Speaking of Canada, @kitreimer, are you Canadian and is your username a reference to David Suzuki? I am trying to remember is Computerfriend mentioned anything Canada-related, now…
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That is what people like about them. I like Jack Reacher because I know exactly what I am going to get. Jack will travel somewhere new. He will meet a woman in trouble. He will get in a fight with five guys and beat them all. He will use his military contacts in some way to expose some bad guys. He will win. He will leave.
That is the plot of every Jack Reacher book, and sometimes you just want the predictable.
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Egads, that’s horrifying!
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I have the same feeling about reruns of The A-Team.
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I’m in the northeastern USA, although I love our northern neighbor and endeavor to visit again soon. My username is a convoluted in-joke (the meaning of which I’ve long since forgotten) based on the name of Sufjan Stevens’ older brother Marzuki, who he references in a few songs.
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Has anyone read anything city-centric that they’d recommend?
Personally I’ve read a lot of literature (mostly nonfiction) on Venice which I can recommend (Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark and John Berendt’s The City of Falling Angels are good starting places). I also once tried to get through an 1800s travelogue-epistolary-ish kind of work on Naples (Naples and the Campagna Felice, anonymous author), but stopped quarterway due to the appearance of, compared to modern sensibilities, some very overt misogyny in the pages (I don’t know — maybe I’ll try finishing it again someday).
This seems to be a very niche genre of writing (travel writing but not travel writing per se), so it’d be cool if anyone had any suggestions!
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Do criminal novels with a few references of the city count? Donna Leon’s Brunetti series takes place in Venice. Some might call it mainstream because it is so popular but I like it and it covers some ethical topics sometimes. There are around 30 of them and I’ve read them all.
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I do know of them! Haven’t really tried reading them yet (unless you count skimming the first few pages as reading), I guess I’ll give them a go sometime later. And you’re right, they’re insanely popular.
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For non-fiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_London by George Orwell.
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Margaret Atwood has a number of novels set in or around a fictionalized Toronto- I once read a few papers talking about how she wrote sort of a Southern Ontario Gothic, with the oppressive, dreary city and the complex love lives of quite unlikeable people tangled up in them. Her books Alias Grace and her other one The Blind Assassin prominently featured the cityscape.
Apparently there’s a whole Wikipedia page for novels set in Toronto. I haven’t read many, however, but I do like Atwood’s stuff.
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That one was one of my earlier brushes with Atwood, and it remains the only novel I’ve read where something as ridiculous as an Elvis impersonator being vital to the plot doesn’t destroy the actual plot stakes with being too over the top silly to the point you can’t take it seriously anymore.
I always thought it would make an interesting roleplay premise because of the whole alternates thing- the interpersonal drama of like, love and what constitutes the person of your adoration, and how do people react to new found wealth and the ever looming supervisors and such. It’s a bit like a more heavy handed on the capitalism, lighter on the brutal human rights violations (though there is some of that with the alternate design stealing…) version of the Handmaid’s world, which although has fascinating world building, I’d feel super uncomfortable adapting to a TTRPG campaign with how goofy and silly I can veer sometimes.
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Edward Rutherfurd has made a career out of those.
Pick a city, any city. I personally recommend Sarum.
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I recently finished Alan Moore’s epic novel Jerusalem about the city of Northampton. Set over more than a hundred years, it mixes fantasy, social history and Moore’s reminiscences of growing up in the town. It’s 1200 pages but well worth the effort.
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An old favorite of mine is Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. New York City in the Belle Epoque era is a major character in it. It’s just a fantastic book.
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Oh, wow, I remember that book! I haven’t thought about that since…forever. My grandpa gave it to me when I was a little kid. On reflection I’m not super sure it was age appropriate, but I do remember some of it so I guess it left a long impression.
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Well, Joyce’s Ulysses is Dublin-centric enough that retracing the steps of the protagonist is a cottage industry there.
Not quite as magisterial as Joyce’s novel but also of highly “literary” quality, there are:
- John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and New Orleans
- G. Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers in the English translation) and pre-Castro Cuba
- Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in Four Books and Glasgow
- Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels and Los Angeles
And as a random pretty good novel that I don’t see discussed much, there’s Fritz Leiber’s urban fantasy/horror novel Our Lady of Darkness, which is set in and around San Fancisco in the '70s.
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City of Dreams by Beverly Swerling focuses on the early history of New York. And the early history of modern medicine and surgery.
A barber-surgeon and his sister arrive in Nieuw Amsterdam. The book follows their family across three or four generations, with the development of the city as an important driving force for the story.
Non-city reading: I finally got my hands on the final Expanse-novel: Tiamath’s Wrath.
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Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety is impressive for a lot of reasons, but the closely-realized depiction of a few key neighborhoods in Revolutionary Paris is definitely among them.
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A series I’m planning to read:
If you’ve read Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy you’ll know why Great Cities is on my to-read list.
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