What reading material can you recommend to us?

[petra]

What have you been reading lately? Fiction, pro or amateur, or non-fiction, all links are welcome.

Comments

[applepirates]

Most of my fanfiction reading in the last few years has been in Bryan Fuller's Hannibal fandom. I've been revisiting favorites for the comfort and familiarity of it.

Some of my favorites are (please mind the tags, it's a dark show and the fic tends to reflect that):
Two Solitudes, in my mind this is THE Hannibal fic.
Shark Tank, a prison AU.
A Past of Plank and Nail, my ultimate comfort fic, an AU where Will is a carpenter, and trans, and him being trans is not a source of anguish or conflict. It's beautiful.
Space Invader, a Hannibal Extended Universe fic. My favorite HEU fic.

Books-wise, I've been having a tough time finding something that's held my attention, but I just devoured Red, White & Royal Blue in one day. This is not normally what I look for in published fiction, as I usually gravitate towards horror. It really felt like reading fanfic in physical form though, and I really appreciated that.

My forever recs are Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, The Vegetarian by Han Kang.

[petra]

Thanks for the wide-ranging recs!

[daegaer]

I've been reading some books I enjoyed as a child, like Jill Paton Walsh's The Emperor's Winding Sheet, about an English boy shipwrecked in Byzantine territory in 1452, who sees the fall of Constantinople the next year. (I can also very much recommend her adult novel Knowledge of Angels, set in a mildly AU 15th century CE Mediterranean). For somewhat younger readers, I also enjoyed The Boy with the Bronze Axe by Kathleen Fidler, about a boy who escapes the massacre of his tribe to escape to Orkney, and the settlement of Skara Brae. The lack of adult female speaking characters in both books (Fidler's does have a girl main character who shares with the boy main character) didn't worry me as a child!

I've also read a lot of detective novels and thrillers - two excellent ones are Carrie Vaughn's Bannerless and its sequel The Wild Dead, set in a quiet, communitarian postapocalyptic California. An anti-rec (except for the amusement value) would be Christopher Golden's The Pandora Room, in which archaeologists find Pandora's box, and all kinds of nonsense ensues. Nonsense of the "speak to each other!" sort, as well as "do some damn research, author!" sort. The end is visible from waaay off, and there is a completely hilarious "ominous" epilogue.

ALL of A. J. Demas's novels (Sword Dance, Something Human, One Night in Boukos) are fantastic - historical gay romances set in an AU Classical Greece/Achaemenid Persia. She has bonus short stories on her site too.

[petra]

I appreciate the recs, the anti-rec, and the caveat on the kids' book.

[mific]

Some of these are listens not reads, as I consume about 50% audiobooks vs ebooks. The grey bits are spoilers - highlight to read, or copy-paste if on mobile.
Just finished The End of October by Lawrence Wright, an apocalyptic pandemic novel. Much of the detail was interestingly prescient, but he missed the popularity of masks, the govt/state-imposed sheltering at home, the emphasis on kindness and looking after each other, and the crucial importance of the internet/ phones/Zoom etc for connectivity and work. Plus, it being a blockbuster, he added in extreme politics with the Middle East imploding, ecoterrorism, and Putin as the Big Bad, culminating in an apocalypse. He also missed the idiocy of Trump, likely deliberately left him out entirely. It was well written and gripping, there were interesting characters to like and root for, and those mostly survived in the end. The extreme apocalypticness of it was a contrast for me with the real pandemic not being as bad, but then I live in NZ so YMMV for sure.
I also 'read' Severance by Ma Ling, a quieter pandemic apocalypse with no OTT politics and more focus on family and relatedness. Or the lack of it, in the protagonist's case. It was also well written and engaging, and not a blockbuster formula, so the ending didn't wrap everything up neatly and was left open. For me, a simple soul, that was less enjoyable, esp. as the ending didn't make sense to me she barely escapes one dying city only to head off into another one.
In more straightforwardly enjoyable reading, I just finished the Murderbot novel - Network Effect. Another great read, with an interesting asexual relationship developing for Murderbot.
I read this last one a little while ago but it's very topical. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. A YA novel about a black teenage girl in a dilemma about speaking out after a close male friend is shot by police in front of her. It's really engaging, complex, thoughtful, rooted in her family and community, and ultimately hopeful, so good to read at present.

[petra]

I keep meaning to read Murderbot and not getting around to it. It should be easier now that I have the first three in .epubs; we'll see if I manage it sometime soon, but between the writing I've been doing and keeping up with fanfiction it's been hard to focus on Real Books.