5
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Elevator pitch your favourite book!
I'm looking for something new to read, so I'm just selfishly posting this in the hopes that it works.
Doesn't have to be your all-time favourite I guess, if you can't decide. Feel free to do multiple books too, or maybe just whichever is on your mind a lot recently.
A seemingly average, normal person gets bamboozled by an elderly scam artist and a group of thieves into participating in their latest scheme. After a series of physical and mental challenges, including a surprising number of riddles, this seemingly normal person starts to realise just how drab their old life was, and matures a bit as a result.
In case that sounds interesting and you actually want to read it:
The Hobbit
Battle of the Linguist Mages is at once a lighthearted parody of video games & streaming culture, and also a deep insight about how lonely it is to be seen as a persona rather than a person. It also features aliens who are actually punctuation marks, power morphemes that are shouted in battle, definitely-not-scientologists, adventures in a logosphere, and some wild legislation by the governor of California.
If you prefer your books to be relatively serious it's not for you, but as someone with my whole career in the video game industry I really related to the narrator, and I really enjoyed the humor at all points. Also ft a cute sapphic romance.
(note: do not expect much actual linguistics)
A teenage boy named Koli lives in a small village in a dangerous world. There are monsters outside of the village, but his village has guardians that can wield seemingly magical weapons to protect the villagers. As part of being a stupid teenage boy, Koli upsets the order in the village, makes a new friend, and must learn to survive in the dangerous world outside. A world that may seem more familiar than you expect.
The Rampart Trilogy (The Book of Koli, The Trials of Koli and The Fall of Koli by M R Carey. It's got optimistic humanism, it's got trans rights, it's got friendship, it's got found family, it's got anti-fascism, it's got fantasy vibes and sci-fi vibes and some really hilarious moments.
Are you also annoyed by our universe limiting the speed of light? Would you prefer if the relativistic time dilation effects worked in reverse in a universe with positive-definitive Riemannian metrics based laws of physics? Then I got a great trilogy for you!
Reveal
Greg Egan - The Orthogonal Trilogy