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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