Mistborn: The Final Empire! If I’m not mistaken, “heist book in fantasy setting” is literally one of the main things that inspired Brandon Sanderson to write this.
I typically re-read the LOTR, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion once a year. Well, The Silmarillion is once every two years because, whew, it is a dense one.
Wow, that's a lot of rereading. Me and some friends do a LOTR watch party every year, making food and eating food as they eat it in the movies. But reading the books every year, that's quite a feat!
Devil in the White City is also a great book, the first book of his that I’ve read. Story of America’s first recognized serial killer, occuring in Chicago during the World’s Fair. Worth checking out.
That was my first book of his I read as well, back in college when I was taking a true crime class. My school had great English electives that I kept taking for fun and it set me back a year because I didn’t have anybody smart to tell me that they didn’t get me any closer to graduating.
Definitely need to check this one out. Larson in general is such a great author (at least to me) because he tells the personal stories of people involved in history that a really make it interesting.
If you haven’t read it, I’d also recommend “In the Garden of Beasts”, also by Larson. It’s about the American Ambassador to Germany and his family living through the rise of Nazi Germany and how surreal the entire thing is.
I’ll check it out for sure! Like you said, it’s human stories in historical context and he has such a knack for that. So much historical non-fiction struggles to either tell the human story while also providing the straight facts in an easily consumable way, or tell the history while providing human color. He is really great at striking a good balance with it.
I seldom get creeped out by things but there was something about House of Leaves that legitimately got under my skin.
I do understand how some people feel like it’s Foster Wallace levels of self indulgence, but I like that he did something a little weird. Like Maerman mentioned, the full color is great.
I’ve been slowly going through the Familiar, but I worry that it’s too ambitious a project.
I’m from America so of course our literary classics are pretty widely known in the western world, so I’m going to recommend something a bit more niche: There There by Tommy Orange. It shines light on many different aspects of the Native American experience, specifically in Oakland, California. It covers addiction, poverty, culture, and heritage in a way that I (not Native myself) found moving.
From the original “pulp” era: Sax Rohmer. Love that 1920s pulp fiction. He’s horribly racist, but it’s enjoyable if you just swap the “heroes” and “villians” in your head as you read. (Fu Manchu is the most evil man in the world because… he wants to free China from British colonial rule? Right. Go Fu Manchu!)
Also, Doc Savage. I like Doc in the same way I like the 60s Batman TV show: I don’t particularly like the “heroes”, I just enjoy the environment. (In one Doc Savage story I read recently, Doc’s plane is described as being so INCREDIBLY high-tech and bleeding edge, that the WHEELS RETRACT WHEN IN FLIGHT. Amazing. WHAT ELSE WILL THE FUTURE BRING!?!?)
I grew up on Lovecraft, but have discovered that what I like most in his work was done better, previously, by Lord Dunsany. (Particularly the Dream Quest stuff.)
I own a few magazines from the end of that era. These are issues #2 & #3 of Fantastic Magazine, 1952:
Finished the sequel to Becky Chamber’s A Psalm For The Wild-Built. Can’t recommend this series more highly for a glimpse into a calming and peaceful alternative future.
I use Goodreads, it’s got a very annoying interface but I do like being able to discover other people’s lists. What’s the pro to leaving for one of these other platforms?
I left GoodReads because I try to have as little to do with Amazon as possible. I tried StoryGraph but never warmed up to it. I realize LibraryThing has some indirect Amazon ownership, but I found it an acceptable compromise.
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