Exceptional books
Mar. 9th, 2006 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbSo in the comments to the last post*, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cpolk asked me which books struck me as exceptional in the fantasy field. Since I'm lazy, and boring, and otherwise would have nothing to say today, I decided it could pass for content in a post all of its own.
Thus, we have the books I think are Exceptional, right here and on display. Suffer my opinions, livejournal, and despair. :-)
Edited slightly for unnatural punctuation.
"Exceptional? Okay. Bearing in mind that my exposure is limited to stuff that comes out of the UK and what I hear enough buzz about to think worth importing from Amazon. :-)
My favourite fantasy of all time is Mary Gentle's massive circa-500K Ash: A Secret History. Battles, explosions, mud, The Really Shiny Weird Talking Pyramids, golems, the coolest framing device in existence ever, politics, screwed-up interpersonal relationships, Interesting! Strange! Compelling! characters, mud, rain, siege, starvation, disease, death, blood, muck, dirt, people-who-hear-voices, Burgundy, Carthage, imperial politics, perpetual night and more battles. (Whee!)
Gentle has an extremely lucid prose style, and an extraordinary touch for details, as well as for character. In Ash the main character is probably the most complicated, fully-realised person I've ever read. Gentle's a multiple-postgrad in history, too, which I don't think hurts.
I'll go out of my way to add that Gentle's White Crow collection (three novels, two short stories, one cover) is also exceptional, in a different, less layered way. It might have some serious flaws - and at least one of the novels squicked me, pretty much worse than anything else I've read, although that's not necessarily a flaw - but it's a different kind of incredible every time I go back to read it. The kind of book(s) where you taste the dust and feel the sky, if that makes sense. And she doesn't shy away from being ruthless at times, when it's needed.
And also. The only word I have for it is Shiny :-).
::gets down book. looks for passage::
::time passes::
Okay, you'll have to take my word for it, if you haven't read it, because I can't find a passage that I can type in here without wanting to go off and read the book instead of type. :-)
I'm less enthused by her latest, 1632: A Sundial in a Grave, if only because the main character is to me much less compelling. But it's still at the upper rim of Really Good.
Um. Gentle aside, what else strikes me as Exceptional?
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls. Those are two books that hit me right where I live. Although if they had been written by someone without Bujold's talent for character, they would have been maybe no more than middling-good, so maybe not entirely exceptional.
Matthew Woodring Stover, Heroes Die, though whether that's SF or fantasy is really arguable.
Manda Scott's Boudica books. Marketed more mainstream than fantasy, but it's definitely fantasy.
Alice Borchadt, The Silver Wolf, Night of the Wolf and The Dragon Queen. Set in c 8th century Rome, Roman Gaul and Rome under Julius Caesar, and post-Roman Britain, respectively. The world needs more intelligent werewolf stories with Real Scary Bits, popes, lepers, history and women. :-)
Going back a few years, Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry. I can't believe I read it for the first time last month.
Patricia McKillip's The Changeling Sea probably rounds out the Exceptional! category for me. There's other stuff that'll make the cut into Really Good, or maybe Not-Quite-Exceptional, but yeah. Those are the ones that kicked me in the teeth, so to speak, and made me sit up and really take notice. For fantasy, at least. The SF/AU list is shorter, but you asked for fantasy. :-)
(In an aside, I also think I'll add to that category in fantasy this year, ifmatociquala's Blood and Iron comes anything even close to making me feel the way Hammered et al did. And Gentle has another book out in December :-))"
Well, there you have it. Actual Content (tm).
In other news, the Archaeology assignment is done with the doneness of a very done thing. And am I the last person in the world to discover that the Roman Emperor Hadrian was gay?
(He was also the first emperor to be portrayed as wearing a beard, which is the kind of interesting fact - like the fact that Nero was the first Roman emperor to be portrayed with facial hair - that just makes my day. Yes, I know I'm weird.)
List of early emperors who were mad, bad and dangerous-to-know: Gaius Caligula (he of making his horse a senator fame), Nero (both of them Julio-Claudian dynasty), Domitian (Flavians), Commodus (Antonines). Poisoner-empresses: Livia, Agrippina the Elder, Agrippina the Younger, sundry others.
History is fun.
---------
*You know, the one where I was saying Shaman's Crossing was dull?
cpolk asked me which books struck me as exceptional in the fantasy field. Since I'm lazy, and boring, and otherwise would have nothing to say today, I decided it could pass for content in a post all of its own.Thus, we have the books I think are Exceptional, right here and on display. Suffer my opinions, livejournal, and despair. :-)
Edited slightly for unnatural punctuation.
"Exceptional? Okay. Bearing in mind that my exposure is limited to stuff that comes out of the UK and what I hear enough buzz about to think worth importing from Amazon. :-)
My favourite fantasy of all time is Mary Gentle's massive circa-500K Ash: A Secret History. Battles, explosions, mud, The Really Shiny Weird Talking Pyramids, golems, the coolest framing device in existence ever, politics, screwed-up interpersonal relationships, Interesting! Strange! Compelling! characters, mud, rain, siege, starvation, disease, death, blood, muck, dirt, people-who-hear-voices, Burgundy, Carthage, imperial politics, perpetual night and more battles. (Whee!)
Gentle has an extremely lucid prose style, and an extraordinary touch for details, as well as for character. In Ash the main character is probably the most complicated, fully-realised person I've ever read. Gentle's a multiple-postgrad in history, too, which I don't think hurts.
I'll go out of my way to add that Gentle's White Crow collection (three novels, two short stories, one cover) is also exceptional, in a different, less layered way. It might have some serious flaws - and at least one of the novels squicked me, pretty much worse than anything else I've read, although that's not necessarily a flaw - but it's a different kind of incredible every time I go back to read it. The kind of book(s) where you taste the dust and feel the sky, if that makes sense. And she doesn't shy away from being ruthless at times, when it's needed.
And also. The only word I have for it is Shiny :-).
::gets down book. looks for passage::
::time passes::
Okay, you'll have to take my word for it, if you haven't read it, because I can't find a passage that I can type in here without wanting to go off and read the book instead of type. :-)
I'm less enthused by her latest, 1632: A Sundial in a Grave, if only because the main character is to me much less compelling. But it's still at the upper rim of Really Good.
Um. Gentle aside, what else strikes me as Exceptional?
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls. Those are two books that hit me right where I live. Although if they had been written by someone without Bujold's talent for character, they would have been maybe no more than middling-good, so maybe not entirely exceptional.
Matthew Woodring Stover, Heroes Die, though whether that's SF or fantasy is really arguable.
Manda Scott's Boudica books. Marketed more mainstream than fantasy, but it's definitely fantasy.
Alice Borchadt, The Silver Wolf, Night of the Wolf and The Dragon Queen. Set in c 8th century Rome, Roman Gaul and Rome under Julius Caesar, and post-Roman Britain, respectively. The world needs more intelligent werewolf stories with Real Scary Bits, popes, lepers, history and women. :-)
Going back a few years, Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry. I can't believe I read it for the first time last month.
Patricia McKillip's The Changeling Sea probably rounds out the Exceptional! category for me. There's other stuff that'll make the cut into Really Good, or maybe Not-Quite-Exceptional, but yeah. Those are the ones that kicked me in the teeth, so to speak, and made me sit up and really take notice. For fantasy, at least. The SF/AU list is shorter, but you asked for fantasy. :-)
(In an aside, I also think I'll add to that category in fantasy this year, if
matociquala's Blood and Iron comes anything even close to making me feel the way Hammered et al did. And Gentle has another book out in December :-))"Well, there you have it. Actual Content (tm).
In other news, the Archaeology assignment is done with the doneness of a very done thing. And am I the last person in the world to discover that the Roman Emperor Hadrian was gay?
(He was also the first emperor to be portrayed as wearing a beard, which is the kind of interesting fact - like the fact that Nero was the first Roman emperor to be portrayed with facial hair - that just makes my day. Yes, I know I'm weird.)
List of early emperors who were mad, bad and dangerous-to-know: Gaius Caligula (he of making his horse a senator fame), Nero (both of them Julio-Claudian dynasty), Domitian (Flavians), Commodus (Antonines). Poisoner-empresses: Livia, Agrippina the Elder, Agrippina the Younger, sundry others.
History is fun.
---------
*You know, the one where I was saying Shaman's Crossing was dull?
