What are your favorite genres besides fantasy?

I read mostly fantasy and nonfiction, but lately I've been wanting to read other things. What other genres and books would you suggest?

I'm open to anything that's not, well, overtly deep and intellectual. I have a thinking-type job, so I just want good brain candy!

(My mom suggested cozy mysteries - any specific books I should check out?)

Mysteries are great. If you want ones that don't need a lot of thinking Sue Grafton would be one. She's a decent writter and her mysteries usually are not very mysterious. Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma Mysteries are a little more involved and deal with a realistic Ancient Ireland. John Sandford has the Prey Novels which aren't really mysteries but more Detective novels but most of them are fast paced good books. Agatha Christie of course is always a great choice. Rex Stout has quite a few with good stories about Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.

Just a few of the ones I've sampled...

Mysteries are my favorite brain candy. I like the Golden Age mysteries better than the newer ones, but that's just me. Favorite authors: Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Ellis Peters and Laurie King. Laurie King and Ellis Peters are not GA authors, but they write like they could be.

Another genre I enjoy are memoirs or travel journals/experiences. Especially when well written. Mark Twain, Washington Irving and John Steinbeck leap to mind.

Wow, those touchstones are just leaping up today!

I enjoy reading sf, mostly of the alternate history or steampunk or hard sf varieties... Neal Stephenson and his Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World), including Cryptonomicon; Jon Courtenay Grimwood and his Arabesque Cycle (Pashazade, Effendi, Felaheen) + his End of the World Blues and Stamping Butterflies (but the earlier work is also good, but I would exclude redRobe).
Also Effingers Budayeen suite - When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun and The Exile Kiss.

On the lighter side I enjoy Pratchett and his Discworld series, and of course Good Omens is always a good laugh or a smile.

I also read nonfiction, right now mostly about process oriented methods for utilizing organisations and about the conflicts or diferrencies beween business interests and the IT/IS organisation within a corporation... That is workrelated, though. Privately I enjoy reading nonfic about the history of ideas (don't know the proper term in english) and the like.

BTW I think all these tries at touchstones has put some stress on the server, they don't want to touch! Maybe I sneak by later and see if I could make them work at that time...

*fixed the some 12 hours later*

Mysteries. Your mom may know you best and have suggested cozies for a reason. But other mysteries are also, IMO, good brain candy.

A few good and entertaining mystery writers, old & new, who haven't been mentioned yet:Catherine Aird
M. C. Beaton
Jan Burke
Jill Churchill
Carole Nelson Douglas Dick Francis
S. T. Haymon
Michael Innes
Harry Kemelman
Peter Lovesey
Sharon McCrumb
Anne Perry
Peter Robinson
Josephine Tey

P.S. Fantasy isn't one of my favorite genres. I love LOTR, and am getting a big kick out of Harry Potter, but I'm mostly a SF fan. (Before anyone starts throwing pints at me, check the Group description.)

MrsLee, what's a "GA author"? I know Dorothy Sayers wasn't from Georgia. (VBG)

Busifer - I forgot about the Baroque Cycle. I've read Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon.

Though, I don't remember that much of Cryptonomicon besides math, bodily functions, and a lot of boats and bombs. What was the plot? Was there one? Maybe I should reread it...

Myshelves - what *is* the difference between science fiction and fantasy? A lot of people point out that one has space travel and the other has elves, but I know there's more to both genres than that!

I think my mom suggested cozy mysteries because *she* likes them!

defining Sci-Fi vs Fantasy is asking for trouble but a simple GENERAL view is Fantasy has some kind of "magic" and Sci-Fi everything is explainable by science.

I generally split it down "can it be explained by physics?" Yes - SciFi No Fantasy.

No matter what criteria is used there are books that cross/ride the line.

greenlion,

SF & Fantasy: There has been a lot of ink spilled in the war over that definition. :-)

In general, I think of fantasy as "couldn't happen" and SF (including speculative fiction) as "could happen if" we split the atom (hey! we did) or find a way to beat the speed of light, or develop more areas of our brains, or mutate, or set up a society with different cultural premises, or . . . . Some books squat on the fence. :-)

Most fantasy I've read also tends to have a pseudo-medieval setting. I usually find the real history more interesting.

readafew,

I left out a mention of magic in deference to Arthur C. Clarke:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Argh, I'm supposed to be *working* - you know, that thing I do to pay the bills. And I'm posting on forums. I have officially become "one of those people."

I always wonder about the effects of technology on the environment in science fiction. If the "sufficiently advanced technology" left no ill effects on the environment, then I would totally consider it magic!

I read science fiction and fantasy differently. For fantasy, I'd never worry about whether magic was possible or not. I just assume that for the purpose of the story, sure, it is possible (though I like it to be logical.)

For science fiction, I start thinking hard about "what would life be like if..." So yeah, I guess I start reading on the premise that it could happen in real life if we just knew something, or if we made some key advances.

But if there's too much science and not enough story, I lose interest. (I have a short attention span, I admit it.) I went to enough physics lectures in college, I don't need any more!

greenlion,

Any story that assumes much knowledge of physics leaves me in the dust. :-)

Some of the early SF that used the scientist and his beautiful daughter as cardboard props in telling about his experiment can be amusing just to see what the experiment was. :-)

But character development is very important to me in fiction. Do a good job of it
(and of course have a good plot) while teaching me some physics, and you've got me hooked. I'm one of the minority who doesn't enjoy Asimov's books. He never created a character who seemed real to me. Whereas in the first of his books I read, Heinlein had me choking back tears over the death of a computer.

I just don't go out looking for books with magic, or elves. I did after I'd first read LOTR, hoping to find more like it. (Dumb!) The stuff I tried was derivative and/or 3rd rate. So I gave up.

I looove romance novels *ducks in case of rotten tomatos*

Honestly, most of the ones I've read are a lot smarter than people give them credit for. For example the book Fantasy Lover (bad name, great book) has a very strong greek/roman mythology backing as does most of Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark Hunter books.

There is a lot of fun fantasy in romance novels if you read the right ones.

You could also try historical novels. Not easy to find them (many stores just tuck most of them in with Romance, regardless of era) but the good ones are a good read.

I gobbled up the Horatio Hornblower series, and many people swear by Patrick O'Brians
Aubrey books.

I concur with a good mystery series - Elizabeth George P.D. James and Elizabeth Peters are good ones to add to the list that myshelves mentioned. As for historical novels, then I'd like to suggest Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. They're romance, history, adventure, time travel all rolled up into one - well there's six in the series so far - more to come :-)

And Horatio Hornblower is wonderful, hear hear!!

#13,
Not a rotten tomato, honest. I just looked at a couple of LT reviews for Fantasy Lover, and I'm puzzled. "Julian of Macedon"? Julian sure sounds Roman to me, not Greek. But his mother was Aphrodite? Is the mythological backing faithful to Greek, or to Roman, mythology?

I like historical stuff, meaning general fiction set in the past rather than bodice-ripping pirate-loving kinds of things. Mysteries are also pretty fun, though I haven't read a wide variety of them.

I'll almost always give literary fiction a try, but I wouldn't say I'm over the moon about it. Some literary fiction rocks my socks; other stuff is so obviously trying to be important that it completely puts me off.

#16 - I haven't read the book in question, but as a Classicist I'd assume that Julian was someone connected to the Juliae, the Roman family of which Julius Caesar was a part. (There was also a much later Julian who was Constantine's grandson. He isn't often mentioned, since he decided to switch the state religion back to paganism. He was murdered for it). The Juliae claimed they were related to Venus, which is just the Roman name for Aphrodite. But since there's mention of Macedon, which is much more closely connected to Greece... well, like I said, I haven't read the book, (or even heard of it), so I can't really say what's going on there. I just felt the need to jump in and share my wondrous Classical knowledge, which I so rarely get to whip out and bash people with.

>#13 Ha ha! I own that one! I don't read a lot of romance anymore, but I DEVOURED them from the time I was 16 to maybe 22. Tons and tons and tons and tons. They probably make up a good third of my collection now.

#15 - I was going to recommend both Elizabeth George and Diana Gabaldon. Both authors use the same characters in their books, and I like that. George's books have become a series that sometimes appears on BBC America and PBS stations, the Thomas Lynley mysteries. The books are much, much better, however! If you read Gabaldon's books, you will meet the most perfect man ever. Her books are unlike any other books I have read.

If you want pure, unadulterated brain candy, go for Janet Evanovich - quick reads, hilariously funny, bit of adventure thrown in for good measure.

#17:
Juliae:
I'm not a Classicist, but that was also my train of thought --- though I hadn't ridden it on down as far as Julian the Apostate. :-) Plus I'm trying to remember if the Romans had a presence in Macedon at some point. Seems likely.

It was just that the name seemed incongruous, and I wondered if the author had done the homework on the Greeks & Romans.

#6 myshelves - Describing a Golden Age mystery can be as tricky as differentiating between sci-fi and fantasy! I'm no expert, but this is sort of my own idea after reading a lot of other peoples ideas. Golden Age mysteries were mostly written between 1920ish and 1950ish. That being said, many folks consider Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a GA author and there are some modern authors who write in the style of GA. Some people say it is the type of mystery. Focused on the puzzle and not the detective, victim or criminal. Well, most of my favorites have very personable detectives, because frankly, I never even try to solve the puzzle, I like to laugh and have fun with the story. In GA mysteries the author is supposed to play fair with clues, leaving them for the reader to find. The solution is not supposed to be found with mystical or psychic methods, etc. There are a lot more guidelines I think, but I don't take time to memorize them. The dates work for me, simple. My other guideline is, I either like it or I don't.

#7 - believe it or not, but Cryptonomicon has a plot ;-)
Personally I just skip the pages describing bodily functions, or algorithms (I started out training to be an engineer but decided I like the "magical" approach better - I don't enjoy numbercrunching and chemical formulas).

I'd admit though that to Stephenson plot is never the important thing, it's the ideas, and Cryptonomicon is about the worth of "money" but at the same time tells a (in parts true) story about WWII and a totally fictive story set in the present.
In the Baroque Cycle the theme is again money but also the emergence of the scientific approach and the clash with the then traditional alchemist approach.

I think he is a better writer than, say, Asimov was, and manages to write a good story with believable characters despite this focus on ideas.

As everybody talks about mysteries I'll add that most of the books that Jon C Grimwood writes essentially are detective stories. This is especially true of the Arabesque Cycle... The same could be said about Effingers Budayeen suite; I'd never tag it as crime/mystery, though.

Fantasy and Science fiction - is whatever you want it to be! Some authors like Cherryh insist there is not distinction and write pure sf Foreigner, pure fantasy Fortress and crossover books Morgaine without any trouble. Others like Anne Mccaffery write pure fantasy and insist it is SF - the early Pern books for example. The border between the two is wide grey and fuzzy.

I normally divide them by feel, some books feel like fantasy - Not set in this universe, some natural laws have been broken/changed. Eg magic exists. Some feel like SF could easily be in our future - the universe works more or less as we currently understand it to. Mental powers don't really exist, unless you've a skull full of nano-bots amplifying them.
I don't like alternative history probably because it blurs the line too much for me.

If you read Fantasy then always try SF. Unfortunetly most of my favourites whilst not being intellectual are deep and "hard" reading, though they do get a decent chracterisation going. For those who want some physics that doesn't spoil the plot and characters try Donaldson's Gap series
Mysteries - well the classic Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot are always worth reading. or of course Sherlock Holmes. There is a whole group of suggestions HERE
Other good comfort reads - lee Childs Jack reacher series.

*only three touchstones didn't load I'll try them later.

For historical fiction I reccommend the Sharpe's Rifles series by Bernard Cornwell.

I've tagged as Noir in my library what MrsLee has as Golden Age mystery. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett are the easiest to find and always in print. Other authors in the field include Cornell Woolrich, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson and Chester Himes.

>16 myshelves: Sherrilyn Kenyon uses a mixture of Greek and Roman mythology. Julian in the book was the son of a Spartan general and Aphrodite. He was fighting the Romans.

BTW-Thanks for not throwing any tomatos :-)

#24 OldSarge - Do you tag things such as Agatha Christie as noir? For me, noir fits the authors you listed perfectly, sort of hard-boiled detectives? Elsewhere I was discussing this and thought that Rex Stout had a great balance between hard-boiled and yet not disillusioned detectives. He has the humor I like.

I hesitate to admit this, but I'm an Agatha Christie virgin.

*blush*

Should I give her a shot?

Agatha Christie is great. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are my favorite. If she seems kind of cliche at times, it is because she was first.

I did read a book titled Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death, by MC Beaton. It was hilarious.

Hmm. Those touchstones are dead, dead and even more dead.

Not the same as a real Christie book, though, I know.

I read Agatha Christie voraciously when I was in high school, but not after that. That said, she wrote some classics: And Then There Were None is English country-house mystery personified. Murder on the Orient Express is another often-mentioned one.

If you want to try contemporary (well, c. 1940s-1950s) adventure, try Hammond Innes. Jack Higgins writes similar books, but he's more current. So is Frederick Forsyth.

#21: MrsLee,

Oh. Ok. I didn't figure out what GA stood for in your post. :-)

Reminds me of the line byDavid Hartwell: "The Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12."

#27 & 29: Clam,

I've read several Agatha Christie novels, in different series. I liked one of them. :-) I think it was Death on the Nile.

The Agatha Raisin mysteries are fun!

#27 - definitely! She's really fun, and her books are very quick reads. She has some duds, of course, (I personally hated Passenger to Frankfurt and The Big Four, either of which would've put me off her for life if I'd started with them) but a lot of her books are really good. My favourites are And Then There Were None The Secret Adversary, and Death Comes as the End. Her autobiography was also really good.

#26 Nah...Agatha Christie is most definately NOT Noir. I don't believe that any mystery fiction by English authors can be considered Noir. It's almost all locked door mysteries. Very different sensibilities too, Noir (or hardboiled detective fiction) is a product of its' time and place.

Besides Fantasy and Sci-Fi, I read horror, mystery, spy, and just general fiction. I also read all kinds of nonfiction, especially biographies and histories. I also read cereal boxes, subway ads, and scribblings on bathroom walls.

#27- Hey Clam, Christies are quick, easy reads, so good experiments.

Start with the Classic Murder on the Orient Express, then And Then There Were None and The ABC Murders. Try a few more Hercules Poirots, especially the ones with his sometimes sidekick, Hastings like The Mysterious Affair at Styles and some Miss Marple as well.

Try her various short story collections, as well.

Only after you've enjoyed a few of these should you THEN tackle The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Sleeping Murder and Curtain.

One thing about Christie, I don't collect her books, but I'm always willing to pick one up. Especially the Poirot and Marple ones. Even if I've read them before, I still enjoy them.

xicanti, I agree about the autobiography. One of the best I've ever read.

#36

I agree MrsLee... I pick them up at bookstores, and then I also drop them off... at libraries, or I will leave them in airport lounges, for someone else to take.

I do that with *blush* Star Trek novels too, which I read on planes, as the engine sound of the plane is nice as a backdrop.

#35

I agree with your suggestions completely.

Today, 2:49amMessage 5: rufustfirefly66 -- I'm with you. I'm not a big mystery fan because I think they're too formulaic. But I can't say I wouldn't enjoy one or two from each of the best mystery authors. But there is so little time . . . .

#38 some enjoy the formula - that's why i tend to read them when travelling vs. at home. I am distracted travelling, and I can put them down or pick them up at a moment's notice. Further, there is much to be said to seeing the formula used properly.. it is a good one.

That's a really good point about the formulas. I've noticed that I can read any number of hero/quest formula stories - it's the details that make it interesting for me. It's probably the same with mysteries. I mean, doesn't the sleuth always solve the crime, every time?

I don't ever read mysteries but I would think that reading a mystery where they don't solve the crime would be supremely unsatisfying.

*cough* I don't really consider Fantasy my favorite genre. I consider Classic novels my favorite... and by Classic I mean Austen/Hardy/Dickens and the like, NOT Aristotle or Plato, though I slogged my way through them too, back in college.

When I'm not reading Classic Fiction, I'm usually reading current Literary novels.

That being said, The Lord of the Rings is probably my favorite work of all time, for many personal reasons.
:o)

I like Historical Fiction, with a preference towards a medieval setting. Bernard Cornwell and Jack Whyte are two of my favorites. I also started reading Peter Tremayne, he does great little mysteries that take place in 7th century Ireland.

I also enjoy WWII fiction, mysteries, spy thrillers, etc.

I like to read a lot of juvenile fiction, especially teen angst such as Joyce Carol Oates and books set in other coutries, most recently Sold. I also read non-fiction about architecture such as What Not to Build and The not so big house, fairy tale retellings such as Bella at Midnight and Fairest, a couple graphic novels such as Legends in Exile and occaisionally historical fiction, mysteries, and other random things.

#36 I do collect Agatha Christie, but I actually prefer Ngaio Marsh. Her series about Roderick Alleyn, the gentleman DCI is a lot of fun. I pick them up at the smaller secondhand bookshops for just about nothing and read them when I'm a bridgekeeper in the summer.

#39 Formulas are easy when you have to jump on a bike when a boat passes your bridge, so I'll have to agree with you there.

The dry as dust definition of science fiction:
A form of fantasy in which scientific facts, assumptions, or hypotheses form the basis, by logical extrapolation, of adventures in the future, on other planets, in other dimensions in time, or under new variants of scientific law.
from A Handbook to Literature

Fantasy:
...a conscious breaking free from reality. The term is applied to a work which takes place in a non-existent and unreal world, such as fairyland, or concerns incredible and unreal characters....
from A Handbook to Literature again

Mystery brain candy:
the Hamish MacBeth series by M.C. Beaton
Hercule Poirot series by Christie
(prefer Miss Marple on film to reading them, sorry)
The Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters
Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy Sayers
Anne Perry - the Pitt series