Read Guards! Guards! Damn fine book, though I see the writing style isn't quite to my tastes.

 

I can't narrow it down to just one - not possible. But top 3, probably, would be Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien and Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman.

That's in Fantasy, which is my fave field, I have read widely and deeply in it for years. Other favorite writers include Emma Bull, John Crowley, Joseph Delaney, Charles De Lint, Mercedes Lackey, Ursula LeGuin, Holly Lisle, Anne McCaffrey, Patricia MacKillip, Robin McKinley, China Mieville, Elizabeth Moon, Andre Norton, Brandon Sanderson, T. H. White and Tad Williams. Oh, and anything by Jane Yolen, and pretty much anything edited by Terry Windling.


And the Monster Blood Tattoo Series by D.A. Cornish is very good. Excellent world-building, very original feel, and you quickly come to care about the protagonist. He is a young, orphaned boy, but instead of going off to wizarding school he is sent off to make his own way with little in the way of protection or skills in a world riddled with monsters. The map is a work of art, and the names of places and characters are wonderful.

And I highly recommend Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs. Also, two excellent steampunk novels that both have at least one more book forthcoming, The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt, and The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar.

The Tales of The Otori has been mentioned, I wanted to also say this is a really good series set in a medieval Japan type setting, with warriors, politics and magic.

And if you like urban fantasy, try to get your hands on any of the 4 Borderlands anthologies of stories set in a town on the border of our world and faerie, full of teen runaways and dropouts from the every day rat-race, elves slumming it, and half human/half elf beings that neither race claims and both despise. It's got gangs, motorcycles, magic, murder, music, drugs, art, despair and redemption. I think Terri Windling and Delia Sherman invented the place, then the other authors kept asking to contribute stories set there, eventually enough for a book, now it's been over 20 years and at least 4 books. Very cool place.

 

John Ringo's Troy Rising series.

Its a nice sci-fi series.

I think he's got like the first 14 chapters floating about for free.

And yes that other series he has, he pretty much admitted "Yeah... its juvenile power fantasy."

Hell I think in that link Inverarity posted, he said at one point he wanted to end the series with the main character discovered in the landing gear well frozen to death. The entire series being one delirium dream.

 

Just finished a pretty awesome story.

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay.

A standalone novel, the narrative is centered around a 15 year-old Canadian on vacation with his father and his crew in France, where he stumbles into the middle of the latest iteration of a feud that began between the Celts and the Greeks. While the story does contain vaguely described magic, it's strength lies in bringing the region of Aix-en-Provence to life with its history and the well developed characters.

On a side note, two characters from the author's Fionavar Tapestry Trilogy have supporting roles in this story.

I'd give this a 4/5 -> 5/5 overall.

A truly enjoyable tale combining top-notch characters, history and magic.

 

On Tolkien and LoTR: My advice is to start with The Hobbit, it IS the prequel, is actio-packed and introduces you to characters, places and events that show up in the trilogy, so you will start LoTR with some background and some investment in what's happening that will help keep you interested during the slowish, detail-heavy parts.

IMO, The Hobbit movie should have been before the LoTR trilogy. And if they mess with this story, I will have to slay the director with my vorpal blade. Seriously.

 

I guess I disagree. It introduces us to hobbits, dwarfs, elves, Gandalf, et al, and in happier times. It gives us a feel for Middle Earth, and some of the darker sorts that dwell there. We meet or hear of some epic characters. And Bilbo acquires the ring , which thrusts Frodo and Sam into the great events of LoTR- Frodo is Bilbo's heir and successor in the quest, and LoTR is the story of what happens at least in part as a consequence of Bilbo taking the ring, and not telling Gandalf about it. LoTR reads much better knowing the back story about Bilbo and the ring.

 

The Alex Verus series is worth checking out. It's modern fantasy: the main character is a diviner, a wizard with the power to see the future. It's kind of similar to the Dresden Files, but the world doesn't feel as rich (though, in fairness Butcher's first few books weren't exactly great) So far the Alex Verus series is only 3 books in, and they all felt pretty short to me.

Without giving much away, the premise is that Verus gets caught up in stuff that he doesn't want to be caught up in, and he has to use his precognition to keep himself alive against foes with much more magical power than himself. I really love the concept, so while the books aren't amazingly great literature they are still very fun to read.

 

Finally ended up getting through Infinite Jest.

It's been recommended before, I'm pretty sure. It's awesome and weird and so totally beyond any explanation I can provide at the moment, other than the fact that it is what happens when a guy like David Foster Wallace tries to create an an appropriate answer to Hamlet. Whether he succeeded is much more difficult to answer.

I have literally no fucking idea what to say other than that you should try to read it. My favorite section was probably the part told as a monologue by Himself's dad. I have no idea why, though. I plan on doing a more critical reread later.

 

I'm reading it at the moment, by which I mean that I'm about halfway through (maybe a third...) and that has taken me most of the year, reading on and off. It's brilliant. I'm not entirely sure what's going on, but it's pretty much the best writing I've ever seen, and should be read on that basis alone.

 

If you haven't read it, you should pick up John Dies at the End by David Wong.

It's really hard to describe, but basically these midwestern dudes take a drug called Soy Sauce and do weird shit and fight trippy monsters. There's no overarching plot (it's very choppy and feels almost like a collection of short stories at times) as it was originally written as a webseries and posted online.

And it's funny. Really, really funny. The author is one of the main editors of Cracked, so he knows humor -- maybe not the most sophisticated humor, but humor nonetheless.

I personally adore it. It's one of those books that you get a hundred pages into and are sad to note that there are only five hundred left.

But yeah, really fun read that will keep you entertained for a weekend. And the sequel, This Book is Full of Spiders, comes out in less than a month. I've already got it preordered.

 

To be entirely fair, he's the worst editor, and I've seen very little of his work that isn't self-righteous ranting about a subject he invariably knows nothing about. If you could combine him and Gladstone into one being, no one would ever laugh again.

 

That's a tough read, though worth it. (Took me a couple months and it's by far the most marked-up book in my library.)

For the lulz, I recommend checking out the recent set of tweets by Bret Easton Ellis on DFW. (If you come to the thread late, search around 5-8 Sept. 2012) I guess he really doesn't like seeing a bio come out about the late author whom he ragehates. Dissing a dead guy in twitter feeds is apparently the new, classy way of getting back at someone for an interview like this one.

 

I'd already seen the tweets, actually, but that interview is new and sheds a lot of light on them. I genuinely had no idea that there was any actual reasoning behind them other than "Fuck you, dead author of a dead style who's got a ridiculous amount of posthumous praise."

Makes him seem like less of a cunt, honestly, though not much less.

 

Control Point by Myke Cole.
Black hawk down meets the x-men.

I recently had to spend a day flying and waiting on connecting flights, so I bought this book after a quick glance in a news store at the airport, it's pretty awesome for a lucky find. Not sure if it has been recommended yet.

basically magical powers start to develop upon the human populace, and by nature, the governments of the worlds try to control it, however the magic has proven difficult to control, and if you basically run from the governement once, your dead. So they have magicians chasing magacians in the name of safety.


Summary: Army Officer. Fugitive. Sorcerer.

Across the country and in every nation, people are waking up with magical talents. Untrained and panicked, they summon storms, raise the dead, and set everything they touch ablaze.

Army officer Oscar Britton sees the worst of it. A lieutenant attached to the military's Supernatural Operations Corps, his mission is to bring order to a world gone mad. Then he abruptly manifests a rare and prohibited magical power, transforming him overnight from government agent to public enemy number one.

The SOC knows how to handle this kind of situation: hunt him down--and take him out. Driven into an underground shadow world, Britton is about to learn that magic has changed all the rules he's ever known, and that his life isn't the only thing he's fighting for.


Gives me strong vibes of another story, but I can't remember which, besides odviously X-men. Good character development, and has the character guessing if the bad guys are the good guys, or really the bad guys, or just a nessecary evil.

Bit disappointed in the development of the probes though, especially his probe

Spoiler

Portamancy, the summoning aspect of it gets shut to the side to a minor role, bringing forth the decapitating people by opening a portal on top of them, instant kills role. I thought there was a lot of potenetial with summoning and ports as well, but like I said, besides the odd scene or two, the summoning part is pushed aside. The opening portals up and people being cut if touched by them reminds me of traveling in the wheel of time, especially when Rand starts sending them into the trollocs to kill them.

Overall, 4/5. Some things get introduced and not fully developed, but still a good read. Very similar to xmen in a lot of ways, so if you enjoy that you will probably love this too.

 

Well today I found an online, free ebook, called Machine of Death. It is a series of short stories, all centred around the concept of a machine that can tell you how you'll die.

However, the answers are vague, and not completely trustworthy. Your slip of paper might tell you you'll die of CRACK. But you don't know if that means you'll die from a cocaine overdose, or tripping on a broken pavement.

I like it, because it puts into writing some of the things that have come up when talking about this sort of thing with friends - just because you know you'll die of old age, doesn't mean you won't be a paraplegic in a coma when such a death occurs.

 

I read this post thinking of the Cassandra episode of Red Dwarf. Definitely will check this out.

 

Don't know if this has been recommended yet, but I just finished reading through Old Man's War and it's sequels, by John Scalzi. It's an awesome series of sci-fi books centering around John Perry, a 75 year old man who up and joins the space military. They stick him in a new cloned body and send him out to kill some aliens. Parts of it made me laugh hysterically, and parts of it were honestly thought provoking. I can't recommend it highly enough.

While I'm on Sci-fi by Scalzi, check out Redshirts. It's clearly a long, book length love letter to Star Trek and other cheesy sci-fi and it is glorious.

 

Recently picked up a novel by the name of The Walls of the Universe, by Paul Melko.

The story follows John Rayburn, a farm boy from Ohio, as he encounters an alternate version of himself - who has on him a device that can travel across the boundaries between universes. John is offered a chance to explore the multiverse and leaps on the opportunity, only to find that the other John tricked him: the device is broken, and he has no hope of returning.

The summary on Amazon.com:

The sequel for this book came out relatively recently, and I've been meaning to pick it up. The summary for the sequel, The Broken Universe, is as follows: