Recommendations? Don't mind if I do!
Well if you have any interest in conspiracy theories and all that sort of stuff Foucault's Pendulum is a pretty great book. It's about three very intelligent and very bored editors at a vanity publishing company who deal with a lot of nuts publishing conspiracy stuff, about Knights Templar and holy artifacts and all that assassin's creed shit, plus the occult, who decide to write their own grand unifying conspiracy theory for fun and sell it to the nuts. But shit starts to go bad when the nuts buy into the new conspiracies and the editors themselves get too caught up in the events which follow. Though I suppose I should warn you that it's not exactly a light and simple book, it's written by Umberto Eco, whose novels at times seem to be history books in disguise. I like them, but I appreciate them more when the occasional historical info dump is about a topic I am actually interested in, which was often the case in Foucault's Pendulum, but not so much in The Name of The Rose which was a really good book about a Sherlock Holmes-ish monk investigating a murder in an abbey in the 1300's that would occasionally veer off into a discussion about the schism in the church between the Franciscan and Dominican orders. Not my cup of tea, but I still enjoyed the book.
I am currently reading House of Leaves, and it has seemed pretty damn cool so far. It's a horror novel that's a bit different from your usual book. It's about a documentarian/journalist who moves into a new home with his family only to discover there is a massive, dark labyrinth within it, which isn't there at first but grows out of what began as an ordinary hallway. What makes it different from the usual book is how it's formatted in such a way that the actual physical book itself is almost a prop being used to help tell a story rather than a mere collection of the words which make up the story. It reminds me a lot of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, whose short story collection Ficciones I also highly recommend.
Player of Games and Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks (who sadly passed away earlier this year) are really good scifi novels from his culture series, set in a far flung future where AI does most of the dirty work and most of the humans or aliens can pretty much live lives of leisure. When they're not at war with each other, that is. And they often are.
Blindsight by Peter Watts is about a future where vampires were discovered to be an actual offshoot of the human race, they were brilliant, far more intelligent than humans, but also sociopathic and canabalistic. They died out around the time humans started to become more civilized and form large communities since the vampires were loners and all that. However humans use genes to bring them back, a la Jurassic Park, to take advantage of their brilliance, and made some slight modifications to keep them from being too much of a threat. Then an alien ship shows up and everyone starts to panic. A team of specialists and led by a Vampire is sent to investigate.
The A Song of Ice and Fire novels, starting with A Game of Thrones, are really fucking good.
Neal Stephenson is a really fun writer. His books are filled with lots of nerdy stuff and also very smart. Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash are probably the best but Anathem is really good too.
The Terror by Dan Simmons is a horror novel about what happened to a couple ships that get trapped in the ice while looking for the northwest passage in the mid 1800's.
The Winter King, Enemy of God and Excalibur by Bernard Cornwell are a more down to earth take on the legend of King Arthur.
And I guess that's enough for now.
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