Recommend Some Genre Trash

Timothy Zahn writes fun space operas. I recommend "The Icarus Hunt" as one. Also, his "Conquerors" trilogy has lots of space war and intrigue kinds of stuff. And, if you don't mind reading media tie-ins, his three Star Wars novels from the early 1990's (Shadow of the Empire et al.) are pretty good too.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "The Disappeared" is also fun, and perhaps a bit deeper (but still a good read).

I've enjoyed Patricia Cornwall's hard-boiled medical-examiner Kay Scarpetta; check those novels out. Likewise, Marcia Muller's books for another female hard-boiled detective. (I may be misusing the term hard-boiled; I don't think I read much of the real hard-boiled genre, so I'm ignorant.)

Robin Cook writes silly medical thrillers that are often a good read.

Charles Sheffield's "Proteus" series (there are four, I think) and his "Heritage Universe" series (starting with Summertide; there are 4 or 5 of these) are also fun.

For hard-boiled detective stuff, I'd get Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch books. Or, to be on the other side of it, Lawrence Block's Burglar or Hitman books, which are rather more whimsical. Unless you've read them recently, I always find that re-reading Chandler's Philip Marlowe books is a pleasant surprise, as they never seem to get old. I must have read them 5 times.

You didn't ask for fantasy books, but I laugh in the face of narrowly drawn requests for advice: Steven Erikson's Malazan Books of the Fallen (starting with Gardens of the Moon) are pretty outstanding.

If you haven't read David Weber's Honor Harrington stuff, it's perfect.

You didn't ask for fantasy books, but I laugh in the face of narrowly drawn requests for advice: Steven Erikson's Malazan Books of the Fallen (starting with Gardens of the Moon) are pretty outstanding.

Yes, they are. Unfortunately, I just finished Reaper's Gale a week or so ago, so there'll be no new Erikson for me for a while. Other books in that general vein would be welcome, though.

If you haven't read David Weber's Honor Harrington stuff, it's perfect.

The problem with that is that Weber is on my list of Authors to Never Give Money, along with S.M. Stirling, because of appalling politics. Though, to be fair, in Weber's case it's not his own misbehavior that it the problem, so much as that of his fans on Usenet back in the day.

Given that he's a Baen type, I suppose I could get free download versions and put them on the PDA, but that's not as good a reading experience, though it is convenient.

Christopher Brookmyre?

Older, but still in print -- have you ever read any of John D. MacDonald's Travis Magee series (21 of them)? Carl Hiaasen has acknowledged MacDonald as one of his inspirations.

Magee is a "salvage consultant" -- if you've been unjustly but legally victimized/robbed of anything valuable, he'll "salvage" it for you, for a 50% cut. Generally well plotted yarns that are eminently readable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_McGee

Most anything by David Baldacci would be suitable, in the mystery genre. Stuart Woods has some good books, but a lot of mediocre ones too.

Dave Duncan has a few newish books out. The Alchemist's Apprentice is a murder mystery set in 17th-century Venice, with some magic. It's minor, but decent fun, and has good background color. It's the first of a series but clearly a loose one, as all the plot is wrapped up.

Also recently published is his Mother of Lies, which completes the duology begun in Children of Chaos. These are fantasy, set on a dodecahedral planet. These are more typical middleweight Duncan, I would say - not up to his best (such as A Man of His Word), but good. (My main problem with the duology is I think the ending is too pat - if there is a sequel, it will presumably solve that.)

Jeff Lindsay's Dexter books are excellent. Darkly funny, with a totally unique protagonist, they're really easy, enjoyable reads. The first one is a bit wonky and comes to an unsatisfying conclusion, but the second picks up where the first left off and is hugely funny.

(Yes, these are also the books the Dexter series on Showtime is based on, and the series is very different but also excellent.)

If you want to read a first-person account of a "good" serial killer... look no further.

Have you read Night of Knives by Esslemont, then (co-creator of the Malazan Empire world with Stephen Erikson and set in that world)? My brother just finished it and said that it was pretty good.

You must be ordering from Canada to get Reaper's Gale so early, I guess; I get them from the UK but it's cheaper from Canada, I think.

Also more fantasy than sci-fi, and pretty old, but if you haven't read Steven Brust's "Jhereg", I'd recommend that.

Simon Green's Tales of the Nightside (of London, kind of) starring John Taylor who can turn anything inside out, are fun trashy stuff. Vaguely similar in tone to Butcher. 7 shorter novels in paperback at B&N last I saw.

Read QED! That will amuse the people next to you on the plane.

Have you read the "red-green-blue mars" trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson? My wife really liked them, particularly the battle between corporate interests and the environmentalists who want to keep Mars like it was before we got there.

I think "Sick Puppy" by Hiaasen is the one featuring a biostitute (biologist working for developers) who meets a particularly just ending, but "Stormy Weather" is a great read during hurricane season. There is also his non-fiction book, "Team Rodent", about you know who. Read that on a flight to Orlando!

Hi Chad,

Thanks for the list of examples. I am always on the lookout for good trash, and there is a lot in your list that I haven't read. (Incidentally, did you ever see Richard Wolkomir's "Wafted to Mars, he fights four-armed green Tharks", which extolled the virtues of trash-lit? He gave me permission to reprint it here.)

I'll second the Timothy Zahn recommendation, although I like his solo novels better than his series. His recent Night Train to Rigel is an enjoyably light space opera/mystery.

In space opera, you might like Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy. Chasm City is a side-quel set in the same universe, and it's a good introduction if you aren't sure you want to commit to a trilogy. Reynolds' Century Rain is also good (and noirish); I haven't read Pushing Ice but I will soon.

For sheer hard-boiledness, I turn to Lee Child's Jack Reacher books. One reviewer described Reacher as a sort of justice-dispensing shark, always moving and always putting the hurt on the bad guys, and Stephen King recommended the first reacher book, The Killing Floor, in the categories of Best Corrupt Southern Town and Best Exploding Warehouse.

However, my current favorites are Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels, which are hard-boiled PI space operas. If you haven't read Altered Carbon, give it a shot. You'll never think of the word 'damage' the same way again. Morgan's brand new novel Thirteen is not in the same universe but in a similar vein.

What about David Brin for some space-faring, talking dolphin and chimps plus aliens adventures - the Uplift Wars, Sundiver, Startide Rising. He's got quite a few that are fun quick reads.

I'm going to ignore the fact that the book is in between printings and that it's not scifi and will suggest John Dies at the End (It is available to be read online at http://www.johndiesattheend.com/). If anyone wants to know what would have happened if Douglas Adams wrote a horror story, all they'd have to do is read that.

I want to second the Michael Connelly suggeestion on the off-chance that you were not aware of their existence. Not quite hardboiled, but dark and tightly-plotted, with ambiguous characters and satisfying outcomes. He has yet to write a bad one, and any of the Bosch books are excellent, but his best were two non-Bosch books that remain popular: The Poet and Blood Work. Echo Park, the most recent Bosch paperback, was also good.

I assume you are search for recent works, so I won't get into Donald Hamilton's criminally neglected Matt Helm series. Lee Child's Reacher series combines Richard Stark's Parker and David Morrel's Rambo -- it's not for everyone, but the rationalism displayed by the protagonist seems very SF-like to me. Speaking of which, I just picked up Morrell's Creepers, and it was enjoyable, if more light-weight than his better works. Stephen White's Kill Me had an interesting premise, and if the execution did not meet that quality, it was still an enjoyable read.

Long shots: Janwillem van de Wetering'sw The Perfidious Parrot follows three Dutch ex-cops on the trail of a hijacked oil tanker. Hardbloiled and exotic due to the odd slang usage of translated dutch. Michael Van Rooy's An Ordinary Decent Criminal: an ex-con, trying to go straight, pursued relentlessly by a crooked cop, uses his crook skills to get out of a jam. Excellent writing. Finally, William Deverell's legal thrillers transcend the genre due to an engagingly clipped prose style, snappy dialogue, and frenetic pacing -- you can't go wrong with any of them.

They may not be trashy enough for you, but Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Dustin Long's Icelander are both detective novels taking place among imaginary societies in remote snowy outposts. The former is more straightfoward than the latter, though.

Yes, Rob is using hard boiled a bit incorrectly. Marcia Muller's what I call soft boiled. I love her books but I don't know if Chad would. Also note that after the first few Scarpetta books, the quality declined percipitously. Have you tried Kathy Reichs' books about Temperance Brennan? They have no relation to the tv show *at all* and are pretty good in small doses.

Dr. Vector has some good recommendations esp. the Alistair Reynolds. Jordin really likes him so you can be sure there's no Stupid Physics.

Do you know Walter Jon Williams' comedy of manners trilogy Crown Jewels, House of Shards, and Rock of Ages? They're quite amusing and great airplane reading. You might have to get them from the library or abebooks though. They seem to be op.

Second the recommendations for the Dexter books and the McGee books. And I really liked Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books too but they are one of those hate'em or love'em things apparently.

I need some new hardboiled writers myself.

MKK

I would recommend the Arkady Renko series of novels by Martin Cruz Smith - Gorky Park,Polar Star,Red Square,Havana Bay,Wolves Eat Dogs,Stalin's Ghost - an interesting series about a nonconformist Russian criminal investigator. It's especially interesting since it covers the Soviet era of the 1980's through present-day Russia.

Aha, I see now that you did get your copy of Reaper's Gale from the UK. Note to self: read links.

There's always David Gemmel, of course. Heroic fanrasy and moderately hardboiled, to boot.

Wm. Gibson's Spook Country is out 8/7.

If you like the style of Weber/Drake et al. but not their politics, Eric Flint probably fits the bill. I liked 1632 and some of the sequels, and they're certainly plane fodder. I suspect that John Ringo's politics are also other than my own :) but both his SCA-ish fantasy (start with 'There Will be Dragons') and some of the space opera stuff (start with 'A Hymn Before Battle') are worthwhile; probably avoid the 'Ghost' series.

If you haven't read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series, it's not trash but fit well with planes for me.

There is a recent Dick Francis, presumably written sans wife, that's pretty good but whose title now escapes me. Also Spider Robinson's finish-up of an old Heinlein ms, 'Variable Star.' Hmm.. the last thing I bought was the Complete Amber, and if you have by some chance not read the series then that would give you a coupla thousand pages in one chunk.

On the off chance you don't know this already, Daniel Keys Moran has posted a bunch of stuff for free online. Reading on a PDA wouldn't be great, but you could always print it out...

Is it too late to get in suggestions? Because if so I'd like to recommend the following extremely genre books, though I'm not so sure what the trashy quotient is. The first two given what I know of your reading tastes are very strong recommends, the other two are weak recommends.

- Anything and everything by Peter F. Hamilton, who writes super-duper-epic space opera; what I'm reading by him right now is "Pandora's Star", which is the beginning of his new series/trilogy thing.

- The Takashi Kovacs novels by Richard K. Morgan, beginning with "Altered Carbon"; these are about a mercenary working in a vaguely transhumanist future as a very self-consciously 30s noiresque detective.

- Getting a little further from what you asked for, "A Song of Ice and Fire" by George R.R. Marin, although technically /F rather than SF/, is totally worth giving a read.

- These are technically neither genre nor fiction, but I would recommend Jon Ronson's "THEM: Adventures with Extremists" and "The Men who Stare at Goats". The first one is about various very strange beliefs that conspiracy theorists have about what the U.S. government is doing; the second one is about various very strange things that the U.S. government actually did do in the 70s. Although nonfiction, both of these books are told as the author's first-person narrative, and both actually remain close enough to the borderline between journalism and absolute insanity that I can feel confident including them in a list of recommendations of genre fiction.

I might suggest Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, which follow a British rifleman of the Napoleonic period from the Peninsular Wars to Waterloo (a second series provides both prequel in India and sequel in South America). Not up to the literary quality of Patrick O'Brian, but ripping tales for all that. Be a while before you run out of these; there are at least 21 of them.

Actually, thinking about it some more, given the request for stuff like the Dresden Files and the general stuff Chad has expressed an interest here, I would also recommend Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. The plot is sort of a 14th-century science fiction sort of thing, with the events of the plot being reconstructed after the fact in a vaguely detective-novel-ish fashion by a bunch of 20th century academics. Warning, this might be good airplane stuff depending on what you like, but it is NOT light reading.

(I should note, though, that if there's anyone here whose ears perk up at the mention of the names Borges or Gaiman, you will devour this particular novel like crack.)

You mentioned Butcher. Have you considered his Fury fantasy series? (Furies of Calderon et al).