Poll of the Day > Looking for book suggestions

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've read fantasy and sci-fi pretty much my whole life and I'm getting sick of the same old tropes/archetypes. Looking to broaden my horizons a bit

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Command And Control by Eric Schlosser is a great book about the building and management of nuclear bombs by America.
It's long, but crazy good.

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There There by Tommy Orange. It's a novel about modern Native people living in Oakland who all intersect at a big pow wow. I think coming from a sci-fi background you might find some things to appreciate, because it touches on the technological singularity and 3D printed guns and drones are part of the main plot. It was very moving and it's the best book I've read since The Three-Body Problem trilogy (that one is straight sci-fi but still highly recommended if it's one you haven't read).

JigsawTDC posted...

There There by Tommy Orange.

I couldn't get into this book. Might be the worst book I've read in recent memory. There are just too many characters to be given anything but a superficial treatment in the 300 pages or so allotted to them. Personality development is very shallow, and they're all messed up of course. Is it too boring for a novel to feature a couple grounded, well-adjusted characters?

This shallowness is also found in the notion that this book is a great account of the "urban Indian." Nope, it isn't. Although it's true that most Native Americans live in cities and not Reservations, so many still have strong connections to the Rez: relatives are still there, growing up happened there, Reservation landscapes are essential to spirituality and identity. None of this is present in "There There." It's as though these people sprang into existence ex nihilo. They have little or no backstory. For an excellent "urban Indian" novel from a much, much better writer, read "The Hiawatha" by David Treuer.

Finally, the ending of "There There" is simply bizarre, even ridiculous (spoiler alert). Some of the characters try to rob a Powwow, and for no apparent reason one of them starts shooting another, who returns fire, and in the shootout nearly all of the characters are hit. Mr. Orange prefers coyness to closure and does not indicate who lives and who dies. What's the point?

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Terminonatator posted...

I couldn't get into this book. Might be the worst book I've read in recent memory. There are just too many characters to be given anything but a superficial treatment in the 300 pages or so allotted to them. Personality development is very shallow, and they're all messed up of course. Is it too boring for a novel to feature a couple grounded, well-adjusted characters?

This shallowness is also found in the notion that this book is a great account of the "urban Indian." Nope, it isn't. Although it's true that most Native Americans live in cities and not Reservations, so many still have strong connections to the Rez: relatives are still there, growing up happened there, Reservation landscapes are essential to spirituality and identity. None of this is present in "There There." It's as though these people sprang into existence ex nihilo. They have little or no backstory. For an excellent "urban Indian" novel from a much, much better writer, read "The Hiawatha" by David Treuer.

Finally, the ending of "There There" is simply bizarre, even ridiculous (spoiler alert). Some of the characters try to rob a Powwow, and for no apparent reason one of them starts shooting another, who returns fire, and in the shootout nearly all of the characters are hit. Mr. Orange prefers coyness to closure and does not indicate who lives and who dies. What's the point?

I can agree with your first point to a degree. Character-wise they could all be developed a lot more. Personally I still greatly enjoyed the book both plot-wise and the characters, however shallowly developed most of them were.

I disagree somewhat with your second point though. As someone with Native ancestry who lives in the Bay Area, this novel hit particularly close to home. I haven't really felt a personal connection with a novel particularly like this before. I think I didn't need a lot of the characters developed further for the book to work for me because I know people like the characters, including me, and was probably projecting a bit of us onto them. I'll definitely check out The Hiawatha though! I haven't read a lot of Native fiction myself, so it's definitely something I want to explore more. I've got The Round House by Louise Erdrich coming up on my list soon.

Personally I liked the ending and the bit of bizarreness and ambiguity to it!

If you've ever done conventions (sci-fi, comic, furry, whatever), Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb is an absolute hoot. It's a murder mystery that takes place at a con and it has all the con archetypes. (The title is actually the title of a book in the book)

Year Zero by Robert Reid was a lot of fun. Humans are the only species in the galaxy with musical talent so when aliens discover our music in 1977, they begin copying and sharing hundreds of thousands of songs across quintillions of aliens throughout the universe. But intergalactic law requires that the art from a given species must be enjoyed within the contexts defined by that species, and the US just passed a law establishing a fine for illegally copying music of up to $150,000 per individual copy. This is a copyright violation that could bankrupt the entire universe, so it might be preferable to simply eliminate humanity instead. It's up to a lawyer to find a loophole that can save the Earth.

I also really liked The Rosetta Man by Claire McCague. "Estlin Hume lives in Twin Butte, Alberta surrounded by a horde of affectionate squirrels. His involuntary squirrel-attracting talent leaves him evicted, expelled, fired and near penniless until two aliens arrive and adopt him as their translator."

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Harry Potter

If you want to good fantasy series, I really enjoyed the Matlock the Hare trilogy: The Riddle of Trefflepugga Path, The Puzzle of the Tillian Wand, and The Trial of the Majickal Elders. What's really interesting about this series is the unique language that was developed for the characters, with hundreds of griffles to learn. Fortunately it's not too peffa-difficult, unless you're totally clottabussed.

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The Vaults by Toby Ball

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SkynyrdRocker posted...

Harry Potter

Or better yet:



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captpackrat posted...

Or better yet:

He doesn't really do paperbacks though... but I would recommend. I haven't read that one, but his writing style actually is legitimately good.

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