Friday, March 7, 2014

Follow Friday - Dunbar's Number Is 148


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Pottermorebooks and Chapter Break.net.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: Recommend some of your favorite back-list books – books that are at least a few years old (I’m thinking 5-10 years old rather than classics).

For me, this request is more of less simply "recommend some books" since most of the books that I recommend are at least five or ten years old. In fact, five or ten years ago is probably a lot more recent than most of the books I generally recommend. I thought about recommending some books by Ursula K. Le Guin, because her books are always good to recommend to people, but most of her best books - The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Lathe of Heaven, and so on - were published in the 1970s, which is probably longer ago than the question is really aiming for.

So instead of recommending books from the 1970s, I'm going to go for some much more recent books from the 1980s. I am going to recommend the five book Book of the New Sun series from Gene Wolfe which consists of Shadow of the Torturer, Claw of the Conciliator, Sword of the Lictor, Citadel of the Autarch, and Urth of the New Sun. The story follows Severian, an exiled journeyman torturer in a future so distant that history is no longer recorded, who lives on a world where the sun is dying and has faded so much that one can see stars at midday. The world has advanced and regressed, with medieval implements apparently coexisting side by side in common use with exotic highly advanced technology, the means of using which has often been completely forgotten. Severian fights his relatives, travels through time, recovers an ancient artifact, possibly becomes his own ancestor, and becomes more than one person., all on the way to restoring Earth's sun. The books are exotic, weird, science fiction at its best.

Go to previous Follow Friday: 147 Is the Highest Possible Break in Snooker

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4 comments:

  1. The Book of the New Sun series sounds interesting. Though I'm not really a sci-fi person (I'm more fantasy oriented), I'm interested in how time travel works in this series and your comment about Severian possibly becoming his own ancestor - that's both intriguing and a little bit eww at the same time :D Thanks for sharing!

    New GFC follower :)

    My FF

    Obsessive Compulsive Reader

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    1. @Obsessive Compulsive Reader: If you are more of a fantasy fan, then The Book of the New Sun is probably a good science fiction series for you because it is science fiction with a decidedly fantasy-oriented mindset. The first book, Shadow of the Torturer, won the World Fantasy Award, and was voted one of the best fantasy books of all time in a Locus poll. Although the science fiction elements become more apparent as the series goes on, it retains the feel of a fantasy series.

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    1. @Reviewers from the Book Cove: Thank you. I have read a few other stories by Wolfe, but none of his other novels, which is a situation I need to remedy.

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