Veeky Forums approved reading list

Based on the earlier thread and 1d4chan's list, I made a list on goodreads for Veeky Forums-approved fiction. The thread 404'd but I thought I'd repost it so that other people could vote and add books.

goodreads.com/list/show/109337._tg_approved_reading_list

Other urls found in this thread:

mega.nz/#!OgYDzDRB!nhF1QL0xFOxTZVXwNtnEoRAnMI5N6d-yU68aQkqGXfQ
gutenberg.org/ebooks/7477
sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_hoard.htm
mega.nz/#!7sRmHaKa!8lQfa7ZyDLbJMLVYAcmW7FGjF_vRTWv6JtqeDWr_8IA
best-sci-fi-books.com/reddits-favorite-stand-alone-sf-novels/
goodreads.com/list/show/109337._tg_approved_reading_list
10minutemail.com/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

The rankings are all out of whack because I'm the only person who has voted thus far, so the books I personally have read are all at the top of the list.

Please add The Night Land a Story Retold. A fantastic setting, but the original story was written rather autistically.

It's in there under William Hope Hodgson's Night Lands, Volume I: Eternal Love. I put in Stoddard's retelling, so now they're both in there.

Remember to vote on your favorites if you have a goodreads account!

...

Okay, I added a bunch of these.

Bear in mind I can only add so many books to a list.

...

I'm limited to 100 choices, and so far I have 92. Pick 8 of those and I'll add them.

2bh the best of it looks to be already on it

Are there any books you'd recommend removing from the list?

Well, there's nothing on it I've read that I don't think ought not to be there.

EARTHSEA
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I'm going to break from the party line here and probably get swarmed with negative responses saying I'm just baiting for (You)'s but I'm gonna unironically say I don't recommend Lord of the Rings.

Now, I've read LotR. I liked it. But it's got some problems. The most obvious is it's dense, dry, and filled with a bunch of weird "sidequest" chapters which kind of detract from a fluid narrative. Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire are the most obvious. It takes a considerable amount of effort to read it and really pay attention.

Unless you're the kind of person who just likes reading long epics and analyzing them piece by piece, there really isn't much you can "get" from reading these books which you can't get from watching the movies. Tolkien's worldbuilding is beautiful, and he's got some fun ideas, but the book is intended for literature scholars instead of casual readers.

Some people insist it's the backbone of modern fantasy. Which it is, but only in a superficial sense. You read something like Eragon or any of the FR novels and those are pretty far removed from what Tolkien actually presents. Yeah he gave us Elf forests and grimdark orcs but do you really need an in-depth reading to get that?

Now I don't hate the books and I won't tell people to stay away from them. But at the same time I won't begrudge anyone who takes a look at them and decides it's not for them.

I loved LOTR and I absolutely agree that it's not for everyone. However, as the inspiration for D&D and therefore the tabletop RPG hobby as a whole, it simply must be on our recommended list.

...

I'd add David Gemmell's Legend and John Scalzi's Old Man's War to the list.

I second Old Man's War.
Great sci-fi, and I thought the idea was pretty unique, although I don't read much sci-fi.

Tolkien is a good world-builder, but a terrible storyteller. The Hobbit is targeted younger and is more of an adventure romp (or Tolkien's version of one, anyway), so it's a lot more entertaining and readable, but it's still pretty dry.

Have you ever read the Iron Tower trilogy? Basically, Dennis McKiernan wrote an unauthorized sequel to the Lord of the Rings, where some totally-not-hobbits accompanied dwarves to the totally-not-mines-of-Moria to clear them out a couple of centuries after events which in no way resemble what happened in The Lord of the Rings. His publisher was like, "Hey, that's great, but it references back to all this shit that happened before. You should write that story." So he wrote the prequel to the unauthorized sequel to LotR.

So what you get is essentially a retelling of LotR, with some notable changes (there's no Gandalf-equivalent, for instance, and no magic ring, and the not-hobbits are actually badass archers). And while I thought that the writing was initially a bit young adult-y, I found the story to be much more compelling and immersive.

Anyway, a pdf of the first book in the trilogy is here, for anybody who wanted to check it out. It's an easy read.

mega.nz/#!OgYDzDRB!nhF1QL0xFOxTZVXwNtnEoRAnMI5N6d-yU68aQkqGXfQ

These have to be widely-read books? Because Dark is the Sun is a great post-post-post-post-post collapse book and is essential reading for folks into shit like Gamma World... even though nobody else has ever read it. Failing that, I'd recommend Brian Aldiss's Hothouse (the abridge version of which was published as The Long Afternoon of Earth), which is from the same basic genre, but significantly more recognized. Hiero's Journey is a post-collapse book (though not far future like the other two) with weird mutant beasties that seems to get a lot of attention, but I honestly found it to be rather mediocre.

Lovecraft is a bit tricky, because there are so many good stories, but they're novella-length at most, and so many of them are short stories. Some notable ones that were left off your list: The Shadow Out of Time, The Colour Out of Space, and The Call of Cthulhu. I personally dislike The Dunwich Horror, and think Lovecraft is at his worst when his stories focus on actual magic/witchcraft.

Speaking of Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany was a big influence of his, and Dunsany's The Book of Wonder is a great collection of short fairy tales with a dark twist.

ebooks and such of The Book of Wonder are available here: gutenberg.org/ebooks/7477

Here's one story from that book to whet your appetite. It's only like 5 or 6 pages long, so you can blow through it pretty quickly.

The Hoard of the Gibbelins -- sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_hoard.htm

Here's an htm of Dark Is the Sun, which is currently out of print, as far as I know - mega.nz/#!7sRmHaKa!8lQfa7ZyDLbJMLVYAcmW7FGjF_vRTWv6JtqeDWr_8IA

>Eragon
>Wizard's first rule

i have this in my bookmarks (if you excuse reddit):
best-sci-fi-books.com/reddits-favorite-stand-alone-sf-novels/

For those in a slightly more post-collapse mood I can strongly recommend two books, the first being Star's Reach and the second being Amerigan Tales. It's an interesting take on what may happen down the road in the world. If you're looking for a more cozy sci-fi setting the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series is great for that.

Hyperion is not a stand-alone book.

I'm happy to see a Vlad book in there, and one of the good ones, at that. Jhereg is another good one.

Three Hearts and Three Lions is honestly a pretty meh book, and I wouldn't recommend it except for how its influence on D&D.

Nothing from Karl Edward Wagner, but instead have Animal Farm. Just kill yourself, OP!

No Ender's Game?

No The Survivalist?

I recently read Journey to the Center of the Earth, and it was boring as fuck. It was 90% rock climbing. Only at the very end do you get to some interesting stuff. In terms of old books, I read Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World before that, and though I wouldn't say it was stellar, it was a decent bit more interesting (granted, it came out like half a century after Journey to the Center of the Earth, but we're still talking 1912, which isn't exactly recent).

All the LotR books (including The Two Towers) rate higher than Dune on Goodreads. Fucking Homeland, The Drizzt book, rates higher than Dune on Goodreads.

I tried doing something like this last thread. Pic related. We really need to distinguish WHY some of these books are recommended because some of them are quite frankly not the best reads or have awful characters but have other redeeming features.

Good setting should be a globe, or at least a circle. Good magic could be a wand, or a crescent moon, or even the star (or maybe a gear for tech? a gear and a star? not sure with this one). The caption works for good story. For good characters, maybe a face or mask? You also might want one for the actual prose (a quill?).

Now to argue with your choices.

I enjoy the Conan stories, but the characterization isn't particularly deep, and Conan, himself, is boring as fuck. Dune doesn't get good tech/magic? I'm not sure LotR deserves good story (good setting, yes) and I don't think it's any more deserving of good characters than Dune.

I created a Goodreads account using 10minutemail just so I could vote. So I'm one of the apparently 3 people who have voted for shit.

Seriously, take off Lies of Locke Lamora. That book is utter shite.

I haven't read it, but my friend thought it was better than Dune. I don't believe him.

Can you help me out here?
I am looking for a book or book series like a mix of X-files and Dresden Files but set in a high fantasy setting.
Following an investigator of some sort trying to figure out some conspiracy or magical activities.
The focus should be on the mystery part.
Is there such a thing?

are gamebooks/choose your own adventure Veeky Forums ???

Nor should you! That book was a hot fucking mess. Lynch can't plot his way out of a paper bag...

Earthsea, Amber and A Riddle-Master Of Hed should be in.

Ah yes, spend 450 pages introducing characters and the last two killing all but a few to set up a hamhanded Adam and Even ending. World Of Tiers is a far better work by Farmer.

Steven Brust's Vlad books -- Taltos, Jhereg, etc.-- usually center around a mystery / conspiracy of some sort, and it's a high magic setting, so there are almost always magical shenanigans involved. However, the mystery solutions normally feel like ass-pulls to me, and the mystery is honestly secondary to the colorful characters. Also, despite there being a decent bit of death in some of those books, the tone is relatively lighthearted, so if you're looking for something spooky, you might be better off looking elsewhere.

Dark is the Sun does get a bit kill-happy towards the end, but by a third of the way through the book, all of the major characters but two have been introduced, and by two-thirds of the way through, they all have.

An for World of Tiers, I've not read it, but the premise interests me a lot less, and I absolutely hate it when people from our world are transported to some other fantastical realm (whether that be falling asleep on Earth and waking up on Mars, or riding a roller coaster into the magical world of Dungeons and Dragons).

I'm reading the Culture, anything which I should expect?

So I'm poking around good reads, and I have yet to find a book with a bad rating. What's something familiar that was really bad?

Also, by my count, only half of the characters die, and I don't really get what you're talking about when you say that he killed off everybody to set up an Adam and Eve ending, since there were a bunch of other people with them at the end. I don't see how having the people who died there too would've changed anything.

Good suggestions.

And yeah, the actual commendations weren't very thought out. I just slapped a few on as an example.

I probably need more tags for things like "long series", "first book is bad", "read everything and anything by this author", and "controversial quality".

Muad'dib did nothing wrong.

Oh, and probably some arrow tags for "directly influenced" since so many of these books are based on the ideas presented in others and some are the direct influences of RPG concepts.

Although I would hope anyone browsing Veeky Forums would at least be culturally aware of that kind of thing.

>Muad'dib did nothing wrong.
Except agreeing to star in more than one book.

>And yeah, the actual commendations weren't very thought out. I just slapped a few on as an example.
They'll always be controversial in any case, no matter what you put down.

Did you know some people actually liked the second dune book better than the first?
Shocking, I know.

>Did you know some people actually liked the second dune book better than the first?
Yeah, but some people still think we faked the moon landing. Honestly, though, Messiah ds a decent book taken on its own; it just isn't anywhere near as good as Dune.

OP here.
It's only near the top because it's the first one I added, and it's the first one I added because it's the one I read most recently.

Earthsea and Amber are both in there. Riddle-master I'll add.

This is a particularly awful collection. Less than a quarter are worth reading.

Many people don't rate books unless they liked them, so scores are inflated. 3.5 stars on GR is probably about equivalent to 2 stars.

I go out of my to rate shit I hate, because it deserves it.

This.
But most of the comprehensive reviews I see on these sites tend to be negative, while positive reviews are mostly fanboy gushing.

Such is the nature of user-driven review sites.

Though to be fair, the obnoxious reaction gif-filled reviews can be either fan gushing or autistically bashing for minor reasons.

what are some non-tolkien or pre-tolkien inspired fantasy books?

Maybe the Laundy series?

The Black Company and Intrumentalies of the are pretty good

Please add the Thomas Covenant books. They're either loved or hated, depending on personal taste, but they make a hell of an impact.

It's in one of the first infographics they posted in this thread:

The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Bakker, and the rest of his Second Apocalypse series, are by far the most cerebral and satisfying fantasy literature I've ever read. Very highly recommended.

They're flawed books, for sure - a bit of squicky rape and weak female characters detract from the books IMO, but the sheer brilliance of many other elements make up for it. In my humble thoughts on the matter.

OP here

If you have a Goodreads account you can add it yourself. I've hit the 100-book limit, so I can't add any more without removing some.

If Muad'dib thought that he screwed up, does that mean that him thinking he did things wrong something that he did wrong?

Should I add any or all of the following? I'm not sure how freely you want us to add stuff.

Dark Is the Sun (Farmer)
Hothouse (Aldiss)
The Book of Wonder (Lord Dunsany)
Ender's Game (Card)
The Shadow Out of Time (Lovecraft)
The Call of Cthulhu (Lovecraft)

I quite like The Iron Tower Trilogy, but feel like it needs a disclaimer so people don't go into it and say "This is a complete LotR ripoff!" And since the Goodreads list can't have a disclaimer like that, I probably don't think it should be added.

The only listing I see for Jhereg is in German, and while the name of the book is the same, I'd be a bit hesitant to add it for that reason.

Aside from the stuff on the list, itself, I'm not sure I've read any of the other recommendations here.

Add away; books with more votes will go to the top anyway. We should end up with something like LoTR on top and Eragon near the bottom.

>The only listing I see for Jhereg is in German
Yeah, Goodreads does that sometimes. Look for a link on the book page that says "other editions" and you should see an English one.

>Yeah, Goodreads does that sometimes. Look for a link on the book page that says "other editions" and you should see an English one.
Ah. Scrolling down can help. Yes.

Anyway, I added all of the stuff I mentioned, including The Iron Trilogy omnibus, figuring that if Eragon is okay for the list, it will be too. It'll probably just sit at the bottom anyway, because not many people will have read it.

I don't really understand how the scoring works. Pic is three books I added to the list, with no other votes on them. The lowest ranked of these has the highest rating and I personally rated it equally high as the highest ranked one, and higher than the middle one. Additionally, many more people rated the lowest ranked one than the middle one, and the middle one than the highest one. So it seems like Ender's Game should be first, and then either The Shadow Out of Time or The Call of Cthulhu (Cthulhu if you go by rating or number of raters, and Shadow if you go by my personal rating).

The top 10 right now are pretty good.
I rate six of them 5...
one of them 4..
one of them 3...
one of them 2...
and I haven't read the last one.

That's an average rating of 4.33 for the ones I've actually read, and I'm not shy about giving out low ratings.

Oh... I think I see. I added them to my list in that order. I wasn't thinking that would factor in.

>goodreads.com/list/show/109337._tg_approved_reading_list

>Dune, LoTR below Elric
>Game of Thrones above Gardens of the Moon

It's different people voting according to what they've read. It's never going to be a particularly precise list (if precision were even possible when it comes to how much people like shit). For my part, I considered giving Elric 4 stars instead of 5, but let its Veeky Forums-ness swing the vote. I definitely agree that Dune is the better book (than really any other book you put next to it), but it's a 5-scale, and there's only so much granularity.

PERDIDO STREET STATION

1.It's very unique
2.great and detailed world building
3. Individual ideas can be separated from the text and expanded upon and used in a variety of worlds

( Hell has embassies and diplomats, Giant nearly godlike spiders who war over the philosophical concept of beauty, Disfigurement and mutation as a penal system, etc etc)

( found the pictures from the dragon that did a 3.5 writeup on the series)

>Unless you're the kind of person who just likes reading long epics and analyzing them piece by piece, there really isn't much you can "get" from reading these books which you can't get from watching the movies. Tolkien's worldbuilding is beautiful, and he's got some fun ideas, but the book is intended for literature scholars instead of casual readers.

There isn't anything particularly wrong with this opinion. It's kind of the point of why he wrote it actually. The Hobbit is more the actual fantasy story. Lord of the Rings is his attempt at an epic like Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied, and the Children of Hurin was his incomplete attempt at a tragedy.

>but a terrible storyteller

This isn't. It's throwing aside any existence of preference for style and taking a firm stance that Tolkien is bad at doing the thing he emulated perfectly just because the style he used was not to your tastes. It's a book for literature nerds.

Can't we just turn off voting and group them alphabetically by franchise (which is then sorted in release order)?

I just want a good list to explore. Not this mess of popularity

You give books stars based on how well you liked them in general, and for lists you vote on them in order of preference. If you want to change that order, you can do so easily by changing the numbers in the fields on the right-hand side.

Yeah, I made the damn thing and had some trouble figuring it out.

Arrange it the way you want it and it will affect overall rankings.

You can go ahead and add it.

I don't think goodreads does that, but you can add all those books to a bookshelf and arrange them by author. I specifically put only the first book in each series on the list with the intention of having them represent the series itself, but it's not like it's super important.

When enough people have voted, we can use the top results to create a "canon" list elsewhere. I personally like having things sorted by popularity, since it avoids the ratings-only trap where a book has the highest rating because 3 people read it and it panders to their fetish.

I would actually recommend Lord of light over nine princes in Amber.

Has anybody read the Wind on Fire trilogy? It has been years, but I recall it being pretty good.

What are people's opinions on James Clemens' Banned and Banished pentad?

Most of the people I know loved Perdido Street Station, but I couldn't get into it. The haphazard mish-mash of all sorts of crazy different shit turned me off, and I quit somewhere around page 100 because I got tired of 3 page digressions about the city for every half page of actual plot.

Eragon?

Where the fuck is Ringworld?

(And does anyone know a good free ebook source? I'm dying to get back into a novel.)

I just did the big (20GB?) science fiction / fantasy torrent to get more shit than I could read in three lifetimes.

>Where the fuck is Ringworld?
Thanks for reminding me that I need to pick that back up. I read the first book like a million years ago and got busy with other stuff. I need to reread it and continue on in the series.

Anyway, I can't see of a way for me to add a book without rating it, and I don't want to rate a book I either haven't read or can't properly remember, but I'll create a dummy account for you or any other person who might like to use it to rate and add some books.

Dummy account for anybody who might want to use it:
name: tg-user
email: [email protected]
password: magicalrealm

It just asks for your email and password to log in, so you probably just want to copy and paste the email.

Also, all you need is an email account to create an account (and a name and password you come up with), and Goodreads lets you use 10minutemail, so there's no hassle and no need to potentially expose your actual email account to marketing spam or whatever. In case you've never used 10minutemail before, merely going to the site automatically sets you up with an email account that sunsets in 10 minutes. You don't have to (and can't) enter in any information or anything, so it's a breeze. The only bad thing is that your email will be a meaningless string of characters, which means that if you ever want to sign back into the Goodreads account you created, you'll need to write it down somewhere or something, because good luck remembering it.

10minutemail.com/

The Word Bearers Omnibus. The best thing to ever come out of BL in my opinion.

Pre-Tolkien? Check out Lord Dunsany's Book of Wonder, as discussed earlier in the thread: Other than that, most swords & sorcery stuff is going to have a limited connection to Tolkien. That could mean you go old school like Conan, or read something a bit later like Lieber's Lankhmar stuff, or Moorcock's Elric Saga.

Shit! Completely forgot about A Fire Upon the Deep. Well, it's in there now. I feel like there are probably a dozen really obvious books I'm forgetting about.

L O R D
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DEMON
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Need to put some Edge Chronicles in there.

Okay, I think I figured out how the rankings work.

It's a point system.

When you vote, you submit your own list. Your #1 pick gets 100 points, and the rest depends on how many are on the list.

If you picked 2, it's 100/50
If you picked 3, it's 100/67/33
If you picked 5, it's 100/80/60/40/20

and so on. Each book's points are added together and the overall rankings are based on that.

Why even have rankings?

Nope. The math doesn't track. I do, however, think you've lead us to the answer.

Looking at books that only I had rated, I believe it's 100 points minus 1 for each position after 1st place you ranked the book. So if you ranked the book 1st, it gets 100 points. If you ranked it 2nd, it gets 99. 3rd and it gets 98, and so forth.

I rated 28 books and the pattern holds for the half dozen I looked at.

>Why even have rankings?
Something's got to be at the top of the list, I suppose. It does seem like *ratings* should factor in and be at least as important as ranking. Honestly, you could do it just by the *ratings* of the people who voted to put the book in the list.

That's weird, because I saw one book was voted by one person, 10th place of 21 in his list, and it had like 50-something points instead of 90.

I don't know. All of mine check out though. There does seem to be a lag after you tweak something's ranking before it registers on the list though, so if somebody changed something, the values might not be in accordance with one another for a while. That still doesn't explain how you'd get 50 out of a 21-book-long list though. Maybe you misread something? It actually had 2 votes for it, or you misread the first digit as a 5 when it really was a 9?