Reading Advice?

[forestofglory]

There are a couple of things I want to read thanks to FOGcon but I'm not quite sure where to start.

More China Mieville. I've read The City and the City which I really liked, but I'm so not sure what to read next.

The Culture Books by Ian M. Banks. So he's written a lot of books and I'm not even sure which ones are the culture and which ones aren't let alone a good reading order.

Advice please?

(These weren't the only book recs -- just the one's I'd like advice about.)

Comments

[jack]

I'm not sure if you would like the culture: IMO it has a high proportion of weird disturbing stuff to interest, which is fine if you don't mind that, but I don't know if you would get on with.

I found many culture novels interesting, but I found most of them very hard to get into (I've not read all of them, I can't even remember which are culture and which are other sci-fi.)

Other people disagree about this significantly, but for me what I found was that the second novel, Player of Games, was by far the easiest to get into. The plot is told linearly in the same order it happens, you know who most of the characters are, etc, etc. I didn't find it as interesting as the others, but I enjoyed it, so if you're interested, I'd recommend reading it and seeing how you felt: if you loved the style but felt Banks wasn't really showing off what he could do, get a later book; if you felt it was too weird, Banks is probably not for you.

The first book, Consider Phlebas, casts the universe slightly differently to the later books. There's a plot, but the book is mostly a series of half a dozen successive escapades the main character gets into. I found it a little bewildering, but not less enjoyable because of that, and I think it's partly I read it a long time ago, I think I'd get on better with it now. I think somone reading it for the first time might not get _some_ bits but would get _most_ of it. (Whereas some of the later books are IMHO very "huh?")

[forestofglory]

The culture was defiantly rec as full of cool ideas rather then interesting characters or good plot. Oh those 3 I tend to like characters best, but I still enjoy wacky ideas too.

When you say 1st ect do you mean 1st in publication order or 1st in chronological order?

[jack]

I would generally agree with that assessment, but I was thinking not so much of things that are lacking, as bits that seem to me to dwell a little too much on pain and torture. Not endorsing it or anything, and often very relevant, but mentioning slightly gruesome things quite commonly. (Not really in Phlebas, and easily skip-past-able in Player of Games, but in all the books a bit.)

When you say 1st ect do you mean 1st in publication order or 1st in chronological order?

I don't know, the first in the order they're listed on wikipedia. I think that's publication order, and the internal chronology is roughly the same, except for one or two books in the middle which are far-far-past or far-far-future. But I can't really remember.

[forestofglory]

Ok -- this was very helpful thanks.

[jack]

Thanks