Can You Rec Me Books to Feed My Soul?

[labingi]

It’s that time again, when I ask for book recs because I can’t find anything (new) that fills my need for catharsis. I’m looking for any written medium (novel, graphic novel, manga, novella, etc.). I appreciate all your recs. Some have given me stories I will treasure for life (like Trigun, Banana Fish, Acid Town). I would love recs that have some of the following characteristics:

* Cultural settings that are not like or set in my own (America/modern global West): this might include creative spec fic societies as exemplifed by Le Guin; historical/fantasy settings that feel like older cultures (ex. A Song of Ice and Fire; Asian/manga; indigenous or Afro-futurism; works that are genuinely older, even ancient.

* Complex characters with complex love relationships with each other. This does not need to be romantic. I tend to be less leery of m/m relationships, but that’s not essential. If they involve relationship/genre clichés, those clichés should be explored so deeply and wisely that they lay bare new insights about being human (ex. Mirage of Blaze). I am always glad of a good friendship story.

* Stories about older, more mature characters, cuz I’m not getting any younger and/or characters I categorize as “saints,” not in a strictly Christian/religious/literal sense, but in the sense of people with a very highly developed sense of conscience and understanding of life, who are importantly motivated by being of service in the world. (Ex’s include Vash and Rem from Trigun, Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov, Kagetora from Mirage of Blaze (in his tortured, confused way), Yudhishthira from the Mahabharata.) I really want to read more of this ilk.

Here are some titles I have really fallen in love with, and I would love to fall in love with something like this again:

Japanese:
Mirage of Blaze
Trigun
Banana Fish
Acid Town
Gangsta (when it’s about the two principals)

Other
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Brothers Karamazov
Wuthering Heights
The Lord of the Rings (Yeah, everybody who reads fantasy loves it, but I really love it for the low-key straightforwardness of the characters.)
Great Expectations

Works I’m not Necessarily in Love with but Really Please Me
Ai no Kusabi (mainly original novel, 1992 anime)
The Persian Boy (Mary Renault)
The Man Who Fell to Earth (book and movie)
Blade of the Immortal (esp. the parts focused on Anostu, Rin, Makie, Gichi, Hyakurin)
Hedda Gabler (reread this recently, fascinating)
City of Illusion (Le Guin)

Here’s what I do NOT want (but always with exceptions for the brilliant):
Anything that is basically about late-20th, 21st century Western culture, including science fiction stories where we’re colonizing the solar system, etc., but it feels just like 20th-21st-century Western characters grappling with capitalism. And this pretty includes anything about “teenagers” in the modern conception of adolescence, unless it’s truly ingenious, like Buffy. Anything primarily comic, zany, or action-oriented: I’d like enough psychological drama for it to be cathartic. Thank you!!!

Comments

[sovay]

people with a very highly developed sense of conscience and understanding of life, who are importantly motivated by being of service in the world.

I don't know if you have already tried these books and had them work or not work for you, but the request for an ethical dimension makes me think at once of Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire—Ninefox Gambit (2016), Raven Stratagem (2017), and Revenant Gun (2018), plus the related collection Hexarchate Stories (2019)—which are a space opera cycle concerned not just with the overthrow of a violently dystopian interstellar empire but with everything that happens afterward, like paperwork and figuring out how to separate as much as possible responsibility and cruelty. I don't find them grimdark or nihilistic at all. The relationships are intricate, varied, and, at least for me, a satisfying mix of idtastic and thought-through. There is humor, but not to the purpose of undercutting its characters. I suppose there's a fair amount of action, but it's not the pupose of the plot. The writing is beautiful.

[labingi]

Thanks for the rec! I've heard of this series but haven't read it. I have put it on my Christmas wish list. :)

[vilakins]

My number one is The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, alias of Sarah Monette. I loved it so much I didn't want it to end. I desperately want more of Maia and his world. Reviews which express very well how I feel: "remarkably compelling and fascinating", "mostly eschews plot-heavy histrionics in favor of warmth, psychological depth, and hope", and "compelling attractiveness of Maia’s character" as a fundamentally decent person, as well as the author's detailed worldbuilding.
Monette says she's writing a sequel featuring a minor character. I have hope of more Maia-ness despite that.

Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Alien and human characters, very engaging and likeable.
Its sequel, A Closed and Common Orbit, focuses on two minor characters from the first book and is very, very different: an intense and fascinating exploration of AIs.
Both are optimistic and satisfying, but I'd say the second one is more powerful and other-culture.
The third book, set elsewhere in the same universe, didn't grab me as much and is not as different from US culture as you probably want. I read a novella as well, set in a different universe, but it was depressing which the two recced books certainly aren't.

Ascending by Meg Pechenick, an immersive novel about a linguist on a ship of aliens. It's slow starting (but never boring because linguist) but once she's on the ship you get the alien culture.
The sequel, Bright Shards, is also good but lacks the exploration of culture in the first. I'll certainly read the third. There is also some romance in this one.

[labingi]

Wow, this is an embarras de richesse! Thanks for the great recs. I look forward to pursuing them.

As a side note, I found myself pondering Vila the other day--you know, kind of deeply as a character--and it made me think of you. I was pondering, in particular, how he is situated (and situates himself) according to class, which I find very interesting and very British, but also interesting worldbuilding for the Federation.

[vilakins]

First of all, I just read the most beautiful and enthralling book: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. I've read a lot of hers but this one's a masterpiece that comes close to The Goblin Emperor in that I didn't want it to end and have to say goodbye to the characters. Her Uprooted is also very good, but this one is really powerful, and I think it will stay with me.

As for Vila, I understand about as much of their class system as you; here it's much more about education and success. I didn't answer right away as I knew I'd have to marshal my thoughts about Vila.

When we first meet him, he's fairly confident, with a place in the world he made for himself outside the grading system: a very clever thief in demand for his skills. He doesn't define himself by grade at all (though he doesn't deny it) but by his skills. He treats the others as equals, though he makes mistakes, like the jokes about pleasure machines before Space City which go down like a lead balloon with the higher grades, though I'm sure they'd have worked with his friends. He is also much cleverer than they must have suspected, with his wit and vocabulary, though I'm not sure where he acquired it. Reading? I'm also inclined to believe him about buying his grade - maybe he was a Gamma? - to get out of being trained as a spaceship captain. He shows a lot of knowledge about ships, recognising the Scorpio's class and its features, and knows how to fix it using force fields. Of course by that time his self-confidence has been eroded by the scorn of the others - and not having a function that gives him worth; he'd hardly been able to use his skills since S2, and Dayna has his position on the neutron blasters. Blake may have been dismissive at times but he gave Vila his due and responsibility for important tasks.

Anyway, in short I don't think it mattered to him. Friendship and being worth something to others matters a lot more. He didn't go with Kerril because he knew his skills, his self in his view, wouldn't matter on a new world.

[labingi]

Thanks for the additional recs! I'm going to have to keep a close eye on this thread and use it as my reading list.

I am always in awe of the depth with which you read Vila. Interesting reading of him as originally a Gamma. He does say he grew up in the Delta service grades, but then he's not known for being 100% honest. :-)

[vilakins]

He has a lot of knowledge and a large vocabulary, so if born a Delta, Vila must have learned all that somehow, by perhaps being promoted to a grade he wasn't comfortable with. He does dislike responsibility and is easily bored, so I can see him buying his day down or back.

I suspect Avon of having earned promotion to Alpha through his high intelligence. He seems to care too much about grade, and he remarks at one point that everyone has the same chances he did.

Of course with B7 we have to extrapolate from off-hand remarks to fill in the many gaps.

[bookwyrme]

The Murderbot trilogy by Martha wells. The bot in question has been designed to be a centrally controlled, low rent security guard, but it figured out how to hack the system and has been working out how to be an independent person and how to deal with the friends it keeps making more or less despite itself.

Anything by Aliette de Bodard. She's American of French Vietnamese descent and her work deals a lot with questions of displacement, cultural change, culture clash, and generational differences. She's also unusual in approaching the way a religious practices might change over time while holding to core beliefs--most authors simply ignore religion altogether or at best sideline it; she engages the complexity and centrality of belief in a way I deeply appreciate.

[labingi]

Thanks for the recs! Good to see you on DW. Hope you've been having a great holiday.

[bookwyrme]

By the way, a lot of Aliette de Bodard's short stories are available online. Check her site for links.

[bookwyrme]

Ah good. I did recommend her. I was pretty sure I had, but I was looking at the Non-Eurocentric posts for her. I'm eager to see what others have suggested there as well. I love finding new books!