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I have not dropped off the face of the earth! In fact, I have been reading books, and not just academic books either. I kept realizing that it had been a while, but I didn't realize how long until I looked at my "books" tag today and found I'd lasted posted my comments on books in May, 2012, and last posted a reminder to myself in September, 2012.
The reminder post (originally posted for my eyes only) reads like this:
both vols of Sharing Knife so far
One of our Thursdays is Missing
Iron Sunrise & its predecessor
Hunger Games trilogy
Pat Cadigan, Tea in an Empty Cup
Glass Books
Lewis, Planet Trilogy
Guess how many of those books I have here in the pile of books to review for today? Of eleven books I'd noted for myself, I still planned to review three, planned to review two that were sequels to two I hadn't reviewed—I'm not even running at 50%. So I may have read even more books that I never noted down. I'd like to think so. It seems I ought to have read more for fun in the last fifteen or sixteen months than I have piled by me.
Anyway, without further ado, reviews—most with minimal spoilers, I hope, but I'll note exceptions.
Someone gave me The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist as a gift. I wish I could remember who so that I could warn him or her. It's a first novel, and I think the author was going for the "spectacular literary debut" descriptor that he got on the book cover. I was immediately hooked and stayed that way for the first hundred or more pages. By the time I finished the book, I felt like I was dragging myself across a finish line. I did want to know what happened to the characters, and I think he really did create characters worth caring about, but I was getting darned tired. If you don't want to know what tired me, then don't read the next two paragraphs (though you might want to know that the second one is a content warning). Just skip to the next book. I don't mind.
The first spoiler: I start to worry when fanfics get over a certain length because often I find them repetitive. I realize that given the length of some of the fics I've written, I shouldn't be saying that. But we can all remember stories (that we didn't write, right?) where the heroes get out of the frying pan into the fire, then into a worse fire, then into a conflagration. . . . It was one darned thing after another, and I began to feel weary. Everyone is trapped or caught multiple times.
The second, and worse, spoiler: I had a hard time stomaching parts of the book. I have a hard time reading about sexual assault, and generally I choose to avoid it. When I do choose to read about it, I generally only do so with an author I trust. The assaults start with people who aren't really characters: we see them at a distance, and they seem to be consenting. I was uncertain and disturbed, and I ought to be disturbed if someone is being assaulted. I nearly quit the book, though, when the main character was sexually assaulted but, by gosh, she was going to claim victory over her persecutors by not enjoying it. I hope that at this point I misread it or am misremembering the scene; feel free to correct me if I am. But her moral victory seems to be that she's about to succumb to pleasure and then realizes that's wrong. No, excuse me: what's wrong is what that other character is doing to her. There's some small victory in the protagonist deceiving the villains about the extent of her resistance, which she did. I remain disturbed by the idea that it took an act of will for a woman to resist pleasure in a sexual assault. There are many violations of characters' bodies and wills, but most of them are women, and it's the violations of women on which the book seems to dwell. I had real problems with this element of the book.
The Sharing Knife, volumes 1–4, by Lois McMaster Bujold
My brother dragged me into this world. Gosh, these are a guilty pleasure: I have seen advice not to feel guilty about what you enjoy, but my guilt is that I may drag people in who don't want to go. Oh, and I feel a bit of a philistine for enjoying what reads like fanfic, complete with a mary Sue protagonist. Fawn Bluefield's mistakes are mostly before the first book even starts, and she's so darned cute and so darned near perfect that sometimes I can't stand her. Then I feel guilty about disliking her! Fawn Bluefield is a farmer's daughter who has run away from home for reasons that are gradually made clear (or maybe not gradually; I can't remember the pacing of the first book awfully well). Dag Redwing is a damaged Lakewalker (physically and emotionally).
They live in a world where evil sometimes takes a physical form, cropping up as a blight that works increasing havoc as it grows, learns, and strengthens. I don't want to give away too much, but I found the world and its two very different societies really drew me in.
The main characters, however, are flawed only in the most noble ways. Fawn Sue, despite being entirely new to the Lakewalker world and only dimly aware of blights and what the farmers call Lakewalker "magic" before, helps Dag figure out things that centuries or millennia of Lakewalkers have not managed before. You Have Been Warned. Read at your own discretion. When I heard that the author had written fanfic when she was young, I had to laugh and say, "She still writes it, but in her own world!"
Yet even while I felt that the novels were flawed (more flawed than their leads), I enjoyed the first one a great deal, and the others only a bit less each time. After the fourth book, I'm not sure I want another. I certainly wouldn't have stopped before reading the fourth book, however. Fawn and Dag somehow won me over despite being Mary Sue (not quite Manic Pixie Dream Girl*, partly because she is the protagonist and partly because she's not in Manic mode or Pixie mode when we first meet her) and Brooding Hero. They charmed the heck out of me, and I'm still not sure how. I might read that fifth book if there is one.
*I just wasted too much of my life reading the appropriate entry at TV Tropes to make sure I was using the term correctly. I will not look up Brooding Hero in case it's there, because I don't have that much time left to lose.
I first read Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis, when I was a kid. I was afraid I wouldn't like them again. I still like the first two, and I'm still very ambivalent about the third, so no change.
I am a practicing Catholic, so I'm not at all bothered by the Christianity of the novels as such. I'm bothered by some strands that I find rather patriarchal, especially in That Hideous Strength. Your reaction may vary, of course.
In Out of the Silent Planet, poor Elwin Ransom is just looking for shelter in a storm when he finds a woman who needs help and gets into trouble like you wouldn't believe: he gets kidnapped onto a spaceship to Malacandra. Please bear in mind that the book was published in 1938 and that Lewis was a literature professor, not a scientist! Ignore the science, or pretend you're watching Stargate.
In Perelandra, Ransom goes more willingly to Venus, where he meets that world's Eve—as does his nemesis.
In That Hideous Strength, the central characters are the Studdocks: Jane, who is having bad dreams and feeling increasingly distant from her husband; and Mark, who has a chance to really make it at his university, even if he isn't entirely sure how. The dreams, the science, and the politics are much deeper than they initially realize.
I enjoy them partly for the exploration of theology, though I don't agree on all his theology. If you find that dull or take great issue with Lewis, you'll probably find the books dull or just annoying. I also find some historical interest: the books are from 1938, 1943, and 1945, and I think contemporary anxieties get channeled into the novels in interesting ways.
I enjoy the first two partly out of nostalgia as well. I like Lewis's takes on space and aliens, which seem very different than what's written now. While the people of Venus are quite human, they live on a planet of small islands floating loose; the one command God has given is that they are not to live on the one piece of fixed ground. Ransom finds this way of life difficult, as would I; the Queen can hardly imagine any other, though she makes efforts to understand Ransom, who is himself the alien here. On Malacandra, the landscape is foreign, but the inhabitants even more so: multiple intelligent species co-exist, each living quite differently from the others.
I think the third is more tedious simply because almost everyone is an ordinary human being who talks too much, and because Mark is so entirely dense about who means well and who doesn't. I spent pretty much the whole novel frustrated with Mark. I like Jane better, despite criticisms that surface from time to time because she and Mark have chosen to put off having children!—and despite the criticism, she is clearly the better person. I didn't enjoy this book anywhere near as much as the other two, but I didn't mind finishing it even when I found parts off-putting.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: My daughter made me read these books. At this point, you've probably either read them or chosen not to read them, and so I doubt anyone cares a lot about my take. I found them compelling. At first the simple style put me off a bit, but it fit the character very well: Katniss isn't highly educated, and though she has a lot of survival skills and strong instincts, sometimes she isn't very smart! I'd get frustrated with her and then remember that she was just a teenager, just a few years older than my daughter, and the frustration would mostly evaporate. I could believe in her as a teenager, and I could believe in Gale and Peeta and others. I found the books imaginative and engaging.
I have real problems with the world-building, which you shouldn't read if you don't want spoilers:
• How the hezmana did the US manage to make such a mess of itself without anyone else stepping in? Apparently the rest of North America has been sucked into Panem, but are we to believe that no one from South America, Europe, Asia, or Africa either tries to help or tries to take advantage of the situation? That was a huge bloophole to me. I waited three books for an explanation, and I never got it.
• Then there's what I call the RTD problem, after Torchwood: "Children of Earth": there's a point at which I can't believe everyone would go along. Call me naïve—but even Hitler had assassins going after him repeatedly because they would not go along with what he was doing. Then there were the Allies: see previous point.
• Going along with that, I had trouble believing that if Panem was left alone, the people in power were evil enough to create the Hunger Games, and the people out of power were weak or apathetic enough to let it go on more than seven decades, the appearance of Katniss and Peeta would change all that. I believe that individuals can be catalysts: I know historians who think Pope John Paul II played a huge role in the downfall of the Soviet Union, and I don't know where South Africa would be without Nelson Mandela, to give just two recent examples. I'm having trouble seeing Katniss as a person of that stature to other people.
As Daniel Jackson said (and Fig quotes): "Anyway, I'm sorry, but that just happens to be how I feel about it. What do you think?"
One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde: I have lost count of the sequels to The Eyre Affair. I loved The Eyre Affair; I never wanted it to end. I did not like the sequels as much. I know some people like the Book World more than the Real World of Thursday Next, I prefer the Real World. The Book World is clever. The Real World moves me; I loved the ending of The Eyre Affair (which I'm not spoiling here—go read it if you haven't!) and felt it was earned by all the pain in the novel (and before). After that, the stakes seem to get higher in some ways, but in other ways, they just feel contrived to me.
I can't say much about this novel itself without giving away previous books and possibly a chunk of plot from this one. I enjoyed it reasonably well and remember reading it in a doctor's office as I waited and waited and my arm went numb, and I still wouldn't put down the book.
In Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross, faster-than-light travel has long been a reality. Humans have colonies far, far away. The Eschaton appeared when we got FTL, to stop us changing the past. Martin Springfield has come from Earth to the New Republic on an engineering job, paying Pinkertons "[f]or legislation and insurance," but we learn fairly early that he's working for more than the New Republic. He meets Rachel Mansour, "UN diplomatic intelligence, special operations group." Meanwhile, the Festival has come to the New Republic's youngest colony. It sounds like fun, but it really, really isn't.
I can't read Stross's Merchant Princes series at all; I forced myself through the first book and then wondered why on earth I'd bothered to finish it. Brilliant Husband devours them (as does Paul Krugman, apparently), but they leave me cold.
This series somehow has a very different effect on me (and the Atrocity Archives series still another, but more on that later). I came to like Martin and Rachel very much and to wish them well through all kinds of disasters. I won't name all the other characters (partly because my memory for names is so bad).
I liked the universe-building here, though I couldn't get my head around some of the science. ("How do they do that? Can they do that?"). The aliens in the Festival were deeply alien. The different worlds operated fairly differently, and I liked that. Be warned: Stross books often have high body counts. You may lose characters you care about. Or you may just spend the entire book expecting to lose them. Stross shows some of his sense of humor here (unlike in Merchant Princes).
I liked it quite enough to read Iron Sunrise, a sequel of sorts. We meet some characters familiar from the previous book, but the protagonist here is really Wednesday, a girl who manages to flee her destroyed solar system with her family and conceal from them her last-minute run around a space station with her not-so-imaginary friend. I don't know how to make her sound appealing, really, because she didn't appeal to me at first. I came around.
We learn a bit more about the universe here and some problems in it, and I hope those tidbits are promises of at least one more novel there.
That took me a lot longer than I thought. I won't post them all in one go. More tomorrow (God willing).
The reminder post (originally posted for my eyes only) reads like this:
both vols of Sharing Knife so far
One of our Thursdays is Missing
Iron Sunrise & its predecessor
Hunger Games trilogy
Pat Cadigan, Tea in an Empty Cup
Glass Books
Lewis, Planet Trilogy
Guess how many of those books I have here in the pile of books to review for today? Of eleven books I'd noted for myself, I still planned to review three, planned to review two that were sequels to two I hadn't reviewed—I'm not even running at 50%. So I may have read even more books that I never noted down. I'd like to think so. It seems I ought to have read more for fun in the last fifteen or sixteen months than I have piled by me.
Anyway, without further ado, reviews—most with minimal spoilers, I hope, but I'll note exceptions.
Someone gave me The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist as a gift. I wish I could remember who so that I could warn him or her. It's a first novel, and I think the author was going for the "spectacular literary debut" descriptor that he got on the book cover. I was immediately hooked and stayed that way for the first hundred or more pages. By the time I finished the book, I felt like I was dragging myself across a finish line. I did want to know what happened to the characters, and I think he really did create characters worth caring about, but I was getting darned tired. If you don't want to know what tired me, then don't read the next two paragraphs (though you might want to know that the second one is a content warning). Just skip to the next book. I don't mind.
The first spoiler: I start to worry when fanfics get over a certain length because often I find them repetitive. I realize that given the length of some of the fics I've written, I shouldn't be saying that. But we can all remember stories (that we didn't write, right?) where the heroes get out of the frying pan into the fire, then into a worse fire, then into a conflagration. . . . It was one darned thing after another, and I began to feel weary. Everyone is trapped or caught multiple times.
The second, and worse, spoiler: I had a hard time stomaching parts of the book. I have a hard time reading about sexual assault, and generally I choose to avoid it. When I do choose to read about it, I generally only do so with an author I trust. The assaults start with people who aren't really characters: we see them at a distance, and they seem to be consenting. I was uncertain and disturbed, and I ought to be disturbed if someone is being assaulted. I nearly quit the book, though, when the main character was sexually assaulted but, by gosh, she was going to claim victory over her persecutors by not enjoying it. I hope that at this point I misread it or am misremembering the scene; feel free to correct me if I am. But her moral victory seems to be that she's about to succumb to pleasure and then realizes that's wrong. No, excuse me: what's wrong is what that other character is doing to her. There's some small victory in the protagonist deceiving the villains about the extent of her resistance, which she did. I remain disturbed by the idea that it took an act of will for a woman to resist pleasure in a sexual assault. There are many violations of characters' bodies and wills, but most of them are women, and it's the violations of women on which the book seems to dwell. I had real problems with this element of the book.
The Sharing Knife, volumes 1–4, by Lois McMaster Bujold
My brother dragged me into this world. Gosh, these are a guilty pleasure: I have seen advice not to feel guilty about what you enjoy, but my guilt is that I may drag people in who don't want to go. Oh, and I feel a bit of a philistine for enjoying what reads like fanfic, complete with a mary Sue protagonist. Fawn Bluefield's mistakes are mostly before the first book even starts, and she's so darned cute and so darned near perfect that sometimes I can't stand her. Then I feel guilty about disliking her! Fawn Bluefield is a farmer's daughter who has run away from home for reasons that are gradually made clear (or maybe not gradually; I can't remember the pacing of the first book awfully well). Dag Redwing is a damaged Lakewalker (physically and emotionally).
They live in a world where evil sometimes takes a physical form, cropping up as a blight that works increasing havoc as it grows, learns, and strengthens. I don't want to give away too much, but I found the world and its two very different societies really drew me in.
The main characters, however, are flawed only in the most noble ways. Fawn Sue, despite being entirely new to the Lakewalker world and only dimly aware of blights and what the farmers call Lakewalker "magic" before, helps Dag figure out things that centuries or millennia of Lakewalkers have not managed before. You Have Been Warned. Read at your own discretion. When I heard that the author had written fanfic when she was young, I had to laugh and say, "She still writes it, but in her own world!"
Yet even while I felt that the novels were flawed (more flawed than their leads), I enjoyed the first one a great deal, and the others only a bit less each time. After the fourth book, I'm not sure I want another. I certainly wouldn't have stopped before reading the fourth book, however. Fawn and Dag somehow won me over despite being Mary Sue (not quite Manic Pixie Dream Girl*, partly because she is the protagonist and partly because she's not in Manic mode or Pixie mode when we first meet her) and Brooding Hero. They charmed the heck out of me, and I'm still not sure how. I might read that fifth book if there is one.
*I just wasted too much of my life reading the appropriate entry at TV Tropes to make sure I was using the term correctly. I will not look up Brooding Hero in case it's there, because I don't have that much time left to lose.
I first read Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis, when I was a kid. I was afraid I wouldn't like them again. I still like the first two, and I'm still very ambivalent about the third, so no change.
I am a practicing Catholic, so I'm not at all bothered by the Christianity of the novels as such. I'm bothered by some strands that I find rather patriarchal, especially in That Hideous Strength. Your reaction may vary, of course.
In Out of the Silent Planet, poor Elwin Ransom is just looking for shelter in a storm when he finds a woman who needs help and gets into trouble like you wouldn't believe: he gets kidnapped onto a spaceship to Malacandra. Please bear in mind that the book was published in 1938 and that Lewis was a literature professor, not a scientist! Ignore the science, or pretend you're watching Stargate.
In Perelandra, Ransom goes more willingly to Venus, where he meets that world's Eve—as does his nemesis.
In That Hideous Strength, the central characters are the Studdocks: Jane, who is having bad dreams and feeling increasingly distant from her husband; and Mark, who has a chance to really make it at his university, even if he isn't entirely sure how. The dreams, the science, and the politics are much deeper than they initially realize.
I enjoy them partly for the exploration of theology, though I don't agree on all his theology. If you find that dull or take great issue with Lewis, you'll probably find the books dull or just annoying. I also find some historical interest: the books are from 1938, 1943, and 1945, and I think contemporary anxieties get channeled into the novels in interesting ways.
I enjoy the first two partly out of nostalgia as well. I like Lewis's takes on space and aliens, which seem very different than what's written now. While the people of Venus are quite human, they live on a planet of small islands floating loose; the one command God has given is that they are not to live on the one piece of fixed ground. Ransom finds this way of life difficult, as would I; the Queen can hardly imagine any other, though she makes efforts to understand Ransom, who is himself the alien here. On Malacandra, the landscape is foreign, but the inhabitants even more so: multiple intelligent species co-exist, each living quite differently from the others.
I think the third is more tedious simply because almost everyone is an ordinary human being who talks too much, and because Mark is so entirely dense about who means well and who doesn't. I spent pretty much the whole novel frustrated with Mark. I like Jane better, despite criticisms that surface from time to time because she and Mark have chosen to put off having children!—and despite the criticism, she is clearly the better person. I didn't enjoy this book anywhere near as much as the other two, but I didn't mind finishing it even when I found parts off-putting.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: My daughter made me read these books. At this point, you've probably either read them or chosen not to read them, and so I doubt anyone cares a lot about my take. I found them compelling. At first the simple style put me off a bit, but it fit the character very well: Katniss isn't highly educated, and though she has a lot of survival skills and strong instincts, sometimes she isn't very smart! I'd get frustrated with her and then remember that she was just a teenager, just a few years older than my daughter, and the frustration would mostly evaporate. I could believe in her as a teenager, and I could believe in Gale and Peeta and others. I found the books imaginative and engaging.
I have real problems with the world-building, which you shouldn't read if you don't want spoilers:
• How the hezmana did the US manage to make such a mess of itself without anyone else stepping in? Apparently the rest of North America has been sucked into Panem, but are we to believe that no one from South America, Europe, Asia, or Africa either tries to help or tries to take advantage of the situation? That was a huge bloophole to me. I waited three books for an explanation, and I never got it.
• Then there's what I call the RTD problem, after Torchwood: "Children of Earth": there's a point at which I can't believe everyone would go along. Call me naïve—but even Hitler had assassins going after him repeatedly because they would not go along with what he was doing. Then there were the Allies: see previous point.
• Going along with that, I had trouble believing that if Panem was left alone, the people in power were evil enough to create the Hunger Games, and the people out of power were weak or apathetic enough to let it go on more than seven decades, the appearance of Katniss and Peeta would change all that. I believe that individuals can be catalysts: I know historians who think Pope John Paul II played a huge role in the downfall of the Soviet Union, and I don't know where South Africa would be without Nelson Mandela, to give just two recent examples. I'm having trouble seeing Katniss as a person of that stature to other people.
As Daniel Jackson said (and Fig quotes): "Anyway, I'm sorry, but that just happens to be how I feel about it. What do you think?"
One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde: I have lost count of the sequels to The Eyre Affair. I loved The Eyre Affair; I never wanted it to end. I did not like the sequels as much. I know some people like the Book World more than the Real World of Thursday Next, I prefer the Real World. The Book World is clever. The Real World moves me; I loved the ending of The Eyre Affair (which I'm not spoiling here—go read it if you haven't!) and felt it was earned by all the pain in the novel (and before). After that, the stakes seem to get higher in some ways, but in other ways, they just feel contrived to me.
I can't say much about this novel itself without giving away previous books and possibly a chunk of plot from this one. I enjoyed it reasonably well and remember reading it in a doctor's office as I waited and waited and my arm went numb, and I still wouldn't put down the book.
In Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross, faster-than-light travel has long been a reality. Humans have colonies far, far away. The Eschaton appeared when we got FTL, to stop us changing the past. Martin Springfield has come from Earth to the New Republic on an engineering job, paying Pinkertons "[f]or legislation and insurance," but we learn fairly early that he's working for more than the New Republic. He meets Rachel Mansour, "UN diplomatic intelligence, special operations group." Meanwhile, the Festival has come to the New Republic's youngest colony. It sounds like fun, but it really, really isn't.
I can't read Stross's Merchant Princes series at all; I forced myself through the first book and then wondered why on earth I'd bothered to finish it. Brilliant Husband devours them (as does Paul Krugman, apparently), but they leave me cold.
This series somehow has a very different effect on me (and the Atrocity Archives series still another, but more on that later). I came to like Martin and Rachel very much and to wish them well through all kinds of disasters. I won't name all the other characters (partly because my memory for names is so bad).
I liked the universe-building here, though I couldn't get my head around some of the science. ("How do they do that? Can they do that?"). The aliens in the Festival were deeply alien. The different worlds operated fairly differently, and I liked that. Be warned: Stross books often have high body counts. You may lose characters you care about. Or you may just spend the entire book expecting to lose them. Stross shows some of his sense of humor here (unlike in Merchant Princes).
I liked it quite enough to read Iron Sunrise, a sequel of sorts. We meet some characters familiar from the previous book, but the protagonist here is really Wednesday, a girl who manages to flee her destroyed solar system with her family and conceal from them her last-minute run around a space station with her not-so-imaginary friend. I don't know how to make her sound appealing, really, because she didn't appeal to me at first. I came around.
We learn a bit more about the universe here and some problems in it, and I hope those tidbits are promises of at least one more novel there.
That took me a lot longer than I thought. I won't post them all in one go. More tomorrow (God willing).
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I haven't read the Vorkosigan series. I downloaded several when the ebooks were offered free, but I keep forgetting about them. I tried to get them to the iPad, which is better for reading novels, but I can't seem to move them from my computer anywhere else—probably a condition of the free download.
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Funny they won't transfer though. There is a sort of help thing for transferring to the iPad or ereaders at Baen, see if there's any tips you can use in there.
http://www.baenebooks.com/t-ereaderinstructions.aspx
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I'll be sure to check these out. Thanks for the reviews!
*HUGS*
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Oh yeah, Hunger Games trilogy can be nitpicked. Biggest issue is why are teenagers fighting to their death for sport and enjoyment? However, when I hear of some of these crappy reality shows out there, are we really that far away from this happening? :P
Still, entertaining books. I enjoyed them.
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CS Lewis - I think I've been aware of this trilogy for about 10 years now, but I've never read them. I wanted to, because I had read and loved Narnia, but something about the description put me off. And reading your review, I'm kinda glad I haven't read. I don't mind when religion is upfront I may not be a huge fan, but I'll accept it). However, when an author 'sneaks religion in', I'm way less keen. I loved Narnia as a kid (and was completely obliviously to the symbolism? allegory?). In later years, I came across an essay detailing it all - ever since then, Narnia has been a bit tarnished for me. When I re-read now, all I can see now is someone proselytising. :( However, like you with the Silent Planet trilogy, I have a lot of nostalgia for Narnia, which carries it through.
The Hunger Games - I'm still on the fence about reading these. To be honest, if I didn't have a million other things on my To Read list, I might try them. But having picked them up a few times and read the back, I'm not sure I would enjoy them! I'd mostly likely get frustrated with them, remember that they were teenagers, and then yell, "But that isn't a excuse!". Ahem, yes, I may not have the most patience with teenaged protagonists that are too 'real' aka normal teenagers around me...
Jasper Fforde & Charles Stross - you have me curious. I'll keep them in mind. I think you've spoken about Fforde before? Though, no idea what you said, and what the bok was.
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Charles Stross: I like best his Atrocity Archives series. Again, you can read the first one and stop; it's not like Fforde's Shades of Grey series or The Hunger Games series or The Sharing Knife, where I feel like the first book doesn't settle things. The Atrocity Archive series is a bit complicated by the fact that the first book contains a short novel plus a long story, the second book is a free-standing novel (The Jennifer Morgue) that might not make sense if you haven't read the first, and there's a short story in Wireless ("Down on the Farm," not to be confused with another farm title in that volume) that ought to be read before the third book, The Fuller Memorandum. I was going to link to the Wikipedia page on the series, but I discovered that
a) they've missed "Down on the Farm" and
b) there's a fourth novel I haven't read!
I recommend Fforde more heartily than Stross. Stross can be hard to stomach at times—serious horror, violence, people being greatly harmed and even dying. Fforde's Shades of Grey is a bit higher stakes, but the Thursday Next books are generally much lighter.
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I never bothered with the Hunger Games - I just didn't like the premise. I'm not touching Game of Thrones with a bargepole either.