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 Post subject: Suggest a Series
Posted: Jul 16th, '19, 18:07    


Rubie

Joined: Jan 21st, '09, 03:10
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I'm thinking like suggest one of your favorite book series to share and maybe get others into it. This can maybe also be a place to ask if someone has read a series to see if it is worth a read. Maybe suggest a series like another or sounds similar to what someone is looking for?

Please explain a little as to why you like the series or worth a shot. Nothing major, just give more than title or series name. Thank you.

I will start, but let me know if anyone has ideas on how else to work this thread.

Earlier this year I started the The Licanius Trilogy by James Islington (link to the goodread series page) and I cannot wait for the final book that comes out later this year. The magic system is interesting, as in magic can only be done by the gifted, who are looked down upon based on a war and Augurs are kind of like gods, but they are higher gifted with more powers. It can be basically summed as magic, war, evil fighting for good. There are questions that come about in the first book that have me hooked looking for answers. The author will leave you hanging on, teasing you with a little bits and pieces here and there. When you finally get the answer it's worth the reading. Or you will be waiting until the final book for it. (hopefully)

Also if anyone has something similar sounding to this series, I will happily take suggestions to shelves to get around to reading someday because I own way too many books with not enough time to read.

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 Post subject: Re: Suggest a Series
Posted: Jul 17th, '19, 09:23    


Akili Li

Joined: Nov 24th, '15, 22:02
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Hmmm, I admit to a preference for series whose notions of "good and evil" are more nuanced (both sides in a conflict having a mixture of both, both sides trying to do "the right thing" and struggling to figure out what that might be and how to do it). But since I'm also not fond of emotional heaviness and the whole dark, fatalistic, cynical "doomed no matter how you try" outlook that seems to accompany that sort of exploration, it leaves me particularly vulnerable to overstating the joys of the few books/authors/series that DO match the tone and content I look for....
so I can't tell how useful my recommendations are.


But here are a few I like:
Nina Kiriki Hoffman's connected-universe not-really-a-series books, not sure if they have a unifying name, but the universe she created that encompasses "The Thread That Binds The Bones", "The Silent Strength of Stones", "A Fistful of Sky", "Fall of Light", etc. There's a bunch of short stories in it, too. What I love is, they're set in this world, but there's magic and the magic is hidden, right? Normal enough of a base notion to build a novel around. Only she actually looks realistically at, "what would be needed to keep a family of magic-users hidden? What would the costs of that be on its children? What about the long-term effects of the isolation of that family? What happens to people who stumble on them? If they use magic to override the strangers' wills, what effect does that have on the magic-users sense of ethics? How does someone raised like that interact with the normal world if they break from the family and go out in it?" So it's not just a "hidden group of people who have customs just like ours and who have the exact same sense of societal norms and who think just like us, only they have magic!" No, it feels like another culture. It feels like the struggle between two groups alien to each other, trying to find a sustainable balance.
It feels real... and fascinating.



Another series I like, for a completely different reason, is the series of publications put out by the Early English Text Society. They reprint old works (think "Battle of Maldon" or "The Book of Margery Kemp" ... actually I'm not sure EETS has "Battle of Maldon" out, but you can get hold of that one through Skeats so whatever) which are LONG since passed into public domain (well. Early English. As in, Shakespeare is too modern for them), and they publish them not in translation, but with massive glossaries and foot- or end-notes, so you can read them in the original. Sometimes they put out facsimiles of the actual texts, so you can even see the handwriting, but mostly it's print editions and if there's a question over a letter or word or line you can read all about what the damage was, what they think it was, what else it might have been, and the arguments for and against, in the forward or afterword or chapter notes.
Which makes me super happy.
Love that series. Even if a huge portion of them are religious tracts (well, that's what survived, mostly, so...)


What other series do I enjoy?

I liked the humor of the Dr. Siri Paiboun series by Colin Cotteril... those are (forensic, kind of) mysteries set in the Laos of a few decades back, and I love how the characters drive the stories, and how even with the clear lens of Western philosophy the author writes through, the character of the land and culture come through just as much as the individual people. There's magic, but it's the spiritual sort of magic of propitiating ghosts, etc, not the "wave a wand and recite pseudo-Latin" sort.


I liked the Ngaio Marsh mystery series for the sheer love of language that shows through her writings, but I don't actually recommend it, because there is clear evidence of (probably unconscious) racism in those books. The mysteries are clever, the characters are three-dimensional, but.... imperialist British viewpoint of the 1930s comes through VERY clearly. Occasionally forgettable for whole chapters, but occasionally deeply problematic.
Kind of like the original Sherlock Holmes stories, that way... interesting characters, clever premise, but the modern adaptations are less troublesome in many ways, and they are recent enough to be more jarring than reading truly older works (see the EETS books above) which ALSO have some major issues but seem remote enough that it is easier to forgive the history its lack of foresight. After all, hopefully we will continue to progress enough that five hundred years from now, our own works will appear deeply troubling as well, without that filter of historical perspective.

Huh. Kind of a rambling animadversion, there, and I should wrap this up. Plenty long enough already.

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I want to buy or trade for these knuffels:
Earth Gen 18, Light Gen 19, Fire Gen 21, Air/Light/Water Gen 22, Light Gen 23, Earth/Light Gen 25, Darkness Gen 26.
Please PM me if you can help!

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 Post subject: Re: Suggest a Series
Posted: Jul 17th, '19, 17:45    


Rubie

Joined: Jan 21st, '09, 03:10
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Location: Illinois, USA
Off topic, but to mention on Ngaio Marsh with the racism, that doesn't bother me, it's when people can't tell that hey, this piece was written in a period when it was more likely to be there, even unconsciously.

I think it's time for me to actually go and get myself a library membership again. These sound interesting and not something I would go out of my way to to consider. I think I'm going to try and read the Dr. Siri Paiboun sooner than later since I've been looking for a mystery book like that, but I never know where to start when I go to the mystery section of the bookstore and leave because I don't know what authors are good or what is considered good in those standards since I mostly stick with fantasy.

edit because I can

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 Post subject: Re: Suggest a Series
Posted: Jul 20th, '19, 11:20    


light_sucks

Joined: Jul 17th, '08, 06:15
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Ooo! I just read The Cruel Prince and the Wicked King. They are amaaazing. I loved them. They're the first two books of the Folk of the Air trilogy. The last one is coming out in November and I am so freaking excited about it.

I adore Holly Black's writing. She's such a good author. She mostly writes about young adult fantasy. Specifically about the fae, but she does some other stuff too.

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 Post subject: Re: Suggest a Series
Posted: Oct 17th, '20, 12:13    


PupDragon

Joined: Aug 10th, '09, 15:59
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I don't know any books similar to the Trilogy you mentioned, but if you are taking book recommendations, I would suggest anything by Terry Pratchett.

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 Post subject: Re: Suggest a Series
Posted: Oct 27th, '21, 07:14    


Akili Li

Joined: Nov 24th, '15, 22:02
Posts: 19509
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PupDragon wrote:I don't know any books similar to the Trilogy you mentioned, but if you are taking book recommendations, I would suggest anything by Terry Pratchett.
How could I have forgotten Terry Pratchett?! Obviously the Discworld series but also the Bromeliad trilogy, and his stand-alones like Dark Side of the Sun and Strata.

You know how I found Holly Black? I used to play Magic: The Gathering a lot (mostly during the 3rd ed stage; I started just as that came out) and would spend more time looking at the pictures than reading the card texts -I created decks based around the illustrators rather than looking at what could win (which meant everyone loved playing with me because they could always win, ha ha ha). I had a Nene Thomas and Rebecca Guay deck, a Foglio deck, and just about when I was getting out of playing, I finally got enough cards to create a Tony DiTerlizzi deck.
So since I never actually ended up playing that last deck, I looked him up to see what else he'd done.
And eventually found that he had a children's book series he illustrated called the Spiderwick Chronicles (not sure on spelling). So of course I got them all, because I liked his art. And the author of the series was Holly Black.
Funny how it goes!

Speaking of children and young adult series....
Ones I loved:
Any of the Tamora Pierce series (she has several)
Any of the Patricia Wrede series (she also has several. Probably my very favorite is The Thirteenth Child series, then next favorite is her standalone "The Seven Towers" (warning; you only ever really hear about 2 of the seven), and then the connected series set in the world of Lyra (not really a series since the books are all complete stories which can be read in any order at all), then the Enchanted Forest quartet.... anyhow.)
I grew up with and loved the Pern books by Anne McCaffrey, and the Witchworld series by Andre Norton.
Too late for my own young adulthood but worth reading anyhow is Sharon Shinn's "Mystic & Rider" series (eponymous title of the first book).

Oh it is a mistake to start talking books, I don't want to stop talking...

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I want to buy or trade for these knuffels:
Earth Gen 18, Light Gen 19, Fire Gen 21, Air/Light/Water Gen 22, Light Gen 23, Earth/Light Gen 25, Darkness Gen 26.
Please PM me if you can help!

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