mahagonny]

Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison

I know a couple of people, a father and son, who are Aspergian. And who knows? I may know others who don't know they are, in the sense of it having a term, something identified and studied in depth. Hopefully what has been learned about it is disseminating.

[mahagonny]

con't

I was a little afraid to read the older brother's story after the rough edges of Possible Side Effects. But it ended noticeably happier. Comparing the two brothers' stories I get the impression that Asperger's can easily be less of a hindrance than alcoholism. The situation of the Aspergian can be improved by improving self-awareness, society's awareness, and sheer fortitude. But alcohol is just...a blight. (Jackie Gleason did say 'I drank and it worked out for me...hmm'.) Well, that would blend with Robison's point, which he made well. Asperger's is not a disease, just a different way of being gifted.

ETA: And not to minimize the trials or courage of Burroughs, being a gay person born in 1965.