Book Suggestions
- Thread starter Alverost
- Start date
TLCsDestiny
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2019
- Messages
- 249
- Points
- 83
What do u like to write about?
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2019
- Messages
- 1,071
- Points
- 153
Fantasy, War and Adventure
- Joined
- Jan 1, 2019
- Messages
- 1,071
- Points
- 153
I meant properly published books written in English and not translated.
TLCsDestiny
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2019
- Messages
- 249
- Points
- 83
Old timer novels, like Dune? Dune is fantasy, bit a war and adventure. I haven't read the book but seen the movie.
D
Deleted member 5560
Guest
Coughs. This ended up longer than I intended, but I guess I just really McFucking like books...
This is a first person series but I only recommend it because I think it genuinely does an interesting narrative style that I personally find motivating, but: The Black Company by Glen Cook is a series of novels about the titular mercenary company written in fairly short vignettes collected together. They take whatever jobs pay, and in the first book they are essentially hired to be the goons of the literal bad guys. Like, a bunch of quasi-undead demonic does-human-sacrifice certified monsters who are gunning for world domination. So it definitely has war, fantasy, and adventure, and the writing style is very interesting. It sort of has this very frank and visceral way of storytelling that juxtaposes against some of the high fantasy concepts it deals with (werecreatures, necromancers, etc). The POV character is a doctor and historian, so there's a lot of descriptions about wounds, illnesses, and battlefield medicine.
Obligatory Terry Pratchett (R.I.P.) Discworld recommendation, I think the uniqueness of his writing style is that he can be extremely sparse or even totally absent on physical descriptions of characters or locations, and yet purely off the strength of his writing still make them feel like real and interesting people/places. He more goes in to exploring the quirks of characters through the smaller details - verbal tics and personal habits and personality - to a point where he can write an entire page of just back and forth dialogue with no pauses to indicate which characters are saying what, but you still get a perfect sense of what line is being said by whom based on what you know of their personalities alone.
Some specific recommendations: The Monstrous Regiment (all female cast IDK if that matters but I know some people can have misgivings about female MCs or predominantly female casts. It's an extremely good novel though, one of my favourite DW ones, about a girl who disguises herself as a boy to fight in the war in place of her brother, Mulan style), Jingo, The Fifth Elephant, The Night Watch.
Sabriel by Garth Nix (I can't... personally recommend the whole Abhorsen trilogy but Sabriel is good). Nix always creates really fascinating worlds and delivers it in an easily digestible package, and the Abhorsen books have some of the grodiest and most interesting worldbuilding he's done yet. I really, really like the way magic in the books work. Sabriel is about two neighbouring countries, one to the south with turn-of-the-century level technology, and to the north, a country so riddled with magic that technology can't work there - magic which also causes the dead to rise. The "Abhorsen" is a bloodline position whose duty it is to go around putting the dead to rest. The titular character, who is the daughter of and successor to the current Abhorsen, gets called back from school to travel back to the magic kingdom after her father dies in order to stop an extremely powerful and dangerous necromancer from rising back from the dead.
RE: Dune, it's... okay. It's extremely dense and hard to get into, and is the sort of story to kind of just launch you into the weird worldbuilding without explaining anything to you, and you have to work it out yourself based on context clues. I got about halfway through and after falling asleep in bed reading it multiple times decided it wasn't for me, but you might want to find an excerpt of it online and decide if it's for you before deciding either way. It has a fairly passionate fanbase for a reason, I'm sure.
Finally, another recommendation more for an interesting writing style despite being largely first person: Bram Stoker's Dracula. Dracula is one of the most famous examples of an epistolary novel, which is a novel told through the form of in-narrative documents (basically like the book version of the "found footage" genre) - often things like letters or other forms of correspondence (telegrams or for the modern age, emails), diary entries, newspaper clippings, radio transcripts,etc. The original Carrie novel by Stephen King is also an epistolary novel, and I've seen a few fanfics that employ this method to great effect. If you're looking to understand different styles of writing, you should look up other epistolary novels and see if any look interesting to you, because I think it can be a really fascinating and effective way to tell a story.
That's it for fantasy recommendations. As for one that is not a fantasy, but is very much about adventure and war, I highly recommend the Hornblower series by C.S. Forester. It's about the titular character, Horatio Hornblower (yes his name is ridiculous, the books are not unaware and Hornblower at one point gets a devastating burn about it), as he joins the English navy as an officer at the age of seventeen, shortly before the Napoleonic war, and by the time he's made captain of his own ship the Napoleonic war begins. The books were written between 1930-1950, including during WWII. The writing style is very crisp and clean and easy to get into despite this, and even though it uses a lot of technical sailing terms, it never becomes overwhelming and takes you out of the story. There are plenty of naval and land-based fight scenes, and as the novels focus on Hornblower's rising career, it also displays his military tactics and cunning. Most of the books are sadly out of physical print, but they're available relatively cheap-ish on Amazon kindle. I recommend reading them in chronological order of the story (starting with Mr. Midshipman) rather than publishing order.
Obligatory Terry Pratchett (R.I.P.) Discworld recommendation, I think the uniqueness of his writing style is that he can be extremely sparse or even totally absent on physical descriptions of characters or locations, and yet purely off the strength of his writing still make them feel like real and interesting people/places. He more goes in to exploring the quirks of characters through the smaller details - verbal tics and personal habits and personality - to a point where he can write an entire page of just back and forth dialogue with no pauses to indicate which characters are saying what, but you still get a perfect sense of what line is being said by whom based on what you know of their personalities alone.
Some specific recommendations: The Monstrous Regiment (all female cast IDK if that matters but I know some people can have misgivings about female MCs or predominantly female casts. It's an extremely good novel though, one of my favourite DW ones, about a girl who disguises herself as a boy to fight in the war in place of her brother, Mulan style), Jingo, The Fifth Elephant, The Night Watch.
Sabriel by Garth Nix (I can't... personally recommend the whole Abhorsen trilogy but Sabriel is good). Nix always creates really fascinating worlds and delivers it in an easily digestible package, and the Abhorsen books have some of the grodiest and most interesting worldbuilding he's done yet. I really, really like the way magic in the books work. Sabriel is about two neighbouring countries, one to the south with turn-of-the-century level technology, and to the north, a country so riddled with magic that technology can't work there - magic which also causes the dead to rise. The "Abhorsen" is a bloodline position whose duty it is to go around putting the dead to rest. The titular character, who is the daughter of and successor to the current Abhorsen, gets called back from school to travel back to the magic kingdom after her father dies in order to stop an extremely powerful and dangerous necromancer from rising back from the dead.
RE: Dune, it's... okay. It's extremely dense and hard to get into, and is the sort of story to kind of just launch you into the weird worldbuilding without explaining anything to you, and you have to work it out yourself based on context clues. I got about halfway through and after falling asleep in bed reading it multiple times decided it wasn't for me, but you might want to find an excerpt of it online and decide if it's for you before deciding either way. It has a fairly passionate fanbase for a reason, I'm sure.
Finally, another recommendation more for an interesting writing style despite being largely first person: Bram Stoker's Dracula. Dracula is one of the most famous examples of an epistolary novel, which is a novel told through the form of in-narrative documents (basically like the book version of the "found footage" genre) - often things like letters or other forms of correspondence (telegrams or for the modern age, emails), diary entries, newspaper clippings, radio transcripts,etc. The original Carrie novel by Stephen King is also an epistolary novel, and I've seen a few fanfics that employ this method to great effect. If you're looking to understand different styles of writing, you should look up other epistolary novels and see if any look interesting to you, because I think it can be a really fascinating and effective way to tell a story.
That's it for fantasy recommendations. As for one that is not a fantasy, but is very much about adventure and war, I highly recommend the Hornblower series by C.S. Forester. It's about the titular character, Horatio Hornblower (yes his name is ridiculous, the books are not unaware and Hornblower at one point gets a devastating burn about it), as he joins the English navy as an officer at the age of seventeen, shortly before the Napoleonic war, and by the time he's made captain of his own ship the Napoleonic war begins. The books were written between 1930-1950, including during WWII. The writing style is very crisp and clean and easy to get into despite this, and even though it uses a lot of technical sailing terms, it never becomes overwhelming and takes you out of the story. There are plenty of naval and land-based fight scenes, and as the novels focus on Hornblower's rising career, it also displays his military tactics and cunning. Most of the books are sadly out of physical print, but they're available relatively cheap-ish on Amazon kindle. I recommend reading them in chronological order of the story (starting with Mr. Midshipman) rather than publishing order.
AuthorSME
Active member
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2019
- Messages
- 13
- Points
- 43
My suggestion, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. It's excellent! You might also consider Terry Brooks novels, such as The Landover Series or The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara Trilogy.