Coming off a literary high - please help

[CoteDAzur]

I just read Cloud Atlas and This Thing Of Darkness in quick succession, both epic, fantastic books of great scope and vision.

Now I don't now what to do with myself. Read another book, but what? What can I read now that won't be a huge disappointment after these two wonderful books that I have just finished?

Continuing with sci-fi, all that softy space opera stuff has been largely overtaken in the last ten years or so by the cyberpunk movement that started with William Gibson and continued fantastically by Neal Stephenson.

My top recommendation in this genre would be Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which figures in Time magazine's list of 100 Best English-Language Novels since the beginning of Time (1923), closely followed by Diamond Age.

If you feel up to it, his recent Anathem is truly epic and very brain-hurty. The exact opposite of a light read, but intellectually very rewarding.

OK, adding Clockwork Orange to my reading list, thank you all.

re 2nd book of Dark Tower - Would I need to read the 1st one over again or can I just read the 2nd book?

Nope - just go straight onto the second. The only things you need to remember are that Walter is Roland's nemesis and that Roland chooses to let Jake fall - ie he sacrifices love in his quest for the tower (and could therefore potentially be damned).

Eek. "Sacrificed love for the quest so can be damned" doesn't sound very promising

I wouldn't (being a geek and former Comicshop owner) blow off the graphic novels so lightly. The films of V for Vendetta and Watchmen bare no relation to nor are anywhere near the same league as the original books. Both of these are incredibly deep and layered tales. V for Vendetta especially (a dystopian tale about a terrorist/freedom fighter in a 1984esq world).

Sandman is written by Gaiman and covers a whole range of different styles of writing, art and storytelling. I think personally it is a far superior work to his later novels.

Batman Year one and Dark Knight Returns are superhero comics but are considered to be the last word in them. Year One follows the parallel tales of Jim Gordon coming to Gotham and Bruce Wayne returning and it is brutal, gritty and very down to Earth. DKR is written as the last Batman tale and features an aged Bruce Wayne returning to the mantle. It is a parody of American culture and the American dream.

Watchmen and any of Alan Moore's work from the 80s and early 90s are well worth a look. Watchmen transcends the superhero genre and is a metatextual piece that plays with time, colour, style and even genre.

From Hell is a telephone book sized pHD paper on Jack the Ripper in graphic form (and again bares utterly no relation to the film based on it).

Strangers in Paradise is just wonderful. That's all.

Most are available from the library if you don't want to buy.

Slaughterhouse V is pretty much my favourite book of all time; So it goes.

Iain M Banks and his nonsci-fi alter ego Iain Banks are well worth a look he is dark in either guise but often in very different ways.

Oh yes Dune and maybe the second Dune book but you end up with the law of diminishing returns after that.

How about China Mieville The City and the City, which I really liked, though I am struggling a bit with Perdido Street Station.

If you haven't read it yet, you could always try The Hunger Games Trilogy for a fairly quick read.

Swastika Night. It makes Handmaids Tale look like it was written for children.

Just trust me!

Yes to, 'The Hunger Games.' I've only read the first one so far, but I enjoyed it.

Also Patrick ness', 'Knife Of Never Letting Go' series if you don't object to teen fiction.

@cote read Mitchell's other books. Ghostwritten is my favourite but they are all brilliant.

Well if we're considering graphic novels, I strongly recommend Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Tells the story of the author growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and Iran/Iraq war and is absolutely fascinating. I found it more so because the author is just a year older than I am, so I remember seeing on the news all the things she lived through.

And persepolis really not a comic book!

@cote ...having read further into the thread, I definitely recommend Dark Tower. You don't need to retread the first one again (that one is a bit pants tbh) - just dive in with book 2. All you need to remember is summarised at the front. And if you time it right you will be able to read the new book in the correct sequence (after wizard and glass and before Wolves.....) when it comes out in just over a fortnight. I absolutely adore The Dark Tower.

Yippee for the new book! :) My least favourite is 'Wizard And Glass' because most of it is retrospective and because the whole Susan thing bores me (or maybe it's just because I'm jealous that she gets to shag Roland!).

Have you read any Murakami? In very similar territory to David Mitchell, I've pretty much enjoyed every book of his I've read, bar Norwegian Wood.

If it's proper literary fiction you're after, I can't recommend Orhan Pamuk highly enough. My Name Is Red & Snow both are brilliant. Not an obvious leap from dystopian fiction, but do trust me! His style of writing is not entirely dissimilar to David Mitchell's (actually way better IMHO).

I do love a bit of Margaret Atwood, but The Handmaiden's Tale does feel very dated to me. The Blind Assassin was fab.

MNHubbie - Re comic books: I actually bought From Hell after the film, but never managed to read more than a few pages of it because the illustrations were just crap. My only claim to authority is having read many comics in my youth & having lived with a rather famous comics author/artist DP in my 20s, but still, I hope you will agree that its facts story is fantastic but the drawings are quite incredibly bad.

I haven't looked into other Alan Moore comics after that but now that I saw on Amazon that his books are not always by the same illustrator, I can definitely take a look at Watchmen (loved the film, especially its anti-heroes).

Re Ian M Banks - See my earlier post below.

re Dune - The first Dune book is of course exceptional, but I actually find the whole six books saga to be very good. The consistency of the universe he has created across centuries, intricate power plays and relationships between the players, the sheer brilliance of vision is frankly unparalleled in all that come since it was published in 1965. (I am friends with the daughter of the editor who published Dune following refusals by many others, and its story is fascinating) I haven't tried reading the many prequels written by his son and some other guy, though.

Metabilis - I didn't quite get what you said there. Which book should I read first in the Dark Tower series, then?

How about a change from great tomes and get stuck into some quality short stories?

'Beethoven was One Sixteenth or some other fraction! Black' by Nadime Gordimer has some breathtakingly good stories in..one made me sob out loud and has 'stuck' with me for a very long time iyswim

Or 'Cry, the Beloved Country' by Alan Paton which is a S African epic - v underrated here

I would also recommend Oryx and Crake. Just finishing The Tiger's Wife which is lighter but still interesting.

Have you read any Umberto Eco? Name of the Rose is v involved and involving IMHO.

Will have a think...

Remus - I do trust your taste in books so will go Dark Tower another go.

I'm not into teen fiction but "difficult" and complicated books which I need to work hard to understand, the more brain-hurty the better. Like Inception (the film), Anathem, or... ehem... Cloud Atlas.

I am actually convinced that otherwise reasonable and intelligent people who haven't enjoyed Cloud Atlas just haven't completely understood what the author has tried to do - the repeated mention of Nietzsche conjures his idea that everything repeats in the history of the world therefore nothing matters, each chapter is in a different literary style (historical fiction, literary farce, dystopian sci-fi etc), Luisa Rey flying off a bridge in her car echoes the book The Bridge Of San Luis Rey (about seven inter-connected people on a bridge and the divine reason for why they each had to die), etc. Its grand themes are also brilliantly executed - fragility of knowledge, individual acts of kindness and selflessness as the only defense against our selfish and destructive nature as a race, how a single act of kindness can echo across generations.

besmirched - Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum is one of my all-time favorites. I intend to read The Prague Cemetery at some point in the future, although I'm a bit worried about the negative reviews it's been getting. Have you read it?

Oryx & Crate is getting a lot of votes here so will take a look at it despite the female sci-fi author

I wasn't interested enough to care what he was trying to do tbh. I felt the same about Julian Barnes', 'History Of The World In However Many Chapters It Is' - trying to be clever but actually being tedious. Maybe I'm just not clever enough? :)

Re the Dark Tower - read number 2 first (The Drawing Of The Three), then number three (The Waste Lands) then number 4 (Wizard And Glass). He has a new one coming out soon which fills in a bit between what are currently books 4 and 5, so you could read the new one after Wizard And Glass. Then it's Wolves Of The Calla, then Song Of Susannah, then The Dark Tower. If you don't like number two, then I wouldn't bother trying the others - but number 2 is one of my favourites because of the great Mafia style gang battle in it.

I think you will hate, 'Oryx And Crake.'

Beethoven etc sounds interesting, actually. It reminds me of J G Ballard's Vermillion Sands which was a great collection of his short stories. I heartily recommend it.