My friend and I do buddy reads (we call every Wednesday to discuss the ~50 pages we’d read that week) and her most recent pick was The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, which was fantastic and now I have to follow that somehow!
We read a mix of books in varying qualities and vibes from children’s books to discworld to Jane Austen to modern Hugo award nominee type stuff. But we tend to be happiest with some sort of “genre” element (sci fi, fantasy, alternate history, any type of speculative fiction).
We had a lot of fun with The Buffalo Hunter Hunter because it was meaty! It was a vampire story, yes, but it also had depth and layers and gave us the opportunity to actually discuss characterization and word choice and allegory and what the author was trying to communicate about the nature of colonialism and all that good stuff!
So I’m looking for more books with a speculative element that have some literary meat to them! Would appreciate any recommendations!
by IReadBooksSometimes
13 Comments
Really like Nina Allan (Conquest), Martin Macinnes (in Ascension) or John M Ford (The dragon waiting)
Either of Simon Jimenez’s novels will blow your doors off, the Vanished Birds or the Spear Cuts Through Water but I’d pick Spear. A fantasy book with an inset map that is more vibes than geography. A lot of the book is told in the most unique format I’ve ever read. You could discuss that alone for an hour.
If you’re up for a literary challenge, check out The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It’s a series of science fantasy novels about an apprentice torturer and his life journey. It has very dense but beautiful language, and readers spend hours parsing through the writing to understand everything. This is THE speculative fiction with literary meat.
The Birdverse is a great series of novellas by R.B.Lemberg. They come together as a tapestry of an alien world, and the language is very poetic, similar to Le Guin.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s *The Left Hand of Darkness* focuses on a diplomat sent to contact a world where the inhabitants have no fixed gender. I found it a fascinating read in part because of the narration — the outsider narrator arrives with certain biases and preconceived notions, and they come through in the text long before he admits to them.
Check out The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin.
The hearing trumpet by Leonora Carrington
Hyperion by Dan Simmons. or maybe something by Ursula Le Guin?
Jerusalem by Alan Moore
Infinite Jest by DF Wallace
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
Paul Lynch: Prophet Song
It’s really taken off the last few years, but if you haven’t done *I Who Have Never Known Men* yet, it’s definitely a good one to discuss
Zone One by Colson Whitehead. A zombie tale written by a two time Pulitzer prize winner
“I Cheerfully Refuse” by Leif Enger. It’s a near future sliding into dystopia that celebrates community and the written word. The protagonist spends most of the book fleeing around Lake Superior as he’s pursued by powerful forces and local threats he encounters along the way. References to Orpheus, The Odyssey, Quixote and more.