Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

What makes a good book?—I don’t think most people could put their finger on it. Did it open your mind to truths? Console your heart with humanity? Tickle your inner child with bizzare-ness and awe? Or feed your inner critic with what can only be described as some darn good food? I think I might get better recommendations listening to people talk about their favorite books than through asking for books that do well the same things I already know I love from other books.

Tell me about *your* favorite books and series. What are they? Do you keep a goodreads tag of them?

Would you recommend it?—Not everyone would recommend their favorite series. Who would you recommend it to? Who were you when you read it, that it made such an impact? Who is this book not for? How much of a reader are you now—who is this opinion coming from?

What does it do well? If somebody was checking off a list of things a book could theoretically do well, what would they find examples of in that book? Did it teach you anything about good writing, or inspire you, or make you feel seen? How much would you rate it as a whole? What genre and concepts/tags does it fall under?

What caveats would you bring up about the book? What does it do badly, or just unremarkably? Are the ‘good parts’ concentrated on a small portion of the entire reading material? Is it an unfinished series? Trigger warnings or difficult material?

How did you come to know about the book? Do you agree or disagree with what other people say about it? Underhyped or overhyped?

(Because I’m still unsure about Goodreads group ettiquette (are non-contributing non-question replies spam? Or is not replying rude? People rarely seem to reply.) if you want some kind of reply for your efforts to prove I read any particularly long recommendation, put something like ‘thoughts?’ or some kind of symbol at the end. If I don’t read a reply before the discussion moves on, I will dm my thoughts and thanks instead. If not, I’ll only reply if I want to say something.

So, my own favorite series.

(Moment of silence for my page refreshing and erasing my entire first draft.) (Note: the goodreads app is a chaos gremlin, and you will not be able to read 90% of this comment)

Ascendance of a Bookworm by Miya Kazuki.

(...see 26 more).

The English translation completed publication with book 33 in September of 2024. Its spin-off series, Hannelore’s Fifth Year at the Royal Academy, is still ongoing. This series is very memorable for me. I started reading when the prepublications of the translations were still airing update-by-update on the J-Novel website, and the 14k member strong subreddit is still active and enthusiastic. How much does it contribute to one's reading experience, spending years waiting for the release of a new volume, speculating with an active, suspenseful fandom, grieving the attacks of multilingual and google-translate-gremlin spoiler trolls? While I aim to re-read it to answer those questions for myself (and deconstruct as a study what I like about this story in more precise measurements), the entire series is ~12,700 pages long (compared to The Wheel of Time's ~11,700 pages, or Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive's ~6,452 pages.) ...Needless to say, please do not wait up on my re-reading the entire series. Expanding my reading horizons really should be my top priority if I want to expand my taste in books. As for the qualifications of my opinion, my goodreads page is unfortunately very accurate for books I've recently read. I think of myself as a picky, fantasy-focused reader. To quote my introduction,

"...I used to watch anime for a while before I grew tired with how dissatisfied the stories made me feel, graduated to reading webcomics/manhua a lot these past few years, but have (finally, after many many years of intending to) gathered my brainpower in search of deeper, more professionally crafted, soul-feeding stories, you know? I'm also slowly making my way across a list of movies and TV shows."

This is a magical, "boring-dystopia" type story, heavy in worldbuilding and emphasizing responsibility, hard work, resourcefulness, and socio-political tact. Everything I could tell you about this story would be a spoiler: It is extremely slow burn--We start out with our protagonist waking up to the body of a sickly 5 year old commoner who can barely leave her bed, and to memory, we might even be several books in before we learn magic exists in this world, let alone see it, and this escalates to (endgame spoilers but I must prove a point. The plot....escalates about as far as your wildest imaginings, heavily tied into the worldbuilding, which trickles down as smoothly as rain) (view spoiler)[a race to avoid the end of the world and the death of an entire civilization because of the combination of a civil war in a world where entire losing political factions are executed, generations of gradual corruption and neglect of responsibilities in the upper echelons, people neglecting to read the darn manual so hard they forget the darn summoning rituals in the first place, and the subsequent decay of magic in a world built on magic and religious devotion(which, to be frank, *was* the original magic system and should still be the focus of it) (hide spoiler)] Honestly, as much as the cause and effect, I love how serious daily life is treated in this story. From the moment they can be trusted to wash a plate, tend a fire, or follow the older kids out to the gathering spot in the woods, children in this world have serious chores that contribute to the survival of their family. Literally, only diaper-bound infants are monitored 24/7, and the state of the daycare available to a commoner is... quite realistically bad. 7 year olds begin their apprenticeships literally as soon as they're registered as legal citizens, and their only choice is usually between whichever professions their parents are in. I told you, a "boring dystopia." Heck, I'd even go so far as to say our main character is lucky-- despite the harsh conditions, there is no abuse in her childhood. Her mom leaves her to take a break with some random guy's market stall as she finishes up the shopping, and she's literally fine. The worst any of her friends experience is older siblings grabbing the food off the table before they can eat their fill.... Then the bookworm starts ascending, and her world expands, and ....uh.. this world is a lot more brutal than underpaid 7 year old woodworkers and 4 year old foragers scavenging the woods outside the city gates for their family's next meal. Thankfully, most of the more shocking elements happen off-screen or even historically. And somehow, the upper class kids are not an exception, and the story makes it make sense. Everyone in this medieval world has the short end of a stick, everyone has to hold their tongue or risk making enemies they cannot afford to make, ruining their family's reputation, or if you're really unlucky and hard of head, you may simply get yourself executed with a slip of the tongue and some age-appropriate fun. Everyone has a job, not even the corrupt can afford to sit down and twiddle their thumbs in decadence. The main character's free time is a point of notable reference. There's something simultaneously dry and healing about this slice of life element.

Sometimes the early plots are a little... eh. The whole 'tossing the chamberpot out onto the streets' thing is an outdated estimation of medieval city life, and I think 'peasants never bathed' is a little bit of a stretch, even though (thankfully) the upper classes do not fall into that cliche. You'd think the always-hungry peasants would have tried cooking with chicken feed before, though... anyways, these minor flaws are all from the early parts of the story. From my reread so far, the prologue isn't notable, and some characters are talking as living encyclopedias, but their context makes this almost excusable. My more serious gripes (with the writing itself) are in my review, this is getting a bit long and I'm not sure anyone will be happy to hear me ramble more. (Link to review.)
I would rate it as a 4, but it could have easily been a 5. It was so close to a 5, it put in so much work... While the goodreads reviews are high so far, I think it's underrated in popularity. The worldbuilding is better than most actual books I've read so far, definitely far above any manga, webcomic, or anime I've completed (and I've read and watched a lot more of those in my time than actual books....). Heck, the author keeps a file cabinet of who's doing what and when, and references them for Q&A's.

Trigger warnings... The problem with the trigger warnings in this story is that most of them are major plot points. Major reveals where the main character is stunned, finds out why logically things are the way they are, and then tries her best to fix things. While there's not much on-screen gore or spectacle, I'm hard-set to find anything else that could be a trigger warning that this story *doesn't* have going on, be it in the historical context, implications, or sub-plots... So they will be spoiler tagged. While serious content is tackled, the 'junio bunko' editions (which I understand to have easier to read japanese) are targeted at older elementary schoolers, so it's not relly 'spectacle' type brutality. (view spoiler)[Content warnings: death, slavery, child abuse and neglect, extremely normalized SA, mass executions, (heavily implied) forced pregnancy (hide spoiler)] ... Yeah, some of these warnings and "the demographic includes elementary schoolers" sound very wrong together. Ask google and the publishers, not me please. If anything, I'd say this speaks to this story not treating these issues as fodder for drama and shock value.

At last, would I recommend this story? Yes, so far its worldbuilding inspires me so hard. While the plot developments themselves are spoilers (dont read the book titles early), it's a consistent read, and I think its worldbuilding-solidity is evident from the beginning of the story.
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What makes a good book is a different question from favourite books and both are subjective. I don't consider Stephanie Meyers' Twilight series to be good books but they were, and maybe still are (I don't work in a bookstore anymore) very popular, and not just among the YA audience they were written for. And Fifty Shades of Grey, which was - let's be polite and say inspired by Twilight - was a very badly written book, but the bookstore could not keep copies in stock it sold so many for the first year after its release.

My favourite series is Lord of the Rings, and I used to read it once a year for at least the first 20 years after I first read it. Some of my other favourites are not so critically acclaimed. I really enjoy the Lensmen series by EE 'Doc' Smith, but I recognise that they're not great books, which hasn't stopped me from reading them half-a-dozen times since I first read them in the 70s.

What makes a book a favourite is hard to quantify - it could be the mood you were in when you first read it, or a particular passage just struck a chord within you, or it gets associated with something good, but completely unrelated, that happened at that time in your life.

So, yeah. Favourite books…

When I think about this question, all the stuff that comes to mind is from when I was a kid/young adult/younger man. That’s probably a bad thing I suppose but at least I’m honest, eh?

Examples: Tolkein’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ – Le Guin’s ‘The Earthsea Trilogy’ – Moorcock’s ‘Elric’ books and the ‘Corum’ books – Fritz Leiber’s ‘Lankhmar’ books – Arthur Clark’s ‘Childhoods End’ – James Blish’s ‘Cities in Flight’ – Andre Norton’s ‘Janus’ series – Howard’s ‘Conan’ – Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ and ‘Robot’ books and the ‘Wendel Urth’ mysteries. Outside of S & SF there were the historical novels of Henry Treece and Rosemary Sutcliffe. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Later, the espionage novels of John le Carre.

Were these all good books? Some of them definitely, some of them likely not so good. Many of them I couldn’t say for sure either way, as I have not dared to revisit them as an older man, for fear of what Andrea calls ‘a visit from the Suck Fairy’ (Andrea you should copyright the phrase). If these are not good books, not as golden and immaculate as my memory of them, then I don’t want to know that.

In recent times, coming back to S&SF after a long break, a few books have really caught my attention.

Brandon Sanderson’s ‘Mistborn Trilogy’. Exceptional world building, a precision storytelling machine, so tight, so tidy.

P Djeli Clark’s ‘Master of Djinn’ and the associated novellas and short pieces that belong in that world. If anything, I liked the short pieces better, they were sharper, the main novel is a little messy. Not terminally so, still hugely enjoyable but not as orderly as the short pieces.

Catherynne M Valente’s ‘The Orphan’s Tales’ duology. So inventive. Such extraordinary use of language and so wonderfully complex. I am in awe of the skill involved in pulling off this particular literary magic trick.

Susanna Clarke’s ‘Piranesi,’ which is just a thing of beauty.

So, what is a good book anyway? As Tony pointed out, it’s really not the same thing as a popular book and I would suggest it is not the same thing as a, ‘critically acclaimed’ book either.

I tell you what I think a good book is. It’s a book that touches somebody, anybody, that makes them think and feel and laugh and hope. A book that takes them out of themselves for a little while. It doesn’t matter if it’s acclaimed literature, a best seller, or a book that only ten people ever read and five people liked. If it does what a book should do, then it’s a good book.

Robin wrote: "I tell you what I think a good book is. It’s a book that touches somebody, anybody, that makes them think and feel and laugh and hope. A book that takes them out of themselves for a little while. It doesn’t matter if it’s acclaimed literature, a best seller, or a book that only ten people ever read and five people liked. If it does what a book should do, then it’s a good book."

That, Robin, is an excellent answer.

Even popularity can be a surprising metric. I recall attending a poetry reading that a friend of mine was giving in a local pub, back in the mid-80s. The audience was, as you would expect, reasonably literate. We got talking to a couple of girls - as you do, well, as you did in those days - and we got to the topic of favourite authors. Even from a brief discussion, I had gleaned enough to know better than to mention the SF/F authors that I read a lot of, so I mentioned Stephen King - they had never heard of him. King was quite possibly the biggest author in the world in those days, so I was stunned.

It is surprising and also sort of not. I spent a lot of time in customer service jobs back in the day and frames of reference/common ground when describing/discussing issues could always surprise you. I remember a phone call I had once when I was working for multinational blue chip appliance manufacturer Electrolux. I am assuming I was talking to a young intern, or someone on a work experience placement, because the voice was young and sort of timerous. "Hello, is that.... Elek... Elek... errr, hmmm... Elek.... Elek-Troll-ucks?" You would only have that much trouble miss-pronouncing the name if you had quite literally never ever heard of it. I stored that one up for when management were bigging themselves up in meetings, I could think to myself, yeah, great, but I know of at least one person who has never heard of this company and thinks it is called, Elek - troll - ucks.

It is a big and diverse world and most of us only really know about our own little corner of it. So yeah, Steven King? Who's he? I can see that, amazing as it is.😁

I forgot to say in my main answer that you nailed what makes a book a favourite by the way Tony. Yes, it is factors like the time in your life when you pick up that book, who you are then, a character that just resonates with you at that point in time. It can be a handful of scenes, a single image, one paragraph that you just get. You can kind of imprint on a book given the right circumstances. The same book may be meaningless to someone else. Just like one person can have heard of King and someone else not, eh?

Robin wrote: "Many of them I couldn’t say for sure either way, as I have not dared to revisit them as an older man, for fear of what Andrea calls ‘a visit from the Suck Fairy’ (Andrea you should copyright the phrase)."

'fraid I didn't invent it, you can Google her and some of her sisters that go around messing with your favorite books

Nostalgia definitely plays a huge role in loving a book. Am I biased when I say I love Beagle's The Last Unicorn because as a kid it was my "favoritest" movie of all time? Similarly for Watership Down. But then I read both books for the first time as an adult and still adored them so maybe they really are just good. As an adult, I'd almost say they aren't even kid books, either of them, though people used to equate fantasy with "kids stuff".

Age group matters a lot, I guess Twilight resonated a lot with the teen age group. But I read it as an adult and at first I was sorta ok with it though found the female protagonist angsty and annoying (nothing worse than reading "I'm not good enough for him" over and over again). But then I paused to think about the male protagonist and I'm like "Dude, it is NOT ok to sit in a tree outside a girl's window without her knowledge and she's not even your girlfriend yet, that's called stalking and is just a small perverted step away from watching her undress..." But a lot of teens thought it was romantic that he loved her that much.

There are things you notice at certain times your life you don't notice in others. I totally missed the Christian overtones in Narnia and A Wrinkle in Time. As an adult, I could ignore them in Narnia and still enjoy it, but the Suck Fairy made sure it clobbered me on the head for Wrinkle.

That discussion about people not knowing Stephen King, made me think of the Dark Tower, and then made me think how I might not have liked the Dark Tower as much if I didn't know other authors. Dark Tower makes references to other books that are not King's and plenty that are. If you haven't read those, or at least aware of them, you lose the pleasure of finding those references. There's a bit of a thrill to go "Oh! I know what they are talking about here". You might not miss out if you didn't get it, you'd be like "ok, weird little golden flying ball, sure" but if you can say "Hey! That's Harry Potter's snitch" I think you enjoy the book more. Messes more with your mind and is twists reality (note - this series is potential Dreampunk fodder for the BINGO).

Even if something is a classic doesn't mean it aged well. We read
the Riddle-Master of Hed, and while it was probably really special when it first came out we all agreed there's lots of better stuff out there now.

I know a lot of people who couldn't trudge through Lord of the Rings as well, finding stretches of it downright boring. I love every bit of it, reading everything Middle Earth related I can find, even things like the Silmarillion that can read a bit more like a text book than a novel, so I'm not bothered by a bit of a trudge :) And I love love love the expansive worldbuilding, there's a whole history he wrote out, a whole language he invented, before starting LotR, and he didn't try to stuff everything into the trilogy, it really was just background stuff (that his son later published). So much work and soul went into that creation and you can feel it.

I love this, Robin: "I tell you what I think a good book is. It’s a book that touches somebody, anybody, that makes them think and feel and laugh and hope. A book that takes them out of themselves for a little while. It doesn’t matter if it’s acclaimed literature, a best seller, or a book that only ten people ever read and five people liked. If it does what a book should do, then it’s a good book."

I think in How to Read Literature Like a Professor the author talks about how the art from a book is co-created between the author and the reader. This image has always struck me. It is why my (at the time, quite annoying) 10th grade English teacher wouldn't entertain my frustration at whether Nathanial Hawthorne meant this or that in The Scarlet Letter. Rather, what does it mean to me as the reader? I do believe there is some limit to this, but I don't know what/where it is (I'd know it when I saw it).

I categorize my favorites by "what are you looking for?" Proxies for this are age, culture, genre, etc. My favorite books tend to be (not always) books that challenge me, make me think, connect to other (and hopefully bigger) ideas, scratch at "the big questions" in clever ways. The effectiveness of a book at doing that is certainly correlated with my own maturity and understandings.

That being said, here's a brain dump (fiction only) in no particular order. And in the spirit of your initial request, Peony... thoughts?

Lord of the Rings
Dune
Brave New World
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
Stories of Your Life and Others
The Dispossessed
Watership Down
The Neverending Story
Lord of the Flies
Narnia (esp. Dawn Treader and Silver Chair)
Earthsea
Alas, Babylon
A Tale of Two Cities
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Redshirts
Animal Farm
Starship Troopers
I, Robot
Warbreaker, but really all Cosmere
The Bear and the Nightingale
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Abhorsen Trilogy
Discworld (esp. Wyrd Sisters, Carpe Jugulum, The Truth)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Once and Future King
Perdido Street Station
A Wrinkle in Time
Assassin's Apprentice
Neverwhere
Recursion
Piranesi
Jurassic Park
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
Red Rising series (only first three)
Our Man in Havana
American Dirt

Wow I feel kind of indiscriminate... but I do love books...