It’s getting to be that time of year when it’s time for me to update our gargantuan book guides for the gift-giving season. So you know what this is a great opportunity for you to do? Tell me all about your favorite books! They don’t have to be new this year, although it would be outstanding to get some new releases on the list. They just have to meet the following criteria:
- Be of secular interest. So no, “Oh, the Bible is my favorite book! And these Christian books about the Bible!” They don’t have to be on secular subjects at all, of course. They just need to be stuff non-religious people can enjoy. If the topic is religion, it should be approached from a secular standpoint.
- No woo. If your favorite author is Deepak Chopra, don’t even bother telling me, cuz woo ain’t going on the list. Debunking woo, however, is completely in!
- No religious fiction. I want some great fiction for this year! Just not stuff that’s all “Our hero saves the day with prayer!” with an undertone of “and that’s why you should convert right now.” Fiction that doesn’t involve gods would be awesome, but ripping great fantasy with awesome gods is totes okay. Y’know, like Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather.
- Books that have an ebook or sample chapters online will get priority. If the book you’re recommending is dead-tree only, please tell me what’s in it and why it is awesome, because I can’t tell from just a title.
That’s pretty much it.
You can look at last year’s guides for inspiration. If you can think of new categories that should be on there, recommend them! And I’m really, really desperately wanting to get more great science stuff for kids, and also great books for kids on diversity, secularism, and social justice.
Did you write a book? Excellent! Give me a chance to promote it. As long as it fits our themes, I’ll be happy to add it. Please email a pdf copy and a synopsis to dhunterauthor at gmail.
If for some reason you can’t comment here, you can email your book recommendations at dhunterauthor at gmail. Just please don’t expect a reply, because I am working on multiple projects and am already swamped.
Let’s make these gargantuan guides the biggest yet!
Ooh, books!
Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman – intelligent female characters using brainpower and the scientific process to work out what’s wrong, rather than charging in with a sword. http://www.rosemarykirstein.com/the-books/ for sample text.
Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series (starting with The Lies of Locke Lamora) – detailed fantasy with women playing an equal role in their society. The religious system starts playing a part in book 3, but it’s definitely not about saving the day with prayer.
Christopher Brookmyre’s The Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks. NB – this is one of the later books in his Jack Parlabane series, so if you hate reading out of order it’s not the one to start with, especially as it gives away some key plot points from earlier books right in the introduction, but it is the main one that deals with debunking woo. He’s often described as representing the genre Tartan Noir, and tends to write in broad Glaswegian in most of his books. Oh, except that Not The End Of The World in set in LA, so has less Scottish dialect, religious fundamentalists and geology, earthquakes and oceanography. You might like that one too!
Catherynne M Valente’s Deathless – retelling of Russian history/folklore and just gorgeous. When I finished the book, I sat stroking the cover in a stunned state. Not so much the secular theme, given the characters from folklore playing a part in it, but you asked for great fiction more generally so I can’t resist dropping this one in the list.
And for a non-fictional book I’ve enjoyed lately, Mark Miodownik’s Stuff Matters is a really interesting take on materials science.
Here are some books I want, if I ever have a job again:
(a) Mark Witton, Pterosaurs: Natural History, Evolution, Anatomy , https://books.google.com/books?id=ND_PzHQuuLgC&printsec=frontcover
(b) Darren Naish’s upcoming big book on all the fuckin’ vertebrates, yes even 40,000 fish. https://www.patreon.com/TetZoo?ty=h
(c) The Unfeathered Bird, By Katrina Van Grouw https://books.google.com/books?id=wYrPAwRh95gC&printsec=frontcover
By the way, here is Darren’s review of Grouw’s book: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/anatomy-makes-a-comeback-in-the-unfeathered-bird/
Why that avatar is displaying next to my comments, I have no idea. Helpfully, [Edit Profile] shows no option for changing it.
I recommend N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19161852-the-fifth-season
It’s a fantasy book set in a extremely geologically active world where the magicians (orogenes in the books) are capable of starting and stopping earthquakes and volcanoes, and are feared, despised and treated as second class citizens. It has good representation of LGBTQ and polyamourous people and I loved it to pieces. By the end of the book I cried a lot…
The viewpoint characters are three orogene women and one of viewpoints is conveyed by second person narration.
I should also add a Content Notice for lots of stuff (including child death, implied rape, grief, systematic oppression, etc.).
Well – “De Rerum Natura” by Lucretius; the Penguin edition is inexpensive and a verse (as opposed to prose) translation of the ode to atomic theory. While reading it, I was struck by how… primitive? scientifically ignorant? naive? …some of his ideas were, but it was pointed out to me that I should start by assuming these were smart people writing back than and I should maybe check my assumptions – which made me think, two thousand years ago there were neither telescopes nor microscopes, all phenomena had to be observed without instruments. It is amazing how close they (the Epicureans) got atomic theory! There is some philosophy of life that follows as a consequence, and while Epicureans were not necessarily atheist, they did not believe the gods intervened in human affairs (if they existed at all).
“Surface Detail” by the late Iain M. Banks – a masterful work of science fiction that explores what happens when virtual reality is cheap and people’s minds can be uploaded at death – some cultures may decide to create their religions’ forms of an afterlife, including a hell for those who they don’t like. One group decides to intervene and destroy the hells that have been created. Of course, being Banks, that is background for a revenge story interwoven with a couple of other threads.
Another Penguin edition – “The Pillow Book” by Sei Shonagon, translated by Meredith McKinney. Not nearly as salacious as the title might imply to us. This book is a deft translation into modern English that allows alien me to enjoy life as a woman in the Japanese Imperial court a thousand years ago. There are substantial footnotes that aid reading, but are not intrusive. There are also some appendices that give useful background.
I am not sure where any of these would fit in your categorization, but I hope that I have inspired everyone to try at least one of these three books!
Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. The English translation maintains the poetic phrasing and pace. The story is about people at a vanity publisher who are exploiting the outlandish conspiracy theories and occult notions of well-off people in order to soak them for money.
They eventually decide that they could make this sort of thing up MUCH better than the kooks, and so they set out – using a scrap of ancient paper and a computer – to start making up a story historic mad-libs style. While they know it’s bullshit, the kooks think it’s legit and things begin to go off the rails.
The book is what Dan Brown novels wish they were, or a lucid Illuminatus Trilogy. It’s a skeptics guide to conspiracy theories. The one person that starts to believe the nonsense is the one that gets into the most trouble, but it does a wonderful job of showing how intoxicating scratching the itch to “know” can be, even when you KNOW the answer is a fiction.
I reread it from time to time, and even though I know what the original manuscript most likely REALLY says, it’s still a totally engrossing tale.
katybe beat me to it: The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein is the perfect amalgam of “fantasy” and science — you’ll find out why fantasy is in quotes when you read the books. There are four so far and she’s working on the fifth, but you know, day job and health problems have interfered with the all-important writing. They are available as e-books (#1 and #2 have been combined into The Steerswoman’s Road). Nary a god in sight, either.
Also, I have chosen Cliff Pickover’s book on death rituals around the world as a birthday/xmas gift for a friend.
And if you want some intelligent and sophisticated mystery, try the Corinna Chapman series (6 books) by Kerry Greenwood. Corinna is a baker in present-day Melbourne, living in an exotic building with very interesting tenants, and manages to get caught up in all sorts of odd goings-on. Written by the same woman who wrote the Phryne Fisher mysteries (20 books), set in 1920s Melbourne. I like them both but I identify a little more with Corinna. Great fun. All of these are in my Permanent Library as they are good enough to re-read.
If you like meticulously researched historical fiction that puts you *there* and doesn’t include current attitudes, try any of the St-Germain novels by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Each book is set in a different time and place (the hero is a vampire, the good guy), so pick one you’d like to know more about (Ancient Rome, Mongol invasion of China, Conquistador Peru, etc.) and enjoy.
I know I picked up the Kirstein recommendation from a commentator on one of the FTB blogs, but I can’t remember who it was – they seem to align well with what people reading here enjoy. In turn, I’ve passed on the suggestion to a few other readers too, in other circles of my life.
I’ve been reading Laurie King’s series of adventure mysteries that feature the character Mary Russell. The first in the series is The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.
The series begins in 1915, when brilliant teenage feminist orphan Mary Russell meets retired detective Sherlock Holmes, and he becomes her friend, mentor, and ultimately partner in crime (solving).
It’s really well done, and a pleasure for Sherlockians, mystery buffs, and feminists in general.
I would only add a warning for the Gentlemen Bastards series, that the first book, while readable and good, might seem tedious and slow. The other two (so far?), esp. the third, more than make up for this. The third one is absolutely excellent.
Ben Aaronovitch’s series is a good set of reads, too – think detective with magic set in modern-day London (for the most part). Includes river gods and other ‘mythical’ creatures but as functioning members of society. The main character is of West African descent and his mother thinks he is a witch-hunter. I think Rivers of London is the first book in the series, and there are currently five. Though I did read the first three in reverse order and I don’t feel like I lost anything (there is an overarching story but it does not dominate nearly enough to ruin each book on its own). Bonus tidbits about London (and surrounding) architecture sprinkled throughout.
However, my most recent Wonderful Discovery is Theatre of the Gods, which was… well, the review linked there pretty much says it all. It was an intricate read and thoroughly entertaining, long yet never quite wordy enough to become boring. Definitely worth a read. I would probably classify it as absurdist, together with Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series – it reminded me so much of those books in tone (though not in subject matter). In which vein, dense is another likely word to describe it. Probably not for everyone, but yes, I am recommending it. (It has the added bonus of having the weirdest little oddly-placed pop-culture references strewn about.) I bought it on a whim and I do not regret it.
I have to think on this, more books later.
(What really got me about Theatre of the Gods, though, was the bit about slippers.)
I didn’t spot SF on the list (I promise, no Star Trek/Star Wars sli-fi). I would recommend nearly anything by such renowned secular authors as David Brin, Alan Steele, or Kim Stanley Robinson. Brin, in “Thor meets Captain America” explores a theme often seen in SF: Gods (or Jehovah) actually show up, and the result is chaos. Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” is a trilogy that explores the ramifications of a universe in which God is just a senile shell of himself. And of course, there’s the old secular classics: Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov. All make great introductions to the secular universe.
In comics, there is Garth Ennis. His “Preacher” series explores the notion that god just up and quit. It’s a very dark comedy, for adult readers.
And, since you encourage submitters to mention any work they’ve written, I’ll shamelessly promote my own novel, “Ice Fall” which is a neo-classic story of the first Interstellar mission. A very old plot, but one that I’ve tried to put new twists on. One of which is that the crew and colonists realize that the further they are from Earth, the less religious they become.
For sale in PDF/Kindle formats here ( http://icefallsfnovel.webege.com/ ), or in hard copy at Lulu.com
Earlier this year I read Ocean to Ocean on Horseback by Willard Glazier, published in 1896. It’s an engaging travelogue of America from a 19th century perspective. It’s free from various sources such as Amazon or the Gutenberg Project. Not exactly a new release, though…
http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B005UFZAIM
In the science category, I read a short interesting book about the eye called The Eye: A Very Short Introduction.
http://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KB1BRV4
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett (RIP). The story of the Apocralypse (because it’s apocryphal).
Seveneves by Neil Stephenson. The moon has been shattered into seven pieces by an unknown actor (primordial black hole?); how will this affect humanity? (just ignore the last third of the book, it goes totally of the rails)
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Fat Charlie Nancy has to deal with his dad’s estate after his dad dies. The hospital scene messes me up every time I read it (My mom is in bad health, but I do NOT cry, it just gets really dusty every time I read that part).
The Martian by Andy Weir. One of the crewmembers of a Mars mission has been left behind on Mars and is 100 million miles away from the nearest human. How does one survive? I haven’t seen the movie yet, but if it is half as good as the book, it will be great.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb/Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes. The first is about the fission bomb, the sequel is about the fusion bomb. They will make you realize that Dr. Strangelove was a documentary, not a parody.
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer. Sydney Padua is an animator who was curious about Ada Lovelace. So she went to Google books and started reading. Along the way, she “fell in love” with Charles Babbage and sort of stumbled her way into making a delightful webcomic about Lovelace and Babbage “fighting crime” in early Victorian London. Now she has made this book which is the most fun (but also backed up by detailed research) biography you can imagine of two very interesting people. I highly recommend it.
P.S., if you want to see Sydney’s web comic, it’s at 2dgoggles.com.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver has long been one of my favorite explicit anti-religious fiction novels.
How long have you got? ;-)
Short version – I grew up on mostly old out of print SF novels, books on astronomy, local botany guides, authors like Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan & Arthur C. Clarke.
A few suggestions for you which you may or may not have already heard of / read & Ithink /hope you’ll like :
1) Pamela Sargent’s ‘Venus’ trilogy – Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows &Child of Venus which features the terraforming of Venus , some great world building including a future Earth and good strong different women characters and arcs. Her ‘Earthseed’ novel is also excellent.
2) Jan Mark’s fairly short and sometimes pretty grim but unconventional novels ‘The Ennead’ & ‘Aquarius’. The first is SF and the second is fantasy but both fairly realistic and bleak in parts but with some very different heroes and anti-heroes. The woman stone-mason in her Ennead is a really pretty extraordinary and unconventional hero.
3) Anvil of Stars’ by Greg Bear with a bisexual main hero and a great set of very creative and different aliens as well as some staggeringly imagined world building. Makes you think, keeps you guessing and again, great characterisation and space opera. Its a sequel to ‘The Forge of God’ (alien invasion novel) but stands well on its own and is the superior of those two in my view.
4) Dava Sobel’s ‘Planets’ & ‘Longitude’ – non-fiction but really interesting and well written. I think you may well have seen these already but just in case not. She also wrote one on the Copernican revolution and the people behind it (‘A More Perfect heaven) incl. an imagined play which was pretty good, informative and worth reading too.
5) Also non-fiction and perhaps not your thing but since my favourites were asked about here; James Kaler (‘The Hundred Greatest stars’ – an astronomy book which well, the name sums it up ell but its well-written and if you like stars fascinating & immensely informative text. Kaler’s Stars website here :
http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/sowlist.html
is one of my favourite sites and gives you a little taste of his style and depth of knowledge and info available. Also hint, scroll all the way down that link and look at the last hypertexted “contsellation” for a possible chuckle. perhapos after clicking some of the other constellation and star inks there.
Could add so much more but reckon this’ll do for now?
Recommendation seconded by me. Love that classic short story which can be found in (at least) his River of Time’ anthology. Won’t spoil it to add its got a nice subtle anti-religious message in it too. His short story / half essay ‘Those Eyes’ is a perfect take on the issue of “flying saucer” type UFO’s too. (That’s in ‘Otherness’ another great Brin analogy.) I’d also strongly recommend Brin’s Startide Rising’ novel & the Uplift series generally.
PS. Did I leave out a recommendation for David Brin’s Earth novel as well there? I did? Well, that was remiss of me too – great read and full of some marvellous ideas and characters as well. Nicely imaged relatively near future SF.
One more suggestion (know I’ve said /typed a lot already) but recently read another very good space opera -unusually all set in our solar system, Leviathan Wakes’ by James S.A.Corey 2011 orbit books which was a really good and well-written read as well. Incidentally, that my copy of that got soaked with water during a field trip. (Had it there to read on the bus.) Memo to self and advice for others – keep water bottles in plastic bags as well as just backpacks in future! D’oh!
Also read the classic ‘Black Like Me’ by John Howard Griffin a white man who medically transformed himself into an “African-American” back in the 1960’s South. An eyeopening, gripping true story which has hopefully dated and had things change quite a lot since?
Oh & Tim Flannery’s‘Country’ is also a really funny, informative mix of personal life story and non-fiction on kangaroos including a lot of extinct varieties and I’d recommend any of his works too. The opening line for that reads “When I was young I met a man whose arse bore the bite mark of a Tasmanian tiger.”
Then there’s Varley’s ‘Titan’ novel if you want a really great swashbuckling SF book with excellent heroes and anything of his really as well as any Asimov … and .. well I did warn you! Afraid most of these are old and may be hard to find but hope there’s at least a few suggestions you’ll be able to read and enjoy anyhow.
Okay, just one more – and a link to a thread you might also find interesting in this context :
http://freethoughtblogs.com/teacosy/2015/01/03/an-actual-resolution-no-more-white-men/#comment-3673
On Aoife’s Consider the Tea Cosy blog. Special emphasis, / request there for non-white male authors – scroll up and down for plenty more from plenty of people. My comment & suggestions there overlaps with ones made here but a few other ones too.
I know I’ve mentioned him before (both here and randomly over the years) but I highly advise the reading of Mervyn Peake. You could say he’s a bit Tolkien-like (similar era, very descriptive books, etc.), but there’s nothing particularly optimistic or easily defined in his novels (in terms of Good vs. Evil – though Evil as such is usually easily identifiable, I would say the Good characters aren’t easily Good). He’s got several books though the most famous (I would say) is the Gormenghast
TrilogySeries (it’s only called a trilogy because he only managed to write three books before he died, though a fourth was begun), but he’s also got a great little piece called Mr Pye, about a man who wakes up one morning to discover that he has sprouted angel wings. Compared to Gormenghast, Mr Pye is a lot of light-hearted fun.If you want really creepy Peake, though, with a (pretty much equally) disparaging view of both religion and science, please see Boy in Darkness, which is one of the creepiest, creepiest, creepiest pieces I have ever read (which might not be saying much at all).
Also a wonderful illustrator and poet, is Mr Peake – on all kinds of themes.
A long-time favourite book of mine is A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright, which is a cross between H.G. Wells fan fiction and a look into a dystopian future brought about by global warming and new diseases. Includes actual time travel, and a future world with no white people. Some White Saviour themes included, but since nobody is saved in the end, it possibly doesn’t matter. Vague similarities to Atwood’s Oryx and Crake pre- and post-apocalyptic universe (also a good read, mind you, that whole MaddAddam trilogy). Lots of English literature strewn about this one via quotes and lamentations from the main character. It’s pretty awesome (personal opinion).
Wright, as it happens, also wrote Stolen Continents, which is a non-fiction look at the North and South American continents prior to the arrival of colonists. I read it ages ago, so I can’t say if it’s overly optimistic, but it certainly encourages the concept that no, these weren’t simply savages living the primitive life.
He also has a (historical?) fiction called Henderson’s Spear, about a woman discovering her family history, which has some possible links to Jack the Ripper (via Prince Albert, ha!). I have mediocre feelings about this one, but that’s mostly because I’m not huge on historical fiction without any fantasy/sci-fi elements. ;)
Anything by Ursula K LeGuin (especially stuff from the Hainish universe, but Earthsea has got to go on the list).
And The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. Read it via an FtB recommendation and did not regret it. Addresses questions of racism and bigotry in a fantasy setting, and does so rather excellently.
And for something more literature-like and serious (ha), here’s Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky. It’s a great look back into surviving and escaping the Soviet regime, and then surviving as an immigrant to a new country. Some unethical behaviour by the main character (he’s a professor who ends up sleeping with one of his students), but the survival stories are both painful and funny, and offer some great insight into the Soviet ‘lifestyle’ for those who may not be familiar with that particular mentality. (Interesting fact: the Toronto university campus in the story, though under a different name, is the same campus that I went to these ten-plus years ago. It’s a satellite campus of the University of Toronto, and used to be the only campus in Canada that offered a bachelor’s in forensic science to a select few students.)
The title, by the way, references a quote by Stalin (though wikipedia says someone else said it first, plus a few other interesting tidbits about the quote-as-propaganda-tool).
I’d like to reiterate katybe’s and movablebooklady’s recommendations of Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman books. They are un-put-downable, feature a skeptic/scientist protagonist, and come fairly cheaply as e-books. Also super glad to see that RQ mentioned the Gormenghast books – more people need to read them! In a similar vein, I’d recommend anything by China Miéville, whose work ranges from classic SF to fantasy but always has full characters, detailed (often grim) worlds, and broad ideas.
#TeamGormenghast!!!
Oh! And Antoine de St Exupery’s (same feller who wrote The Little Prince) Night Flight is a meditation (?) on duty and responsibility and progress in the face of adversity, and human relations. I’ve never read an English translation, so I don’t know how well the language maintains the character, but the novel is more focussed on the combination of skill and luck that we use to get through life rather than any divine intervention. For all that it’s a rather dark little book, it’s not particularly pessimistic.
For some reason I find it has a weird connection to Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris that I cannot adequately explain, though it is possible that I merely read both books around the same time at an impressionable moment.