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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
Umm, Actually,
The Hobbits are an extreme rarity in Middle Earth. So odd in fact that their existence evaded notice by Sauron and his spies for 2500+ years
Gandalf the Grey's magic is legit, so he isn't a scam artist. The terms of the adventure were laid out very plainly, including mentions of funeral arrangements, by Thorin's letter. Basically they rolled natural 20s on persuasion, but it wasn't ever presented as a scam.
This scheme has been in the works for a very very very long time, not the latest in a string but THE scheme they've been working towards.
Bilbo is the thieve, the dwarven party were a variety of other classes distinctly not of thieves.
With that said, my humble elevator pitch.
"Classic coming of age story where the reclusive protagonist living a comfortable middle age life suddenly found himself host to a rip-roaring party of treasure hunters, and secretly wishes he could join. To his utter surprise, after a sense of social decorum was weaponized against him, he joins them on the most fantastic adventure. "The real treasures were the friends we make along the way" ring true."
But man, does your post make me want to reread the whole dang thing again. Good stuff
Nicely done, I love your description so much more than mine. Naturally your corrections are all things I should have thought of in the first place!
Are you implying
Are you implying that a minority who predominantly lives in a small geographic location is not "normal"? ಠ_ಠ
Also re: 4. Being an accessory and conspirator to thieving doesn't absolve you of the label because you got someone (at a minimum) decades younger than you to do the dirty work. Smells like RICO to me.
/kidding
They're not norm-al because they're nice, not mean.
(Pause for chortle)
ಠ_ʖಠ
Sounds like someone who never got on the wrong side of Farmer Maggot
A murder happens a town over, and our noir detective main character needs to figure out what happened. Only problem: Both cities are in physically the same space, seperated only by the collective decision to ignore what happens in the other one.
The City and The City by China Miéville
Soooo. Is it as uhhh, gross, as perdido? I can handle it but I also have to be in the right frame of mind.
There's moments, especially because it's a murder story, but overall I think it's very restrained. Nowhere near Perdido St Station.
Just finished the book last week. Burned through it. Thank you for the recommendation and the clarification. Easily one of my favorites and easily on my personal "must read" list from now on.
I read a short sci-fi story from the ?70s? where society in order to relieve population pressure has half the population in cold storage/stasis every other day, and the other half in cold storage/stasis every other other day (there's gotta be an easier way to say that).
The protagonist becomes infatuated with a roommate who's in cold storage on days he isn't (just by looking at her through the glass on her storage container).
He requests to change days so he can actually meet her. After several months/years (it's been awhile since I read it), his move request is finally approved, but it means someone from the other day has to change as well.
Guess who he swaps with...
edit to add: I always thought there was a lot more that could be done with the concept - I like where your book is heading with it.
A seemingly random group of pilgrims are selected to take the last pilgrimage to the Time Tombs to offer their wish/question to The Shrike (7' teleporting time-traveling razor-wire chrome steel killer who impales all but one on his Tree of Pain for eternity), where only one wish/question is expected to be accepted. Meanwhile, the interstellar government is preparing for a war with an outcast group of humanity who have used nanotechnology to enhance themselves for a deep space lifestyle. This war is expected to begin at, and be largely over the control of, said Time Tombs.
Why are these pilgrims chosen to go? Is the war a just one? Just what is "The Shrike"?? A Canturbury Tales-like story will explain in this book, book 1 of the Hyperion Cantos. Book 2 completes their story from a new perspective.
Books 3 and 4 continue the story 275 years later, dealing with the offspring of one of the Pilgrims and the church's (now government's) hunt for them due to a percieved instability in their authority embodied by this Chosen One.
Topics: Ancient & new religions, philosophy of language, nanotechnology, wars between advanced AI's, bending time and space, reincarnation, WTF is The Shrike??!?
Good stuff. Wish I could read it for the first time again.
I remember reading this book while working a manufacturing job. I read it during 15 minute breaks, during lunch hour, at traffic lights during my commute, then the entire evening until bedtime. I just couldn't put it down.
I felt that each of the stories started of slow but developed into something amazing from both an emotional and sci-fi tech standpoint. I was so disappointed every time one of the stories ended and I had to start a new one, thinking that the next one might not be as great as the last, but I ended up liking them all.
Did you read Fall of Hyperion and the two Endymion books?
I know Hyperion is only half of the story, but sorry to say that I actually quit about a third of the way through Fall of Hyperion. I think I enjoyed the world building of the first book, but I wasn't as invested in the "main story". I might try again. Maybe I just wasn't in the right headspace for it at the time.
How would you compare the two books?
As someone who read, and was incredibly disappointed by, the rest of the books in the series, when I recommend the book I usually tell people to just stick with Hyperion. Think of it less as an unfinished book, and more as a book with an open ending, and it's brilliant. Plus I think it concludes the thematic journey very well - a recurring idea throughout the book is the conflict between the familiar and the unknown nature of change. Leaving the book just as the characters and their world are finally ready to embrace change is a great choice: we don't know what the consequences are going to be, and that's ultimately the thing that holds us back from change and creates the stifling cultures that the different characters are pushing back against.
Four books in the whole story. Lots of varied opinions on where the strong points are, but I'd actually rank them 1>2>4>3 (book 3 is only last because you get few answers about anything). The second book isn't broken up by individual stories, but sort of picks up where they left off, but from the perspective of a character with a unique POV. The mystery and the world is what engaged me throughout, so if that isn't intriguing for you, then it may not be fulfilling.
Loved this series the first time I read it and reading your description makes me want to go read it again!
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
Sold!
also sold! I just hope it is also aimed at dumbarses like myself
I also have no clue what a Riemannian universe means, but I think Greg Egan is great at making his super complicated hard science fiction exciting for most levels of understanding. You don't need to understand all the intermediate calculations to get what the consequences in the end are. And his writing gives off a degree of excitement for the process of scientific discovery made by his characters, that makes it engaging to read despite not fully understanding everything they say. Egan knows his stuff, so you can sense there is weight behind everything - in contrast to the usual pseudo science handwaving Treknobabble.
I'm intrigued but intimidated. OvO I have no idea what any of that means but I love the way you make it sound so exciting!
The first chapter can be read on his website. I think that gives a pretty good idea of whether the rest is worth reading or not.
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.
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)
This series of books is about a person working a job they hate but are compelled to stay at because of social forces outside their control. One day, they are given the opportunity to walk off the job without an issue. Now out in the world, they have to make their way around solving a mystery behind their former employer without letting on that they used to work for them, on top of the baggage of being a member of the worker caste who is no longer working.
Well, this is a good opportunity to share my favorite clickhole article: The Time I Spent On a Commercial Whaling Ship Totally Changed My Perspective on the World
A discursive, wickedly funny (in a very dry and intellectual way), murder-mystery historical novel filled with unreliable narrators, set in the most interesting city in the world at the crossroads between East and West. Secured a Nobel Prize for its author (and deservedly so).
The book
My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk.Background
The book is set in 16th century Istanbul
Representative quote
As in many other cities, money no longer had any value in Istanbul. At the time I returned from the East, bakeries that one sold large one-hundred drachma loaves of bread for one silver coin now baked loaves half the size for the same price... Had my late mother seen the day when she'd have to spend three silver pieces for a dozen eggs, she'd say, "We ought to leave before the chickens grow so spoiled they shit on us instead of the ground." But I knew that the problem of devalued money was the same everywhere. It was rumored that Flemish and Venetian merchant ships were filled with chests of counterfeit coin. At the royal mint, where five hundred coins were once minted from a hundred drachmas of silver, now, owing to the endless warring with the Persians, eight hundred coins were minted from the same amount. When Janissaries discovered that the coins they'd been paid actually floated in the Golden Horn like the dried beans that fell from the vegetable-sellers pier, they rioted, besieging Our Sultan's palace as if it were an enemy fortress.
From his Nobel lecture
But as can be seen from my father’s suitcase and the pale colours of our lives in Istanbul, the world did have a centre, and it was far away from us. In my books I have described in some detail how this basic fact evoked a Checkovian sense of provinciality, and how, by another route, it led to my questioning my authenticity. I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with these same feelings, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, lack of security and sense of degradation, than I do. Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger … But today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature can ever do. What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kind … Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world – and I can identify with them easily – succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West – a world with which I can identify with the same ease – nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.
Science fiction, an older woman gets fed up with her life and remains behind on an abandoned colony planet rather than Evacuate with everyone else. Unexpected things happen and she shows creativity and resilience.
Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon,
A business man gets pulled into crime through family loyalty. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead.
Real world based fantasy featuring animal characters, a unique trickster mythology and a conlang. A group of friends escape the destruction of their home and seek a new one, finding adventures along the way. Watership Down
Snarky old people battle space aliens.
Click for book title
"Old Man's War" by John Scalzi
I loved that series.
You own property, right? At the very least, renting out one. You've stayed in there for a hot minute, assumingly, everything is all fine and good, but then, you get the idea to do some renovations. You pull out the ol' tape measure, and you find out that you did the measurements wrong. Your house is just a fraction of an inch larger on the inside than on the outside. No big deal. You do it again, but the same thing happens.
Did I sell you? No? Okay, how about this?
Some young buck finds out that something screwy's going on in his apartment building. Curiosity gets the better of him, he finds a ton of papers regarding this strange documentary thing someone made, much like a full-on analysis of the documentary that apparently nobody's ever seen before. While that's all fine and good, the dude eventually figures out that the guy who researched it is...well, completely visually impaired.
How about now? No? Okay, so, what if I were to tell you that those two things were the same novel?
What book?
House of Leaves I think?
Interesting. What's the name of the book?
So... What's the name?
House of Leaves per the internet
If this is House of Leaves, it's the most down-to-earth pitch I've ever heard for that book lol
It's the only book that comes up with the "larger on the inside" house
The mythology of Cupid and Psyche, re-told from the perspective of the supposedly evil, ugly and jealous step-sister. Written as a memoir which begins with an angry shake of the fist to the cruel Aphrodite, this psychological deep dive of introspection weaves between self identity, fantasy and unreliable narrator: how can we truly love and be loved by another, face to face, Till We Have Faces? C S Lewis himself calls it "far and away my best book", and certainly one of my all time favorites.
Great book! Its opening line (beginning the "angry shake") lives rent-free in my head.
I can't find the source right now, but I remember reading somewhere that Lewis's sitting down to write the first draft was a matter of weeks, but only after he'd been mulling over it for 35 years. It certainly has a different feel or texture than his other works, and to me it feels like he drew from a deeper well to write it. For that reason, it's by far my favorite C. S. Lewis book.
I love the second part, especially. And I get to use one of my favorite words to describe it: "oneiric".
(Now you've made me dig out my copy...)
oooh new word of the day for me.
I love part one for the journey and the more "normal" story told very very well. The characters all continue to live full lives in my head no matter how long ago I read about them: they have such depth and dimensions...even the father: a drunken, violent and abusive man who hurt so many people, I find it difficult to hate. And The Fox, ah...
And then part two is a whole other kind of thing which I also love. Oneiric, yes! I agree with Jack that this is his at its best.
it was in a letter to Christian Hardie
In a world where the scientists and mathematicians are sequestered in monasteries instead of priests, strange and unexpected events will cause one young acolyte to question himself, his peers, and the very nature of reality.
A slow burn but an enjoyable one!
AnathemThe absolute best of NS. I sort of like a lot of NS, but he also tends to annoy the fuck out of me at certain times, e.g., lately, he cannot help his fawning billionaire idolatry. Not to mention his seizure-inducing levels of cringe when discussing certain topics, such as virtual environments and MMOs. Nonetheless an entertaining writer that can hit very high highs.
The book in question is well worth anyone's time. Thoroughly entertaining from start to finish.
I like most of his books, he creates really detailed works with very intriguing ideas but I do think he often struggles to bring things to a comfortable resolution. The firehose just shuts off and I'm left questioning what just happened.
This is also absolutely true.
What great comments in this thread, I have some things to look up it seems. Thank you everyone!
My to-be-read list is certainly getting longer.
Not my favorite, but a recent fun one:
A light and irreverant action-romper, where aliens take over Earth and the survivors are forced to navigate an IRL roguelike dungeon for space reality TV. Carl has to do this with his ex-girlfriend's cat. It's Hunger Games for videogame nerds.
Dungeon Crawler Carl
A terrifying space exploration with a crew of misfits sent to research something truly alien. Prepare to question your self, consciousness, and existential purpose. Phenomenal hard sci-fi. Also it's got vampires.
Blindsight by Peter Watts
Epic space opera? Check. Well-described space battles? Check. World-destroying or -saving consequences? Check. Intricate multi-polity politics with constantly shifting alliances? Check. Alien civilization? Check. Espionage with deep-cover agents? Check. Good and evil on all sides, and depending on your viewpoint? Check. Strong female lead, but with a complicated relationship to heroism? Check. Hugo Award winner? Check. Inspired many of present-day science fiction's top space stories, including The Expanse? Check. Book and author almost totally forgotten by now? Check...
A forgotten classic
Downbelow Station, by C.J. CherryhStoryGraph reviews, with spoilers
Downbelow Station is definitely a love-it-or-hate-it read. The turn from Golden Age pure gimmickry and cardboard characters to more modern literary SF style can be uneven and confusing. It's a dense book that takes effort to follow all the complexities. There's a great deal of scene setting at the beginning, but I found the payoff extremely worthwhile. There are some very dark passages, as you'd expect for a turning point in future history. The book is a gateway to the even bigger and more intricate Company-Union series.
Sword wielding lesbian necromancers. In space.
It's actually way better than I'm making it sound
The Ninth House.. um was a trilogy but I think it's going to end up more like a quadrilogy, by Tamsyn Muir.Warning: Book four (probably final) has not been published yet. Rumour is it's mostly written, but rumours are just that.
First book is Gideon The Ninth
I'm somewhere in book 2 - thanks for the reminder that I really need to get back on that series!
Harrow is pretty tough going at first but it is worth it and does pay off very nicely.
A state of the art device designed with AI that automatically hires virtual actors to teach a young child everything they will need to know about the world. A great tool for a very wealthy man to give to their young child. But what if it was stolen and accidentally fell into the hands of the poorest young girl in the slums? How would it change her life?
I require title please.
And thank you!
A heavily armed security bot (mostly robotic, some unspecified amount of human brain, other unspecified bits of organic material) manages to hack its governor module and has snarky escapades in space, often fighting other security bots (governors intact) and megacorporations. The fight sequences are absolutely gripping and the protagonist is incredibly human for all its lack of humanity...
“There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.“"
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Essentially it's a drug trip, psychology essay, nostalgia trip and coverage of a motorcycle rally all wrapped into one. Plus, you can likely read it twice in one day.