Posted on 03/20/2005 10:29:44 AM PST by Finger Monkey
I am in desperate need of an engrossing novel. I would like a big fat book, historical fiction, preferably. The last engrossing book I read was Shogun, and that was last spring.
I am also a sci-fi geek, any really good series recommendations would be appreciated. And fantasy too. Yes, I am that big of a geek.
Thanks for any help you can give, I have been reading periodicals, mostly politics and science, and I need some fiction. I know that you, intelligent FReepers that you are (excuse me while I clean off my nose), will recommend many a good book to me, BerthaDee, newbie.
By the way, how many licks does it take to get rid of the "newbie" title?Your FR Secret Decoder Ring is in the mail .....
LOL!
I am in desperate need of an engrossing novel. I would like a big fat book, historical fiction, preferably. The last engrossing book I read was Shogun, and that was last spring.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It's REAL big and fat and a thought-provoking book.
That was required reading for a business class I took in HS my Senior year.
It affected / reinforced my look on things for many years, right up to today.
Thanks. Added.
My fault, I read your post too fast.
Oh, but Tad Williams' "Otherland" Quartet is even better. Slow at times but the payoff is magnificent. I remember racing to the bookstore the day the last was released and, since I had no money, spending five hours furiously reading to get to page 700 when I was able to learn the fate of a certain favorite character. Then I put it down and saved the money to buy it. One of my top ten stories. Possibly in the top five.
Turtledove: Guns of the South
Sci-Fi basics (if you haven't already read them)
ANYTHING BY HEINLEIN!!!!!!!
Particularly:
- Stranger in a Strange Land
- Farnum's Freehold
- I Will Fear No Evil
Larry Niven's known space series, particularly
- Ringworld
- Protector
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's collaborations, particularly
- Fallen Angels (very political - skewers the greens just fine)
- Footfall (the best "someone invades the Earth" novel)
- Lucifer's Hammer (the best "something hits the Earth" novel)
Frank Herbert's original Dune series:
- Dune
- Children of Dune
- Dune Messiah
Historical Novels
Lawhead's Celtic Crusade triology
- The Iron Lance
- Black Rood
- Mystic Rose
Lawhead's Pendragon (King Arthur) cycle
- Taliesen
- Merlin
- Arthur
- Grail
- Avalon: Return of King Arthur
Gates of Fire : An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae - by STEVEN PRESSFIELD
Historical - non-Fiction
Biography of Winston Churchill - The Last Lion (only 2 of planned trilogy written, author has died) - by William Manchester
- Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory (1874-1932)
- Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone (1932-1940)
Biography of Teddy Roosevelt - Edmund Morris
- The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
- Theodore Rex
- (third volume pending)
The Ever Reliable
Douglas Adams - the entire Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series
I love Heinlein.
GREAT list, man. You hit it. I love the Hitchhiker's Guide. It's about time to read it again. I have always said, Douglas Adams wrote the best sex scene I ever read.
Now, about the biographies, if they are very dry, I might not be able to maintain my attention on them. I need engrossing, not that FR and Winston Churchill aren't fascinating in their own rights, it's just that I have to read dry, dry, desert dry things for work. And I must confess, I've never read a biography. Though I did read "The Autobiography of Henry VIII," it's fiction, though. Very, very good book.
The Mission Earth series has nothing to do with Scientology.
It is a fantastic story.
BATTLEFIELD EARTH WAS NOT, HOWEVER – AS MANY A CRITIC INITIALLY DECLARED – the LRH magnum opus.
Rather, that distinction is more generally afforded to the next of the final LRH works, the ten volume, 1.2 million word, Mission Earth series. How he managed those 1.2 million words in what amounted to the space of twelve months is yet another of those legendary literary feats in line with the perfect dictated sentences of the later Henry James or the virtually flawless handwritten manuscripts of the later Charles Dickens.
In either case, the LRH rate of production alone is astonishing, actually surpassing his fabled speed in the heyday of pulps, and even more impressive considering those rotating Underwood manuals – one in the shop for repair, while he rapidly wore down the other and then switched.
Again, a mass of preliminary notes reveals an intricate plan behind all that seems so freely wrought – every chapter carefully outlined, every character neatly sketched. The whole is a wonderfully wrought tale of a suave and swashbuckling Fleet Combat Engineer from the planet Voltar who must battle a nefarious intelligence chief to save an unsuspecting earth and thwart the subversion of Voltar itself.
The whole represents an after-the-fact confession from former Coordinated Information Apparatus (CIA) executive Soltan Gris, and otherwise employs a uniquely villainous viewpoint; the intrepid combat engineer, Jettero Heller, has been implanted with a video-relayer allowing Gris to see and hear all our hero experiences.
What ensues is a perfectly wry and ironic assessment of a well-intentioned and capable hero – as when this Soltan Gris insists we view Heller as a hopeless innocent among savagely clever CIA operatives...even as Heller effortlessly outwits them all.
“I loved Mission Earth” declared Ray Faraday Nelson of the genre’s new wave, “The CIA will hate it.” He was undoubtedly correct, and particularly in light of later charges that Agency personnel had been financing Central American operations with profits from the heroin trade – all as more or less portrayed in the pages of Mission Earth. Similarly, there is all Mission Earth has to say concerning drug enforcement officials on the take – more or less in line with later scandals involving Mexican enforcement agencies – and all else the series lampoons as regards earth-raping multinationals, death-dealing bureaucracies, conniving media, casual murder and rampant immorality. Or as yet another critic described it, “in a biting commentary on exactly who is doing what on today’s earth.”
The statement is supremely apt, and actually even more so given what the shape of society as we approach the new millennium. For example, much of Heller’s trials involve his efforts to salvage earth from wanton pollution at the hands of a John Delbert Rockecenter and the Seven Brothers, i.e., the Seven Sisters. In the process, Heller stumbles upon an alien plot to subvert Voltarian society with several thousand tons of Turkish opium. (Although physiologically superior in certain respects, Voltarians are nonetheless subject to the same dark temptations as the earthling.) The result: an utterly pandemic drug abuse crisis, much like what we suffer today.
There is likewise much regarding the patently illegal methods of law enforcement agencies, (as in a Federal Bureau of Investigation now known to have wiretapped the telephones of United States congressional representatives), and the employment of a J. Walter Madison to keep the reading public fully uninformed – as in the J. Walter Thompson public relations conglomerate representing highly dubious medical, pharmaceutical and petroleum interests, and lately charged with helping to incite the Gulf War. Finally, there is also much on the psychiatric and psychological encouragement of sexual perversion as a means of population control – all under a banner of “Mental Stealth” and all perfectly in line with the smorgasbord of sexual perversion now advertised everywhere under that ever-popular euphemism, “The Alternative Lifestyle.”
The point – and this from a secretary/research assistant charged with collecting the small mountain of background literature – Mission Earth is a work of definitive satire and expressly intended “for the raising of social consciousness.” If the world portrayed is the height of hypocrisy – where the most saintly are, in fact, the most outlandishly criminal, where political and corporate corruption is the order of the day and populations are regarded as sheep for the slaughter – nothing is accidental, nothing just a byproduct of human genetics as psychiatry would have us believe. Rather, there are explicit reasons for all that plagues this planet, and those reasons are both identifiable and resolvable.
It’s simply a question of cutting through that J. Walter Madison double talk and the psychobabble from a world association of “Mental Stealth,” and getting to the source of the problem. Although as Jettero Heller so painfully discovers, “the way this planet is organized, apparently, is that if you try to do anything to help it, some special interest group jumps all over you.” As something of a footnote here, it might further be mentioned that much of what the series satirically addresses, LRH himself very seriously addressed as both the Founder of Scientology, and founder of the world’s most singularly effective programs for drug rehabilitation, criminal reform and moral regeneration. In other words, as a genuine opponent of those forces which underlie criminality, drug abuse and immorality, here is an author who knows of what he writes.
What such insight ultimately made for is a work of truly phenomenal and enduring popularity. As noted, each consecutive volume of the Mission Earth dekalogy successively rose to international bestseller lists until those lists were all but filled with Mission Earth. At one point, readers found no less than seven Mission Earth volumes among the ten bestselling hardcover books, prompting author and professor of journalism James Gunn to declare, “I don’t know anything in publishing history to compare with it.”
As further noted, the series is now routinely described as a legitimate classic, repeatedly drawing comparison to the works of Jonathan Swift, and so prompting golden age author/editor Damon Knight to summarize the LRH impact as absolutely unequivocal: “He cut a swath across the science-fiction fantasy world the likes of which has never been seen.” Finally there is all Mission Earth has come to represent “as a milestone work of mainstream fiction,” to cite yet another critic, and all else the series represents in terms of what its author described as “a plea that someone should work on the future.”
"Stranger in a Strange Land"
Classic
Read the specific books mentioned on TR and WRC. "Dry" is the LAST notion that will come to mind.
It will make you scream at the unfairness of the universe that the third volume of "The Last Lion" will never be completed.
If your handle is an indication of your gender then you will fall in love with BOTH men. If you are, in fact, a man, you will be proud to be of the same (flawed) gender as these two heroes.
I re-read Stranger almost once a year, or there abouts. It's like visiting old friends.
One of my favorite pass times is casting who will play each character in THE MOVIE of this book.
Einstein called his 'thought experiments' where he explored the things that could never be tested in real experiments, "gedanken experiments" (a German/yiddish word). Well, I enjoy "gedanken" casting of my favorite books.
Right now my favorites for the major roles in Stranger are:
Jubal Harshaw - Robert Duvall
Jill Boardman - Jennifer Conneley
Ben Caxton - Mel Gibson
Anne (fair witness secretary to JH) - Anna Niccole Smith
The mind boggles at what could be done with a story like Stranger in the right hands!
Besides, he is a prick.
Goodkind, on the other hand, is a West Point grad, and hides Sun Tzu in his stories. The man is a genious.
IMHO
How about "Ringworld"?
Yeah, I'm a chick. I'll put 'em on my list. Thank you for the additional encouragement.
That said, one can always buy used books.:)
I've been enjoying reading some 'legal thrillers' lately. Any suggestions? Besides Grisham...
I second the recommendation about Terry Goodkind. The first book in the series is "Wizards First Rule." Start there. TG has a strong libertarian/Ayn Rand theme that runs through his books, and they are well written.
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