• Announcements

    • Robin

      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
The Old Hack

Book recommendations thread, Return of the

Recommended Posts

Book recommendations can be a happy thing especially when traded around between friends. So, without further ado, I am restarting the thread.

First, since this seems to be in the air, I would like to recommend The Gun Primer: A Writer's Guide To Firearm Facts For Fiction by Bruce Jenvey for anyone interested in either writing stories where knowing your guns might be important or in knowing a bit more about the topic in general. Please note that it is a very basic work and that the author strives to merely inform about firearms and their function without getting into the political side. As he says, it is an attempt to help writers avoid basic and common misconceptions about firearms (or for that matter, to allow those who read it to better debate gun control issues, whether pro or anti, based on facts rather than urban myths.)

I found the book easily read, entertaining and helpful in clearing up certain misunderstandings of mine. The author really did try hard to keep political judgment out of the work and in my opinion succeeded fairly well. If you are a firearms expert in your own right I doubt he has very much new to tell, but at the very least he has some entertaining anecdotes about horrible mistakes in TV shows and books committed by writers whom I can only believe have never actually held a loaded gun in their hands, much less fired one.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'll toss in a blatant family self-promo here, although the book as a whole is much more than that. It's called Lone Star Lawmen: The Second Century of the Texas Rangers. I recommend it because a part of it talks about a distant grandfather of mine, Louis G. Phares, who helped form the Texas Department of Public Safety from the Highway Department. It's not a happy story, since there's a lot of political messing with the process he used, and he wasn't exactly the friendliest person on earth, but hey - there's a good segment in the book about him.

BTW, he was responsible for coordinating the capture of Bonnie and Clyde. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer may have carried out the raid, but it was with the organizational help of Chief Louis G. Phares.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I've been in the mood for fun books lately, stuff that makes me laugh and generally has a happy ending.  Most recently, that was Donna Andrew's Meg Langslow mysteries.  Meg is a blacksmith and a very organized person with a family that gets odder (or just reveals more oddness) with every book. Each book has a different setting or hobby.  First one, Murder With Peacocks, she's Maid of Honor at three weddings in one summer.  A fan-run sci-fi con, a computer gaming company, a giant yard sale, a Revolutionary War reenactment, X-treme Croquet (which is a real thing), and the tourist-dependent town's efforts at Christmas and Halloween have been favorites.  Every book is good for several laughs, and you can really get to know and root for the ongoing characters.  I just finished re-reading the whole series, and she seems to come out with a couple of new ones per year so I'm expecting another Christmas by the end of the year.

She also wrote a mystery series as part of a challenge, at the 1996 Malice Domestic convention, to create a protagonist no one had ever used in a mystery before.  She did one with an artificial intelligence program.  Picture if Google, instead of having a bare-bones search engine, had created "librarian" programs who could help you with whatever research you were doing, each with a different personality and the ability to improve their own programming to be more useful (including improving their interactions with customers).  That's Turing Hopper, named for the father of AI and for Admiral Grace Hopper, mother of computing.  I haven't read that series in quite a while, but the books were on the shelf next to Meg's series so I checked them out, and am looking forward to seeing how well it's holding up given how much progress has happened since they were published.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Recent discussion has reminded me of Anne McCaffrey's splendid Dragonriders of Pern series. I can only highly recommend it. Also worth mentioning is its spinoff Dragonsong trilogy, also by McCaffrey, which is more focused on the ordinary people of Pern than the dragonriders themselves.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
On 10/20/2017 at 0:16 PM, The Old Hack said:

Recent discussion has reminded me of Anne McCaffrey's splendid Dragonriders of Pern series. I can only highly recommend it. Also worth mentioning is its spinoff Dragonsong trilogy, also by McCaffrey, which is more focused on the ordinary people of Pern than the dragonriders themselves.

Menolly is hardly ordinary. (Neither is the Harper Hall.)

Nerilka's Story comes closer to being about ordinary people but Nerilka is also hardly ordinary.

(Fun: there's a minor character in Nerilka's Story, named Moreta. She's the title character of Moreta's Ride, where Nerilka shows up briefly in one scene.)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
10 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

Menolly is hardly ordinary. (Neither is the Harper Hall.)

Nerilka's Story comes closer to being about ordinary people but Nerilka is also hardly ordinary.

(Fun: there's a minor character in Nerilka's Story, named Moreta. She's the title character of Moreta's Ride, where Nerilka shows up briefly in one scene.)

Nonetheless. We get to see how the Threadfall and the struggle of the Dragonriders look from the perspective of people stuck on the ground. We also get a look at ordinary Hold life that helps flesh out the setting and which makes it even better in my opinion.

Incidentally, Steven Brust's Vallista just got released. Anyone unfamiliar with Vlad Taltos the assassin and his world should probably start with an earlier book in the series but for those who know him it is well worth reading. I am amazed at how he has written books in this series for a quarter century now and how they still come out fresh, each revealing new facets of the mystery that is the world of Dragaera.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
On 10/21/2017 at 2:26 PM, Don Edwards said:

(Fun: there's a minor character in Nerilka's Story, named Moreta. She's the title character of Moreta's Ride, where Nerilka shows up briefly in one scene.)

It's really the other way 'round -- Moreta was first mentioned in the Harper Hall series, in "The Ballad of Moreta's Ride," and a few years later Anne McCaffrey went back and turned it into a novel.  (There was one major change in the events of the book versus the song, but she explained that away as the Masterharper of the day deliberately altering things for the ballad.)

Nerilka was a minor character in Moreta, but Anne was so taken with her, that she wound up giving her her own book, exploring the same events from a different angle.  Personally, I love it when authors give us that sort of insight into how they created a story, especially when the characters have taken on a life of their own.

On 10/21/2017 at 2:43 PM, The Old Hack said:

Nonetheless. We get to see how the Threadfall and the struggle of the Dragonriders look from the perspective of people stuck on the ground. We also get a look at ordinary Hold life that helps flesh out the setting and which makes it even better in my opinion.

Half-Circle Sea Hold was fascinating to see, even without the Thread aspects.

Years ago, I found out about a Pern online RPG/storytelling where you start out as a Holder, get Searched, and go through training to become a Dragonrider, join a Weyr, etc.  Well, I didn't really want to commit to a character's whole lifespan, but it sounded like a lot of fun, so I created a headstrong, risk-taking young recruit, got a dragon, joined classes with hatch-mates, did a few stunts to establish him taking foolish, careless risks -- and then had him and his young dragon embed themselves in rock during training on how to go between.

On 10/21/2017 at 2:43 PM, The Old Hack said:

Incidentally, Steven Brust's Vallista just got released. Anyone unfamiliar with Vlad Taltos the assassin and his world should probably start with an earlier book in the series but for those who know him it is well worth reading. I am amazed at how he has written books in this series for a quarter century now and how they still come out fresh, each revealing new facets of the mystery that is the world of Dragaera.

I read that series at least a quarter-century ago, and have not been able to keep up with everything written since.  It's on my list of things to go back and re-read from the beginning.  My sister is really into it, she's probably thrilled to see a new one!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

By the way, if you're a Pern fan, I highly recommend you seek out a copy of The People of Pern, a collaboration between Anne McCaffrey and Robin Wood which resulted in some truly amazing portraits of almost all of the main characters up to that point.  The portrait of Masterharper Robinton is fantastic!  Zoom in to see the sort of detail Robin Wood puts into her paintings.  Sebell, too.  One of my all-time favorite artists and all-time favorite authors collaborating is great to start with, but it gets better -- there are some little details about characters that were dropped in that we didn't find out in the books for years, if ever.  Camo's parents, for one, which was never addressed at all in the original trilogies.  But even if you already know everything in there, the portraits are well worth seeking out.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I would like to recommend Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. If you are curious about his work it is a good work to wet your teeth on as it both stands on it's own, yet if you are into meta-fiction it works as the first release in the larger Cosmere.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now