I'm a very fast reader, and I tend to run out of material. With your fiction series recommendations, please say more than the title! Why are you recommending it? What's your capsule review?
To give you an idea of the speed of my reading, while carrying on a fulltime job and a normal life, I could read the entire Harry Potter series before my wife could finish the first book (before we knew Rowling is who she is), and just to be clear, we have about the same amount of free time. Last year, in a few months, I read the 13 million words of the "The Wandering Inn" LitRPG web serial that had so far been published. I read the eight Dungeon Crawler Carl books in under 10 days recently.
For years I've been picking through the recommendations here on Ask Metafilter and finding stuff in answers to others' queries. But I'm hoping to get more by asking directly.
As others before me have noted, online recommendation engines are pretty terrible. I find that Goodreads titles rated above 4.2 tend to be okay, as long as you can find those titles through various searches and clicking (as you can't search Goodreads by score).
One problem is I don't keep track of what I've read. So, too often I'll sit down, rubbing my hands together in delicious anticipation at the start of a new series, only to realize by the second paragraph of book one that I've already read it.
To help outline my criteria, I've gone through the last couple of years of Ask MetaFilter's book recommendations and Goodreads lists to give you an idea of what works for me.
MORE OF THIS
This one is the point of this post: long books and long book series. Especially long series. I'm looking for a massive page count. I laugh when I see people call a seven-hundred-page book long. That is not long to me! That's a weekend's reading with time leftover for a movie or two.
Good writing! I mean actual good writing, not "my friend wrote this book that I wanted to like, and so to help them out I'm going to mention it here." Whether it's NYT fiction, Big Literature, classic literature, snobby literature, genre fiction, or whatever, if it's very well-written, I will give it a go. Excellent writing can smooth out all the other humps and problems in fiction.
Areas I found myself, much to my surprise, reading a lot of: science fiction, detective fiction, mysteries, speculative fiction, futuristic fiction, and historical fiction. Although I am open to any category not on my "no" list. For example, I am a massive sucker for romance fiction where everyone gets what they want because everyone knows how to communicate what they want. Send me those!
Non-white male protagonists and authors. Why would I want to read about people like me? Any sexuality is fine.
One of the best things I read recently was the "Blacktongue" series by Christopher Buehlman. https://www.goodreads.com/series/311116-blacktongue These are not his horror/vampire works, though they are pretty violent. His writing was an unexpected pleasure! A cut above nearly all other genre fiction. Compare it, for example, to Nicholas Eames's "The Band" series. Both series are about DnD-style groups going about whacking at enemies trying to fulfill their goals and reach destinations. In fact, they could almost be the same universe, they are so similar. But Buehlman's more serious writing is so much better than Eames's more humorous writing. The Blacktongue series is literature more than it is genre fiction, and The Band is potboiler genre fiction more than it is anything else. Eames may have been held back a little bit by trying to hold too close to his unconcealed "rock and roll musicians touring" allegory.
LESS OF THIS
No horror, wolves, shapeshifters, vampires, author self-inserts, or conspiracies. What is with all the conspiracies? No cruelty, politics, polemics, animal harm, child harm, drowning, master/slave sexual relationships, alpha/beta sexual relationships, or rape. No manosphere crap.
No talky, script-like drama where nothing happens unless a character says it. Dear author: You are not as good at writing dialog as you think you are. PS: Some readers *like* to have rooms and situations described. It's called scene-setting. Look into it. See the first paragraph of "The Wind in the Willows" for a classic example of how it's done.
Even though I mention two LitRPG series above, I don't particularly care for the genre. I only read "The Wandering Inn" in the first place because it is very long, but it surprised me: I did find in many places that it was far better written than I expected it to be. For its genre, it's a superb example of its kind. In a few places it even moved me, and when it leaves its LitRPG roots and structure, it's even very good.
Fiction themed around language, linguistics, and wordplay tends to fall flat with me, as those are areas I have expertise in. I pick apart their plots and language rather quickly, and my eyes grow sore from rolling.
Any classic mystery detective fiction published in English or French. I guarantee you I have read it. I have probably even read the classic detective fiction periodicals you know. My Spanish isn't as good as my French and English, so I tend to lose nuance when reading heavily stylized Spanish detective fiction. Out of the classic mystery/detective series, I really like PD James, the Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Never cared for murders in mansions at the weekend sort of stories.
I wish I liked cozy mysteries. There are so many of them! Cats! Bookshops! Steaming hot drinks! Reading books with friends! Meet cutes! What's not to like? I've even tried the ones with goblins and ogres and witches, etc. But, alas, they are almost always awfully written, or too trite, too simple, little flimsy things that fall apart when looked at too closely. I can't think of one I was able to finish. I will remain open to your cozy suggestions if they are extraordinarily written. But that bar is high, and I *will* hex you if you recommend one that turns out to be poopy.
I have a complicated relationship with works in translation. Because I read French and Spanish, I won't read French- and Spanish-originating works in English translations because if I am familiar with the originals, I am too aware of how they are so often mistreated in translation. So when I read anything else in English translation from a language that I can't read in the original language, the entire time a little niggling worm whispers to me that the translation is probably less than perfect. It spoils the experience. (My favorite simple example of poor translation in a non-English language I don't know well, proving my fears, was the gloomy Scandinavian detective fiction where the dour policeman's "Hej" was translated as "Hi!" like he was some high school cheerleader just back from a pep rally.)
I have to stop reading when authors begin books with the protagonist waking up or hearing an alarm clock. None of these. Pokémon be damned.
BOOKS I LIKED
I do enjoy Isabel Allende in English and Spanish, but the adult stuff mostly.
"Out of Africa," Isak Dinesen. Frank, forward, fearless.
Enjoyed the Maisie Dobbs series. Give me spunky dames fighting the good fight!
Enjoyed Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" series many years ago, but haven't read the newer books.
I kind of liked the "Game of Thrones" books, but I only read the first five or so before I DNFed the rest because it started to read like the author's plot outline and not like fully fleshed fiction.
Enjoyed the Murderbot stories, but they were done quickly. Good neuro-atypical representation, decent enough writing so that I have no complaints but wouldn't give it any writing awards, either.
Have read and enjoyed all of Wodehouse, Pratchett, Herriot, Tolkien (when I am ill, I read Herriot, Tolkien, and the original Sherlock Holmes stories for comfort), Conan Doyle (and pretty much every Holmes pastiche, tribute, and homage, including the recentish Lady Sherlock series and the Mary Russell series, both of which were entertaining enough), Sayers, Christie, Deighton, Hammett, Chandler. I recognize the whiteness of this list, but I mention them here as they come up on so many recommendation lists.
N.K. Jemisin is amazing, although the Broken Earth series, like most series, loses some of its oomph towards the end. Legacy of Orïsha was less interesting for me.
Octavia Butler is so good but the flavor of her books echo the decades they were written; I am not sure how they will hold up in the next fifty years.
Read all Scalzi and mostly enjoyed it, though it doesn't seem to stay with me. Little emotional residue.
Read and enjoyed "Station 11" and the Becky Chambers books that are so often recommended, often together by the same people. Those books *do* have emotional residue, which, as a fast reader, is something I find important.
Just restarted Dorothy Dunnett's "Lymond Chronicles." My memory says I may have tried them once before. So far, so good. I love a book series where I am looking up words every few lines.
Also just read "The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra" by Vaseem Khan. I enjoyed it very much, though I wouldn't put it at the very top of my best-of list. Certainly gets a huge boost in approval from me for cutting shapes of plot and character that North American and European-focused writers should be paying attention to. Another one where I am looking up words right and left.
Loved "The Expanse." Hell yeah. Martian Marines? Asteroid rebels? Are you kidding me?
Did like "Hail Mary" and "The Martian," though I agree with their weaknesses as generally agreed upon.
The "Stephanie Plum" series by Janet Evanovich was entertaining but meaningless other than a way to pass the time. Formulaic by book ten. Not a strong like for this list.
"Vorkosigan Saga" by Lois McMaster Bujold was very good.
Loved the goofiness of the "The Chronicles of St. Mary's." Time travel how it would actually be: messy and irreverent.
Speaking of time travel, I loved the Connie Willis books! What a writer. Good stuff. Absorbed her books like nicotine patches on the skin.
BOOKS I DID NOT LIKE
Dungeon Crawler Carl is ninety-five percent action, with almost no plot progression or character development across the eight books. I would not read it or its like again. Why did I read all eight books? I needed something to read!
It's not a strong dislike, but Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series never clicked for me. Perhaps I should give it another go.
Same for the Brother Cadfael series. I'm going to have to give it another shot. Though I've listened to a bit of the audio dramatization on BBC, and that was kind of meh for me, too, so I dunno.
DNFed the Jana DeLeon Miss Fortune series, which I was hopeful about because it has 29 books. Meh writing, clichéd plotting, already formulaic by book three.
DNFed the Lucy Connelly Scottish Isle Mystery series. Connelly is culturally blind to what I consider obvious things, like that in real life, all of Scotland mocks all of the US for obsessing over their supposed Scottish roots and their supposed clan tartans and plaids, and they scorn American authors' belief in the supposed manly dominance of the local laird. My eyes rolled out of my head and I only found them when I tossed the book and heard the eyeballs clink together.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: Found it turgid and boring. Read it all.
Instance of a Fingerpost. A yawner. Read it all.
Confederacy of Dunces. A stinker. Read it all. Never can understand this praise for this book.
Dresden Files. Amateurish from start to finish, but I did read them all. It seemed like such a lock for something I would like, too. |
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