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

[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.