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When I was a lad, my grandfather told me he had no truck with fiction. The real world was much more interesting, he said. Though I didn't agree with him at the time, as I got older I found myself slipping into a pattern of only reading non-fiction. This has probably been more useful, but I yearn for the old days of a relaxing read.
But... what to read? The only thing I hear about these days are fiction books about People With Complex Issues, Possibly Post-Colonial, and I have no truck with that. Nor with spy books. Have read a few classic 50s SF books, but I can't rely on that forever. After reading Tolkien, and Hugh Cook's revisionist satires on the same I feel like I've Done Fantasy too. So... can anyone recommend me something that's fairly amusing but not whimsical, not too taxing, but fairly intelligent, serious without being Serious, interestingly written without being Academic.
I guess what I'm aiming for is something with the tone of Terry Pratchett's early novels, before he went all fucking Pantomime horse on us.
I'm going to open this post to comments, and trust I won't get abuse heaped on me like I did last time...
Posted by stuart at May 27, 2008 9:41 PMJane Austen.
OK, so she's nothing like Terry Pratchett, but she is amusing and intelligent.
Posted by: Michael Norrish at May 28, 2008 12:50 PMSunset and Sawdust by Joe R. Lansdale is about a sheriff's wife in 1930s Texas who kills her husband and takes over his job. Lansdale is one of a kind (he wrote the story Bubba Ho-Tep is faithfully adapted from) and this is a good 'un.
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson is easily the best book he's written in my opinion, partly because it's set in the near past rather than near future. The protagonist has a (fictional) psychiatric condition where she goes into anaphylactic shock if she is exposed to the wrong brand labels. Shame that his follow-up book, Spook Country, was so boring.
World War Z by Max Brooks is a surprisingly good novel about the zombie wars told from many different viewpoints across the globe as an oral history.
Light by M. John Harrison is a dense, tightly plotted space opera set in several time periods at once (including the present day) which I read in a single six-hour sitting. I don't usually like space opera and I very rarely read for six hours straight, so this one must have been good. This is probably the most like early Pratchett, assuming you mean Strata and Dark Side of the Sun rather than Discworld.
Following the law of fives, figure I'll second the Jane Austen recommend too, partly 'cause I just pushed P&P on my flatmate. I've found a lot of the "classic" novels to be underwhelming. Austen was good.
Posted by: Pearce at June 2, 2008 12:31 PM