Hello guys, I love reading books but I feel I'm not learning anything new.
Do you guys have some recommendations that will teach me something? It can be history, science, some random information but I want it to be Fiction at the same time.
by Shining-bright
13 Comments
Jeff and Michael Shaara have written books on major battles/ wars in American history. Very well researched but definitely fiction. The Frozen Hours stands out, along with the most famous, The Killer Angels.
Casualties of Truth. Part history about the Apartheid immunity hearings in South Africa in the 90s, part about the black experience through a female narrator, and part thriller about the past catching up with you.
Oh and also both of Benjamín Labatut’s books: The Maniac and When we Cease to Understand the World. About titans of physics especially around the atom bomb and early 30s (time period may be off, go to GoodReads for the descriptions). But it’s a lot about their personal lives, partly true partly not. Very interesting.
Killer Angels is a good fictional Gettysburg. Les Miserable has a section on Waterloo that’s solid. War and Peace on the Battle of Borodino. Options if the history you like is battles.
Wolf Hall. Playground by Powers. Creation Lake by Kushner
Babel (or the Necessity of Violence) by R.F Kuang
It’s set in 1830s Oxford and delves deep in the intricacies of language and translation. I studied linguistics in university which is why I liked this very much. It’s very political and tackles issues like classism, racism, sexism, but in a more nuanced way imo (not just repeating buzzwords and phrases off of the internet). I also just personally like R. F. Kuang’s writing style, intelligent and humorous without sounding pretentious and making the reader feel dumb.
What general region do you live in?
The Terror by Dan Simmons is a fictional retelling about real ship—the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus—attempting to force the northwest passage.
I found the portrayal of the Navy, naval officers, and autocratic expectations of the King’s representatives incredible.
Enjoy!
This guy by the name of Konet on Amazon has a couple really good ones. Stop Stepping on Rakes.
Historical fiction always teaches me things my public school education neglected to teach. Some favorites:
* The Rose Code
* The Women
* Hello Beautiful
* Forever Amber (originally considered smut… very tame by our standards today)
* Great Circle
* Diana Gabaldon books. More historical romance but so well-researched.
* Pillars of the Earth. Intimidating read but I came away with an entirely new scope of a lot of history, religion, and politics.
I also enjoy books that teach me about science, particularly when it ties back to a greater impact in some way.
* Contact
* Any Andy Weir book
* Any Richard Powers book (I’m still picking my jaw off the floor from Playground)
* Michael Crichton (gotta separate the art from the artist here tho)
Then some other randoms
* The Making of Another Major Motion Picture. It’s by Tom Hanks and it’s about how movies get made. A lot of people thought it was too detailed and found it annoying. Personally I want EVERY detail Tom Hanks is willing to fictionalize!
* Taylor Jenkins Reid books. These are often lumped into romance but I don’t think they belong there.
* Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Learning about the video game industry
* The Sentence. It’s the indigenous perspective on COVID and George Floyd
Edit: fixed formatting from crummy Reddit client on mobile
The Alchemist. It’s a very polarising book. Short, I read it over lunch. Some people love it some hate it. I’m about to re read it. It gain something different from it each read. It’s simple yet… not.
Richard Powers has always linked his fiction to broader topics, like creating a virtual reality realm (Plowing the Dark), the relationship of trees to the rest of life (The Overstory), artificial intelligence (Galatea 2.2), the ocean (Playground), Capgras syndrome (The Echo Maker), astrobiology (Bewilderment), bioterrorism as embodied in musical scores transcribed to genetic data (Orfeo), the meaning of life on a personal level — love, music, art and science (The Gold Bug Variations), etcetera.
The Nightengale by Kristin Hannah or The Four Winds by her.
Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King is funny, satirical, every character/name/place has some relationship to history or cultural movements, you learn about Indigenous culture and history, and it is SO GOOD