Help me find books.

mirinda

mirinda

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I don't know if this should be here or somewhere else. Feel free to move it.


Okay, my mother has placed a no "bad" books ban on the house. Bad to her is Sara Douglass and the like. Where as good is more Anne McCaffrey. So no dark books. I love Sci-fi/ fantasy. So I need a list of good books/authors that will be okay on the parental level and still interesting for me to read.

Any help would be great thanks everyone!
 
So, a "good book" is where the Forces of Good defeat the Dark Lord and is minions, eh? That should leave you at least 85% of Fantasy as acceptable.

But can the Armies of Light use magic? That would take a large chunk out of the total, if they can't...perhaps SF is safer.

Can you put up a list of some of the books you've read that you think would pass?
 
Some magic I think is okay. It's the "demons" that have her running scared. No goat sacrificing or anything. No soulless entities....

Well she doesn't balk much at McCaffrey, Tolkein, JK Rowling. (Though witchcraft is a sore spot for her.)

Ummm anything else you think will be helpful to know?
 
wow, that kills the list rather effectively. Eddings and Brooks have demons fairly prominently. though magic kingdom might get you a ways (until book running with the Demon) maybe Piers Anthony's Xanth stuff would fly, though the Incarnations of Immortality again has demons, Macroscope is an older alternative down the sci-fi avenue. you might try Heinlein.... though you should probably steer clear of "The number of the Beast" sounds like that one could be burned on entry.....

McCaffrey at least has a large number of books one can read before repeating.

you might try somewhat obscure. magic, in a technological standpoint..... Melissa Scott's roads of heaven.....
 
no problem. have a long list of books I read, and have read, but most of them would be banned, fast from the sound of the restrictions.
 
What about the funny ones?
Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Tom Holt?

Or Bujold? SF/RomCom hybrids (the Vorkosigan books)
Or Cherryh's Alliance/Union , or Chanur books? May be a bit "harder" SF, but full of interesting characters.

Check out the stickies in General Book Discussion...a lot of them have a short description of them attached.
 
I think everything from Piers Anthony and Christopher Stasheff would do: they do have demons and such but in all their books it is made clear what is evil, why IT is, why should the good stay away from evil. Also, they stress how dangerous is for the good characters to use the METHODS of evil, 'cause they can corrupt you and bla bla bla...

If your mother complains about presence of demons, explain that they are crushed by the forces of good and used only to warn the reader on the dangers of evil. Pretty effectively I would say (stasheff and anthony are quite good writers). With them, if you can see a demon, it is going to be a loser...

Sometimes, I find this kind of books annoying, prude and boring, but if someone is scared by "demons" and "witches" in a fantasy book...
Otherwise stick to the YA science fiction. No demons there...
 
Try some of the Sharon Shinn books. Mystic & Rider come to mind. Also, Archangel, Jova's Angel & the Alleluia Files.

You might also want to check out Mary Doria Russell's books.
 
Or you can read a lot of the older fantasy, for that matter: George MacDonald, Hope Mirrlees, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, David Lindsay, Mervyn Peake, H. Rider Haggard, A. Merritt, etc.

Or not necessarily "older" in the sense of books, but writers who began before the current fantasy craze set in, such as L. Sprague de Camp (alone or in conjunction with Fletcher Pratt, who was a professional historian -- humorous books, but often with some serious points to make as well), Poul Anderson, Andre Norton (though I'm not sure how she'd respond to a series set in the Witch World, albeit these were accepted and loved by generations of sff readers), Katherine Kurtz, Evangeline Walton, Roger Zelazny, Avram Davidson...

And, of course, you also have writers that do come from the YA field, though they didn't necessarily always stay there (personal favorites of mine being Alan Garner and Lloyd Alexander, for instance).

There have also been quite a list of retellings of classic fairy tales as modern fantasy novels, many of which are quite good; those would be worth seeking out, as well.

And as for science fiction... well, you could do a lot worse than reading a lot of the classic sf (I'd suggest the New Wave, but some of that got into rather "adult" subject matter at times, and I doubt that would meet with parental approval, either....). Or many of the Hugo and Nebula winners (not to mention the anthologies which collect together the shorter tales (short stories, novellas, novelettes) which have won these awards, or the Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes One and 2A and 2B:

Hugo Award for Best Novel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nebula Award for Best Novel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Basically by the time you whittle through even a small portion of all this, you'll be well into your 30s, and if you're still interested in reading those that don't currently meet parental approval... well, you may well be the parent objecting by that point...:p
 
You could always try Susan Cooper's "The Dark is rising." The combatants on both sides are human with the Light led by Merlin.

Just ignore the film, though. it's a piece of sh*t.
 
Since this isn't a search for a specific book, but a request for recommendations, I'm going to move it to General Books, where it may get more attention and you may get more answers, mirinda. But before I do ...

The older books JD starts by mentioning would certainly be fine with your mother, but I don't know if they would fulfill your second requirement of entertaining you unless you are already interested in fantasy with a more literary bent. (If you are, they're great suggestions.)

I agree that Norton would be a good choice if you stay away from the Witch World books (they aren't the kind of witches your mother doesn't like, but it might be hard explaining that to her), especially her older books, which are by far the best.

Other suggestions (most of which were originally published for younger readers but were later adopted by adult readers as well, because they have such great crossover appeal):

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia) McKillip
The Riddlemaster Trilogy (also by McKillip): The Riddlemaster of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire, and Harpist in the Wind
The Earthsea Trilogy, by Ursula K. LeGuin: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore

All of the above are classics in the field, beautifully written, and approved by teachers and librarians, so they should be fine with your mother.

Well, she might balk at the title of The Tombs of Atuan, but it's not that kind of book at all -- certified no ghouls, ghosts, demons, or corpses, and the whole story is about turning away from the dark and embracing the light.

Another classic is The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle, which is quirky and heartfelt at the same time. It's a quiet and deeply moving story.

Newer books I'd recommend are:

The Oracle Prophecies, by Catherine Fisher: The Oracle Betrayed, The Sphere of Secrets, and The Day of the Scarab
One of the books in this series was a finalist for a prestigious children's book award in England (under a slightly different title), but the main characters are in their teens and are forced to take on very adult responsibilities. The setting is quasi-historical, sort of a combination of ancient Greece and ancient Egypt.

The Seeker Chronicles, by Betsy James: Long Night Dance, Dark Heart, and Listening at the Gate
The magic here is of the folklore and mythology sort: animal totems and seal-people.

Finally, I would suggest that you look around the YA section here, and see which books look like they will appeal to you. You will notice that the people recommending them and loving them are all adults, but because they are YA books few of them have much in the way of violence, sex, goat sacrifices, or the rest of the stuff your mother doesn't like.
 
Another series is by Patricia C. Wrede

The Enchanted Forest Chronicles:

1. Dealing with Dragons
2. Searching for Dragons
3. Calling on Dragons
4. Talking to Dragons

I found these books to be a lot of fun


There's also Sherwood Smith:

1. Wren to the Rescue
2. Wren's Quest
3. Wren's War


Another series by Sherwood Smith that I liked, but it's not finished yet (will be this year)

1. Inda
2. The Fox
 
Oh yes, Sherwood Smith -- to my mind, by far the best things she's written are Crown Duel and Court Duel (sometimes published as two separate books, sometimes all in one). I've read them two or three times myself and always find them thoroughly enjoyable. And I defy any mother to find anything "bad" in them.

P.S. I'm a mother and grandmother myself, and I have some sympathy for your mother. I was more the "I'll read the books, too, and then we can talk about the troubling parts" kind of mother than the kind that said, "Don't read that book," but I must say, the one Sara Douglass book I read would have strongly tempted me to draw the line. So I'm trying very hard to make suggestions that any mother who wasn't dead-set against Fantasy would approve.
 
Why not go with your mum to a bookshop and get her to read the book covers? If it sounds alright to her and is suited to your age group then you should be OK.
 
How well some of Bradley's books would go over with mirinda's mother might depend on how she feels about gay or bisexual characters.
 
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