Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Some recent On the Road posts have taken us to New Zealand and Iceland, and other amazingly beautiful places. And of course I think the Paris series could have gone on forever.
I know there are novels that feel like Boston, and novels that feel like Chicago. Are there books that capture the feel of living in New Zealand, or Iceland, or Paris, or Ireland or even a small town like Mendocino? Books that make you feel like you know what a totally different life would be like?
To Kill A Mockingbird made me feel like I was there.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
The Hound of the Baskervilles always made me feel like I was there, on an English moore, and then, as in during the late Victorian era. The Holmes stories in general are very evocative of lat Victorian London.
A few decades earlier in the Victorian era, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has vivid descriptions of London at Christmas time. You feel like you’re there breathing in the “sooty atoms” that form London’s fog.
More recently Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo puts you right smack dab in an upstate NY down on its luck town.
Omnes Omnibus
Alan Furst’s novels do a good job of evoking Paris in the ’30s.
Roger Moore
I feel like this is an area where many F&SF books fall short. They spend a lot of time worldbuilding, but it tends to be pretty high level. I rarely feel as if I have a good sense of what it would be like to be an ordinary person living in those worlds. This is one of the things the Hunger Games books did a surprisingly good job at. The books devoted a lot of work to making you understand how an ordinary citizen of Panem felt about their country, since it was so important to explaining where the revolution came from.
Omnes Omnibus
Michael Kronenwetter’s First Kill really nails central Wisconsin. Although he invents a town, I can picture exactly where in Wausau most of events take place.
piratedan
this would be the place for a shoutout to the Slough House series by Mick Herron then… I would also pimp Ben Aaronivitch’s Rivers of London series too as doing a wonderful job of mood setting with enough specifics to anchor you to place you with the character POV.
craig
Already Dead by Denis Johnson really feels like coastal NorCal.
Gin & Tonic
Probably more of character studies than evocations of place, but reading the Martin Beck series I felt like I knew Sweden.
Alison Rose
Oh Lord. I could list a few hundred. I’ll try to limit myself.
Just some that came to mind right away! And I absolutely loved all of these.
Scout211
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See took you to the remote mountain village in China where the Akba people farmed tea and were isolated from the rest of China at the time.
piratedan
@Roger Moore: I tend to agree, a lot of them are focused on character stories and fewer of them on allowing the settings to be a character in their own right.
A couple of series that give you a sense of feel in a different place would be the old Glen Cook Garrett PI series (featuring metallic themed titles), which was centered on the city of Tun Faire and was a series of fantasy Noir stories (a decade before Jim Butcher mined the genre), where multiple species lived and magic was a thing; and the world settings of Bujold’s Vorkosigan series of books, as she changes venues and worlds throughout space as humanity has adapted as needed to what’s there.
Scout211
@Alison Rose: Alison Rose, you are my hero. Such an overachiever!
Big yes on A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Snow Child.
narya
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: All of his northern NY books have that vibe, but yes, Nobody’s Fool (first in a trilogy, w/ Everybody’s Fool and Somebody’s Fool) is spectacular for that.
For me, after multiple readings, the LOTR trilogy did that for me. I started reading Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series because it was set in Chicago. Some of the early ones made me roll my eyes, because he got some things wrong. However, the one thing he got right was the supposed location of Demonreach. I can kind of see where it probably is on my morning runs. And Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed does that world creation really well for me.
Alison Rose
@Scout211: Listen, if someone asks for book recs, I’m gonna go to the mattresses.
Have you read Ivey’s second novel, To the Bright Edge of the World? That was also really terrific, and would quality for this list, too, in fact.
craig
John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee books really feel like sweaty Florida.
Scuffletuffle
Any book by Mary Renault…
Scout211
@Alison Rose: No, will add it to my list. Thanks!
narya
@craig: Carl Hiaasen. ‘Nuf said.
Rand Careaga
I read Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada in 1972 and—perhaps because I was at an impressionable age—the first third of the book felt more like remembering the episodes and events related therein rather than merely reading about them. Odd, because the scenes co compellingly evoked were set at Ardis, a country estate in nonexistent “Antiterra,” a curious parallel world mash-up—cultural and geographical—of nineteenth century czarist Russia and early twentieth century America. It’s been decades since last I picked up the novel: I wonder how it would strike me now?
Roger Moore
@piratedan:
I’m also a big fan of the books in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series. She is clearly invested in the idea of how people in her society live. I thought, though, that Provenance did a better job of this than the Radch books proper. Once she moved a little bit back from the space opera battles and focused more on people trying to live their lives, she was able to paint a really fascinating picture of her society. She has at least three areas where her society is radically different from ours that I thought were very worth exploring: acceptance of genderqueer people, the role artifacts tied to historical events played, and people being able to name an heir who became legally indistinguishable from them. The gender politics stand out the most just because they’re so big in our society, but any one of the three might have been enough for a book in and of themselves.
mrmoshpotato
Jurassic Park.
NotMax
Waxing mostly historical,
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, Robert Hughes
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, Stephen Ambrose
Sarum: The Novel of England), Edward Rutherfurd
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman
Arundel, Kenneth Roberts
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
A Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells
Dance of the Tiger, Björn Kurtén
Cane, Jean Toomer
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia, Tony Horwitz
.
Other:
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Titan, John Varley
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
Footfall, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
.
narya
@Roger Moore: Loved that series–and also too: Scalzi’s interdependency series. Actually, the Old Man’s War series and even Kaiju Preservation Society were really good at scene-setting. I had a really good feel for the places.
Alison Rose
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: Dickens is the master of his setting. Bleak House is my fave of his and the setting is so damn well done.
Paul Begala's Pink Tie
Too many to name, so I’ll go with the ones that immediately came to mind:
The Harry Hole books by Jo Nesbø, especially The Redbreast, Knife, and The Snowman (modern Norway)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (NY around WWII)
The Ripley novels by Patricia Highsmith (Europe in the ’50s, though the series goes further)
Mexican Gothic and The Daughter of Dr. Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (midcentury Mexico)
Great thread!
Old Dan and Little Ann
It took me about 15 years to get through Ulysses. Dublin, indeed.
oatler
Gravity’s Rainbow is full of wartime London cultural details as well as lush descriptions of 1945 Germany.
zhena gogolia
Crime and Punishment for 1860s St. Petersburg.
craig
George Pelecanos really gets DC. Raymond Chandler’s 40s Los Angeles is pretty spectacular. I love how Marlowe does something like drive out to Santa Monica and it’s a long drive through the country to get there.
craig
@narya: loved all those. There’s a new Scalzi book released later this month.
TheOtherHank
All of his books are good, but Christopher Moore’s Pine Cove, vampire, and death books all make me feel like I’m there. Pine Cove is a coastal California town south of Monetery and the others take place in San Francisco. While I’m at it, Noir and Razzmatazz (set in a late 1940s San Francisco) also have the same effect.
NotMax
One more which belatedly sprang to mind.
The Death Ship, B. Traven.
Roger Moore
@narya:
I agree that exploring the setting is really important, but one of the things I find interesting is the distinction between books that do a great job of evoking a setting and ones that let you feel like you understand a different life. There are a lot of F&SF books that do a great job of the first without doing a good job of the second. They get so focused on how things work that they neglect what life there is like.
An example of this is William Gibson’s sprawl trilogy. The world he’s describing is different enough from ours that he winds up spending a lot of time talking about how the big picture world works and very little on what it would actually be like to live there. I never feel like I really understand what the characters’ ordinary lives are like in the 99% of the time when they aren’t engaged in the kind of high adventure worth writing a book about.
A contrast from the same author is The Peripheral, which is set much closer to the present. That world is much closer to our own, so Gibson doesn’t need as much time to explain basic mechanics. What time he does spend on mechanics can be shown in the lives of the characters- how are their lives different from ours- and you get a much clearer idea of what life is like for an ordinary poor person in the rural USA in that timeline than you ever do for what ordinary life is like in the sprawl.
WaterGirl
@Paul Begala’s Pink Tie: Did you see any of my responses to your “report a problem” reports?
Narya
@craig: looking forward to it! “Starter Villain,” indeed.
ETA: “Redshirts” is also fun, with good scene-setting.
linnen
@Alison Rose;
Neverwhere is definitely a book to lose oneself!
Other fantasy books that have a ‘You Are Here” feel to them, I found, are;
– Nightside series by Simon Green for a very dark London Soho. ‘Drinking the Midnight Wine’ in the same universe has a good cityscape (not London) description as well.
– The Master Li and Number Ten Ox series by Barry Hughart puts you in a mystical ‘Ten Kingdoms’ era China.
– God Stalk by P.C. Hodgell gives us a street level (sometimes a rooftop) view of Tai-Tastigon. Very much in the same vein as Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser by Fritz Leiber.
– The Miss Fortune mystery series, starting with ‘Louisiana Longshot’, by Jana Deleon introduces one to Sinful Louisiana
– ‘The Big U’ by Neal Stephenson (yes, the author of ‘Snow Crash’) is a good ‘I remember that’ of a Mega-University campus from the ’80’s
Xavier
My definition of a good book is one that immediately takes you somewhere else.
I remember my Mom reading The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder to us kids when we lived in the tropics…
Narya
@Roger Moore: ooooh, I’ll have to check that out. I’ve read a lot, but not all, of his stuff.
I love these threads to lengthen my reading lists.
Mr. Bemused Senior
N. K. Jemisin’s the City We Became really evokes NYC for me. I moved away a long time ago
Juice Box
In the Country of Others by Leila Slimani made me feel like I was in Morocco.
craig
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books really feel like you’re in the Napoleonic Royal Navy. I’ve read the series a couple of times and you can just smell the salt air and feel the ship rolling in the waves. As an aside the movie Master and Commander based on the series also sets that same sense of time and place.
Roger Moore
@Narya:
If you’re interested in The Peripheral, I’d strongly recommend reading the novel before trying the TV interpretation on Amazon Prime. The TV version suffers from the frequent curse of books turned into “prestige TV”, in that they were hoping to blow it up into something much larger in scope than the original, only to cancel it before they could conclude the story. I wish producers would work more on finishing stories than constantly extending them. It really is possible to tell a new story in an existing world, and it doesn’t leave fans angry and frustrated when the story is ended halfway through.
Miss Bianca
@Scuffletuffle: Yep. Or Patrick O’Brian.
Also, the VI Warshawski books really feel like Chicago to me. Always makes me nostalgic to read them.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca:
Yes, that’s who I was thinking of when I wrote about books that feel like Chicago.
Heidi Mom
Martin Walker’s Inspector Bruno series does a great job of evoking the Perigord region of southwestern France (where the cave paintings are).
Ian Rankin does the same for Edinburgh with his John Rebus series, and Ann Cleeves brings Shetland to life with her Jimmy Perez series. (How did a family named Perez come to be in Shetland, the northernmost part of Britain? Think way back in English history . . . .)
And maybe the best evocation of a place that I’ve ever read in a mystery series is Botswana as described in Alexander McCall Smith’s series about the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.
Alison Rose
@Paul Begala’s Pink Tie: The only Silvia Moreno-Garcia book I’ve read is Gods of Jade and Shadow but it also had a fantastic setting. Yucatán and Mexico City and other surrounding areas during the Jazz Age.
(I want to read more from her, but she’s a tricky one for me, since she genre-hops a lot and a number of her books are too grisly or creepy for my squeamish self. I do have The Beautiful Ones on hold on Libby, though.)
mrmoshpotato
@Miss Bianca:
What’ve they written?
dnfree
“A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth. India after independence, intertwined families, and whether a marriage will be arranged for a young woman or she will be allowed to choose her own husband.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Dona Leon’s books strongly evoke Venice. Not just the buildings and canals, but the food and the life and the culture. That portrayal of Venice is the great strength of those books.
UncleEbeneezer
Steven King, multiple books: Maine
Tim O’ Brien, multiple books: Vietnam (during the War)
Into Thin Air: Everest (Never been there, but I felt like I had after reading that book)
Recent reads:
The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Los Angeles and Vietnam
When The Reckoning Comes (Latanya McQueen)- Southern plantation
These Women (Ivy Pochoda): really nails Los Angeles/West Adams area
If anyone knows a good book that takes place in Taos, NM, let me know. Preferably something dark and/or historical.
zhena gogolia
@mrmoshpotato: The author is Sara Paretsky. She has a series of private eye books with the heroine V. I. Warshawski.
UncleEbeneezer
@Alison Rose: I gotta check out Gods of Jade & Shadow. I tried one of her other books, Velvet Was The Night but couldn’t get into it. GOJ&S though, with the Yucatan setting, would probably draw me in.
dnfree
@craig: Naomi Novik’s books about the Napoleonic war with dragons manage to evoke that possibility. Both the characters and the world are well-imagined, and the scope of the role of the dragons grows through the series.
Narya
@Roger Moore: I avoid Amazon and don’t have prime, so I’m safe!
I really liked the Expanse novels and the SciFi TV seasons, but never saw the rest of it. Daniel Abraham’s Dagger & Coin series is also excellent for scene setting and world building
mrmoshpotato
@zhena gogolia: Ah.
JPL
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
WaterGirl
@Paul Begala’s Pink Tie: All names/nyms that have an apostrophe in them go into moderation every single time you post a comment.
There is a special character apostrophe, which does not have that problem, but it’s pretty obscure so I’m guessing you don’t use that yet.
I have responded to your “report a problem” submissions but I never hear back from you. Hopefully you will see this comment and will contact me by email, instead.
Miss Bianca
@mrmoshpotato: Sara Paretsky wrote the VI Warshawski (hard-boiled female detective) series, if that’s what you’re asking.
ETA: And I see someone else beat me to it.
Mr. Bemused Senior
I have no direct experience with which to judge but I feel Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes captures that piece of England.
Timill
@craig:
Starter Villain
Pity I can’t link to the cover.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Scuffletuffle: Truth! My favorites are The King Must Die and The Persian Boy.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@craig: yes!
Another Scott
Great thread.
When I was a kid, I really enjoyed the Kon-Tiki and Ra Expedition books by Thor Heyerdahl. Sailing the oceans with only the winds and the currents! Woot!!
Of course, it was all a bunch of white-supremacist, western European nonsense:
Something, something, your own lying eyes.
Cheers,
Scott.
JPL
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
The book not only paints a picture of Savannah, but it’s culture.
The other area that I feel like I know is Three Pines the village created by Louise Penny.
Spanish Moss
@Alison Rose:
Loved, loved, loved The Snow Child! Every now and then you read a book and want so badly to share it with someone so you can talk about it. This was that kind of book for me, but unfortunately it didn’t seem to be widely read in my circle.
Adam L Silverman
John Sandford’s novels, which are either solely or largely set in Minnesota. Tony Hillerman’s novels set in the Dine/Navajo portions of New Mexico and Arizona. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels and Boston. Raymond Feist’s novels. Especially the three set on Tsuranuani make you feel that you’re there as it isn’t the standard sci/fi fantasy setting like the Midkemia novels he spun that trilogy off from. Also, his Faerie Tale, which is set in a small town in upstate New York also centers you in that environment.
Alison Rose
@dnfree: Ooh, I loved His Majesty’s Dragon! Never did continue with the series, I should do that one of these days.
FelonyGovt
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Agree 100% about The City We Became. Definitely evokes NYC, and the Brooklyn character exudes Brooklyn attitude.
Also- Deacon King Kong by James McBride- Brooklyn ca. 1960’s and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon- LA’s aerospace community ca. 1970’s and 1980’s.
Miss Bianca
@Mr. Bemused Senior: And Sayers’s Gaudy Night does it for me, similarly – both Oxford the town and Oxford the university feel like characters in their own right.
Alison Rose
@Spanish Moss: That book is probably in my top 5 as far as how often I recommend it to others. I think it’s a great suggestion because the blend of fantasy and reality means you can be a fantasy reader or not and still enjoy it.
Same with The Golem and the Jinni that I mentioned above, as well as Sistersong by Lucy Holland, which also has a terrific setting, a semi-fantasy version of ancient Britain.
LAO
Luc Sante, Low Life — 19th century NYC (was the basis of Gangs of New York)
Not technically about a place but a book I love, Jane Smiley, Horse Heaven — horse racing.
Glascow, Ian Rankin’s Rebus series
ETA: I really can’t believe I named the wrong Scottish city. Lol. I may give up lol
Alison Rose
@FelonyGovt: I really want to read Deacon King Kong. I adored his book The Good Lord Bird.
zhena gogolia
Any Bohumil Hrabal novel for Prague.
Another Scott
@zhena gogolia: +1 Indeed.
Les Misérables by Hugo is up there, also too.
Cheers,
Scott.
zhena gogolia
@mrmoshpotato: Some are excellent, some less so. She’s always a pretty enjoyable read.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
Philippa Gregory’s books, starting with The Other Boleyn Girl, recreate the court of Henry VIII in memorable fashion, and other books range through late Plantagenet and most of Tudor England.
kalakal
A lot of good choices. Nice to see another Master Li and Number Ten Ox fan.
C. S. Forester was very good at evoking a time and place eg the Hornblower series and Brown on Resolution
Gormenghast really drew me in, there were times I could almost see, funnily not so much the characters but the physical space itself
A time of gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor is wonderfully evocative of Europe in the 30s
Sagittarius rising by Cecil Lewis has the best description of flying I’ve ever read
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard is my favourite ever travel book and the ultimate description of the ‘heroic age’ of polar exploration.
Eric Ambler and Gavin Lyall were very good at evoking the worlds in which their characters operated. The Mask of Demetrius and Midnight Plus One are really good. Lyall was espescially good on the technicalities of flying.
Alistair MacLean’s HMS Ulysses is an all too realistic and tragic portrayal of the WW2 Arctic Conveys. Nicholas Monserrat’s The Cruel Sea also draws you into the world of WW2 naval warfare.
I’d better stop there but have to agree with previous posts that Dickens and Doyle were masters of setting
Spanish Moss
Here are a couple of books that really transported me because their natural world settings were so beautifully described and so fundamental that they were practically a character themselves:
raven
@Alison Rose: East of Eden too.
sab
@dnfree: I love those dragon books. And as they go around the world the dragons vary so much with their cultures. The Chinese dragons are just like the dragons in actual Chinese paintings, and very different from the western European dragons at the start.
Narya
@JPL: I am currently working my way through the 3 pines novels—love them.
@Adam L Silverman: cannot believe I forgot Hillerman for this thread.
Which reminds me: Eliot Patison’s Inspector Shan books bring Tibet to life.
raven
kalakal
The fictional world I’d most like to live in would be P. G. Wodehouse’s. I’d love to be a Drone or live at Blandings.
Comrade Scrutinizer
Charles de Lint’s Newford books and Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks.
sab
@Roger Moore: I think Ian M. Banks did a wonderful job of creating the feel of living in a very different world ( or worlds) from ours with his Culture novels.
raven
JeanneT
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
You beat me to it – Leon’s books are amazing.
Princess
I agree with a lot of these – notably Gaudy Night and Seth’s A Suitable Boy. I’ll leave all ofDorothy Dunnett’s novels with a special mention for Scales of Gold, which takes you to 15th century Timbuktu and King Hereafter which posits the historical Macbeth as an Orkney Viking.
Narya
@Princess: the Dunnett books are fabulous for setting, especially the Niccolo series IMHO
Alison Rose
@raven: It’s funny, I’ve read 7 Steinbeck novels (possibly 8, I might be forgetting one) and while East of Eden seems to be a favorite of many people, it was the only one I disliked and had a hard time finishing. But the setting was done very well, I will say. He was always great at that.
Timill
@kalakal: Did you ever try Gavin Lyall’s pre-WW1 spy series starting with Spy’s Honour, in which Capt Matthew Ranklin is seconded to the British Secret Service, only to discover some problems with his preconceptions…
raven
@Alison Rose: It was a pretty ugly story. “In Dubious Battle” was really good and gave a great sense of California in the Depression.
FelonyGovt
@Alison Rose: I’m getting to meet James McBride on Wednesday! Our local independent bookshop is hosting him in support of his new book, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, about Black and Jewish communities in a town in Pennsylvania.
I DEFINITELY recommend Deacon King Kong. Great characters, kind of a feel-good story.
Miss Bianca
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks always makes me want to blaze my way through Minneapolis. And whatever portals to Faerie might remain there.
Steeplejack
@Paul Begala’s Pink Tie:
I see from WaterGirl’s anguished replies that you seem to be not aware of your problem. (In fact, I see that we tried to address it with you in June.) Basically, for back-room database reasons, the blog does not like a “plain” apostrophe in nyms. Every comment will have to be approved by a front-pager.
The solution is to adopt a tasteful “real” apostrophe for your nym, which doesn’t trigger the database problem.
You have to use a formal, “slanted” apostrophe—▶ ’ ◀—a single right quote, rather than the straight quote you get by default when typing.
You can copy the one above or you can insert one in your nym using the “special characters” gizmo above the comment box. It’s the Omega (horseshoe) icon at the right end of the comment toolbar. You don’t want the first one that looks like a right quote, two spots before §; you want the second one, two spots after ». This is obvious on a computer, where the characters are labeled, but you might need it on your phone.
You have to do this only once, if you have checked the box to have WordPress remember your nym. (And of course your first comment with the revised nym will have to be approved by a front-pager.)
I hope you see this and are able to fix your problem. I’m sure WaterGirl is standing by to approve your new nym.
ETA: The blog changes the apostrophe when it displays your nym in the thread, but that doesn’t fix the problem.
Denali5
Any of Jan Morris’s travel books, especially Venice and Spain.
Omnes Omnibus
@kalakal: I liked Lyall’s Maxim novels.
Jim Bales
Let me call out the two novels by Erin Morgenstern:
— The Night Circus
— The Starless Sea
I felt transported to both locations, and felt cheated that I can’t go to either simply because they don’t exist–not fair!
Best
Jim
sab
@Narya: I am a retired accountant and I love the Niccolo series. Who would have thought an adventure series could be based on a young apprentice with an aptitude for bookkeeping?
But she really does make the reader feel what life would be like in 15th century Europe (and Africa.)
Adam L Silverman
@Narya: Also, Kim Newman’s Victorian London in Anno Dracula.
Yarrow
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I was right there on that cattle drive. I read the book. Not talking about the mini series.
Narya
@sab: then you would also like Abraham’s Dagger and Coin series! And maybe Stephenson’s Baroque series.
raven
@Yarrow: Snakes!!!!
Narya
I have to bookmark this post so I can add stuff to my reading list.
Spanish Moss
@Alison Rose: I have never read either of them, I will have to check them out. Thanks!
kalakal
@Timill: Yes, I just read them recently, I liked them a lot
@Omnes Omnibus: I like them too.
I really wish he’d written more of both series.
Lyall was unusual in that he wrote really well about 3 different times. First the 50s & 60s with ex WW2 pilots living on the margins of an increasingly corporate world , then the Maxim Cold War series and finally when the Cold War ended switching to 1912 onwards
JCNZ
@Omnes Omnibus: The opening paragraph of Dark Star…
JCNZ
@Yarrow: But could you read it without hearing Duvall and Jones’s voices?
Nelle
Late to the thread. I just want to be in a lovely bookstore with all of you sitting around, sharing books and thoughts about them. A strong sense of place is important to me and, as I reflect on how much I’ve traveled and think about climate change, I’m realizing that I might be returning to traveling by books , just as I did as a child. There are places, such as one familiar path near my home in New Zealand, where I felt as if I was walking in a Hardy novel, more than in the present moment. All the worlds we carry in our heads!
RSA
I think Jack Vance is an exception to the rule. Araminta Station isn’t his best work, but I think it may be one of the best examples of his bringing the reader to a good understanding of what it would be like to live in one of his societies. The same could be said of his other novels and stories about the Gaean Reach. (The Cugel stories might be in the same category as well.) Vance dives into social conventions, belief systems, history, and such, as background for characters’ actions… It can be quite vivid and compelling.
JCNZ
@UncleEbeneezer: “Into Thin Air: Everest (Never been there, but I felt like I had after reading that book)”
Same. I felt cold as I was reading it. His “Under the Banner of Heaven” is chilling, too.
zhena gogolia
@Nelle: Thomas Hardy is always great with sense of place!
RSA
@Adam L Silverman: Excellent observation about Hillerman’s novels of the southwest.
Speaking of which, I’ll add John Nichols’s novel, The Milagro Beanfield War, which memorably captures New Mexico. As a side benefit, it has elements of magical realism (though I don’t know if the novel is categorized as such) that resonate with Latin American novels in that genre.
sab
@Narya: I do like Abraham’s series. I haven’t reas the other. Thanks.
Alison Rose
@raven: Loved that one!!
Alison Rose
@FelonyGovt: Oh man, jealous!
JCNZ
@NotMax:
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman
Wonderful book. Also, “Guns of August,” for her description of Edward VII’s funeral alone, let alone the rest of it.
Narya
@sab: it’s loooooong. And related to Cryptonomicon. But interesting.
ETA: want my copy? I have ebook so can send paper
Adam L Silverman
@RSA: Yep. It is an excellent novel. And if I’m remembering what my dad told me it is a fictionalization of a dispute that actually happened. The movie was good too! Christopher Walken doing his I’m a scenery chewing psychopath thing amped all the way up past 11!
JCNZ
@NotMax:
The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, Robert Hughes
Yes! The fact that the first boatload of convicts to arrive in New South Wales, in 1788, were the first Europeans in Australia since Cook – twenty years earlier. They just sent them out there.
sab
@Narya: I like long books. That’s one of the reasons I like Dunnett so much. Her stories zip along but she covers a lot of territory while not neglecting the character development aspect of good story telling.
dnfree
@Alison Rose: Definitely continue the series! It travels to different continents, and the story becomes more complex and involved.
JCNZ
Has anyone read Clancy Sigal’s “Going Away”? US labor history in the guise of a novel. Absolutely wonderful. I still have the copy that I liberated from the Edmonton Public Library in 1974.
Narya
@sab: it’s actually THREE books. If you want them, WaterGirl has my email and I’ll happily send them to you.
tjmn
Sir Robert Carey series by P.F. Chisholm based on a real person who was either a cousin or nephew to Queen Elizabeth I depending on what angle you look at that family tree.
dm
@oatler: I was London and saw a flyer for a *Gravity’s Rainbow* tour, but i hadn’t read the book in 20 years, so…..
Today (having reread it recently),I’d jump at the chance.
craig
@Narya: I liked that series. Very long though.
Miss Bianca
@zhena gogolia: Yes, he is! His Wessex is a character in its own right.
dm
@Mr. Bemused Senior: I love that book by Jemisin, but for New york Is go with Kim Stanley Robinson’s *New York 2140
Annie
The Maigret mysteries by Georges Simenon always make me feel,like I’m in Paris.
Miss Bianca
@Roger Moore: I think Stephenson’s Diamond Age gives a great feel of a neo-Victorian world that seems both familiar and lived-in and yet still alien.
Anne McCaffery’s Pern also felt very alien and yet familiar and “lived-in” to me.
Someone mentioned the Vorkosigan Saga – Barrayar and Beta both felt like real worlds to me!
ETA: As did Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover – both the planet and its various societies. I have trouble reading her now because of what I’ve heard about her personal history, but she did create some very compelling worlds.
dexwood
@craig: Definitely the Pelecanos D.C. books. Start with Right as Rain and work forward. Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series. Galway in print. The Milagro Beanfield War, John Nichols, northern New Mexico, volume 1 in his New Mexico trilogy.
ETA: RSA beat me to Milagro.
dm
Robert Byrd’s Alone, about a winter spent alone in a cabin through the Antarctic winter. I still get headaches remembering the after-effects of his near-death experience from carbon monoxide poisoning from his stove.
kalakal
Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar books are splendid for both the characters and the settings. They’re also very funny
@JCNZ: Totally agree with you and Notmax about Barbera Tuchman’s books.
Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace is an excellent history of the Algerian struggle for independence from France, very good at giving a feel for both the overall history as well as experience of individuals.
Jan Morris’ Pax Brittania is also very good at this, capturing a huge swathe of history by diving deep into personal stories at intervals. Also she wrote beautifully.
The Pink Tie of Paul Begala
@Alison Rose: her books are also paced really slowly, but two chapters in, they get weird. I ordered Silver Nitrate right after posting!
Cannot believe I omitted Marlon James’s books. A Brief History of Seven Killings (Cold War Jamaica) and The Book of Night Women (colonial/slavery-era Jamaica). I read the latter going into my first trip to the island and visited a “great house,” Rose Hall near Montego. The night tour is meant to elicit horrified, heartbroken reactions, and it absolutely did.
The Pink Tie of Paul Begala
@WaterGirl: no! and I am so sorry! I haven’t gotten anything at all… and I’ve been here since Sadly, No! My husband even got JC to help personally with a family matter in Morgantown. Can I change to The Pink Tie of Paul Begala?
The Pink Tie of Paul Begala
@kalakal: I was assigned Morris’s three volumes back in the late ’90s as a literature grad student, and they are still on my shelf. Completely engrossing. I would contrast it with something like Anna Leonowens’s account of living as a Westerner in Southeast Asia — obviously racist and culturally chauvinist, and everything else you can say about it, but also very immediate and observant.
Steve in the ATL
@JPL: most definitely! I even litigated against Sonny Seiler (and won—suck it, losers!).
Reminds me that Pat Conroy’s novels were similarly wonderfully descriptive of the low country.
The Pink Tie of Paul Begala
Neglected to mention Marlon James’s books that transported me to Jamaica:
A Brief History of Seven Killings (Cold War Jamaica), The Book of Night Women (plantation-era Jamaica).
Both harrowing and difficult in the right way. I read the latter going into my first trip to the island and went on a “great house” tour of Rose Hall at night. The night tour is explicitly meant to bring out fear, anguish, grief, anger, terror — the appropriate emotions and sensations around touring a slave plantation. Night Women is almost all written in patois.
NotMax
Meticulously researched panorama of late Victorian-era NYC: The Alienist, Caleb Carr.
prostratedragon
@zhena gogolia: First one I thought of. You could feel the disorienting effect of the white nights.
prostratedragon
@WaterGirl: Moving it back a generation, I’d add Native Son by Richard Wright. For the LA environs I’d add stories by Cain, Ellroy, and Mosely to those of Chandler. For the South, The Color Purple. Back in the day I found stories for young people by Lois Lenski and Margeurite DeAngelis really evoked their settings.
S cerevisiae
Late to the thread but all books do that for me, the skill of the author is what generally lets me go father in or not. I have shelves of old, familiar books that will let me escape there anytime, it’s a wonderful freedom.
Brachiator
@JCNZ:
Coming late to the thread. The book made me feel the danger, the cold, the thinning air and lack of oxygen.
Later I watched an IMAX film about the mountain. The sense of danger didn’t come through as well. Things looked bright and beautiful.
Tehanu
I’m re-reading the entire Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh, so the Earth of the Atevi is kind of taking over my brain at the moment. Orangelle fruit and djossi flowers. golden-eyed atevi in court dress (frock coats and lace), palaces with figured carpets and priceless porcelains …
AM in NC
Just seeing this wonderful thread this morning, so I’m sure it’s dead, and I haz a sad.
Two series that put me right into their settings are Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels (British Navy during the Napoleonic wars) and the contemporary Bruno, Chief of Police series by Martin Walker, set in the Perigord region of France. Warning: do not read if you are hungry.
Individual novels: Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolf; The upstate NY novels by William Kennedy (Ironweed, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Quinn’s Book, etc.); A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (he captures the insanity of my native city so marvelously
ETA: The Thousand Autums of Jakob DeZoet by David Mitchell. Don’t know how accurate the setting in Japan in the late 18th Century is, but I felt right there.
WaterGirl
@The Pink Tie of Paul Begala: I just changed some of your existing comments in this thread to:
The Pink Tie of Paul Begala
So that is now in the WordPress database, so you should be able to log in with that – using the same email you used before – and have it show up right away, without being in moderation.
Please send me an email message letting me know either way – that it does work or that it doesn’t: watergirl at balloon-juice.com
Emily B.
Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin
When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson
Faithful Place, Tana French
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
km
Late, but I want to mention a book I just read, “The Unseen” by Roy Jacobsen – life on an island on the Norwegian coast some time ago (apparently 100 years ago). Really enjoyed it & will be looking for the sequels.
Kayla Rudbek
@narya: Scalzi is really good at invoking place. I laughed out loud when he had a protest on the Beltway in his Locked In series.