straightforwardly (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
straightforwardly) wrote2026-03-26 07:27 pm
straightforwardly) wrote2026-03-26 07:27 pm
352.
I have a request for anyone who sees this on their reading page! Could you please give me a list of five books that you, personally, gave five stars to?
Doesn’t have to be Top Favorite Of All Time (and tbh it might even be more fun if they weren’t, necessarily!), just five books that you liked enough to rate five out of five stars. Any genre is fine, as is nonfiction or other formats like poetry collections and plays!
You also don't have to tell me why you picked those books if you don't want to; just the list is enough. (But if you do want to tell me, then of course feel free to do that as well! I'm open for everything.)
(Context: there’s a reading challenge I do every April—the spring semester of the Orilium Magical Readathon—and this year, one of the prompts I need to fulfill is “ask a friend for a list of five 5 star reads; pick one & read it”, but asking my irl friends would run the risk of me getting lists filled with daddy doms or inspirational nonfiction, neither of which is precisely in my wheelhouse, so I’ve decided to turn to fannish circles instead. Though I've now also become curious & excited to see what books people will name even outside of the context of my needing to pick one to read! <3 It's a fun question, I think.)
Doesn’t have to be Top Favorite Of All Time (and tbh it might even be more fun if they weren’t, necessarily!), just five books that you liked enough to rate five out of five stars. Any genre is fine, as is nonfiction or other formats like poetry collections and plays!
You also don't have to tell me why you picked those books if you don't want to; just the list is enough. (But if you do want to tell me, then of course feel free to do that as well! I'm open for everything.)
(Context: there’s a reading challenge I do every April—the spring semester of the Orilium Magical Readathon—and this year, one of the prompts I need to fulfill is “ask a friend for a list of five 5 star reads; pick one & read it”, but asking my irl friends would run the risk of me getting lists filled with daddy doms or inspirational nonfiction, neither of which is precisely in my wheelhouse, so I’ve decided to turn to fannish circles instead. Though I've now also become curious & excited to see what books people will name even outside of the context of my needing to pick one to read! <3 It's a fun question, I think.)
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The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez (stand-alone mythic fantasy, beautiful prose, excellent use of POV)
On a Sunbeam, Tillie Walden (graphic novel; found family, space fantasy, queer coming of age, gorgeous art and fascinating worldbuilding)
Firebreak, Nicole Kornher-Stace (stand-alone sci-fi; near future climate dystopia vibes, fiercely aroace, about community and resistance and friendship)
The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay (stand-alone historical fantasy, sweeping and epic and personal and honestly I could pick a bunch of GGK's novels for this...)
Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin (stand-alone novel, historical future, a combination of standard narrative prose, fictional anthropology, poetry, and just... I grew up an hour south of the area Le Guin based this story upon, and the title resonates so strongly. also I just love Le Guin.)
That's probably a solid list/variety! I'm curious what other books people will list here!
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- The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
- Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
- Starless by Jacqueline Carey
- The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo
- The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
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The Bicentennial Man, Isaac Asimov
Dreamland, Rosa Rankin-Gee
Heroes, Stephen Fry
Silent Zone, Stephen Molstad
The Martian, Andy Weir
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Olav H. Hauge - The Dream We Carry, translated by Bly/Hedin. One of my top favourite poets, I love his work. This translation is (from what I have been told) not actually the best but it was the first one I encountered, so it's the one I reach for most often.
Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities. I thought it started off kind of slow but the ending made me go WHOA.
Jan Zwicky - Thirty-seven small songs and thirteen silences. Just very good Canadian poetry.
Tim Wynne-Jones - The Maestro. I read this in high school (it was required reading) and it made such an impression on me that I kept thinking about it occasionally and eventually bought it a decade later so I could re-read it whenever I wanted.
Stephen King - Firestarter. Something about this kind of story scratches my brain on a really base level.
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I've never actually read any Guy Gavriel Kay, which feels odd, considering I can remember eyeing some of his books with interest in the school library all the way back when I was in middle school.
Finally, I actually came pretty close to buying The Spear Cuts Through Water last week! Kobo was offering a good deal on it, like less than two euros, and I've heard good things about it... relatedly, I have a question about it for you. When I was poking around the internet trying to find something to help me make my decision, I saw some content warnings for cannibalism, and that's what made me hold back on buying it. Could you maybe tell me if that was an accurate content warning, and if yes, how big of a role it plays in the novel?
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I've never heard of Starless, though I've read another book by the author (unsurprisingly: it was Kushiel's Dart), but the summary intrigues me! And Swordspoint is one of those books I've heard so so many people mention over the years, but have never gotten around to reading myself.
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The rose has been sung about.
I want to sing of the thorns,
and the root--how it grips
the rock hard, hard
as a thin girl's hand.
—I'm finding myself quite tempted to order myself a copy!
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Starless is really special—for full disclosure, Jacqueline Carey is my favourite author and I've read everything she's published since Kushiel's Dart. I think Starless is a great show of her major strengths as an author, and it feels a lot like her revisiting her storytelling roots after gaining more than a decade of experience. Which is to say, like Kushiel's Dart it includes a lot of gods/goddesses, a childhood arc and plenty of travel in service of a world-saving quest, but its main characters are an AFAB trans/NB person and a disabled woman, and it's so great. I honestly can't say enough good about it.
Swordspoint is one of those books that should feel dated by now, and I don't know why, but it never seems that way to me. I guess it feels rather timeless. It's very character-driven but with such a robust sense of place, even though its setting is barely even named, haha.
Since I meant to ask in my first comment and forgot, I'd love to hear the same question answered by you! What are five of your five-star reads?
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I apologize for not coming up with standalones, although Pattern Recognition can easily be read as one.
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GGK has a LOT of novels and if you've any interest in historical fantasy he's absolutely worth a read. I adore his style.
The Spear Cuts Through Water having a warning for cannibalism is accurate, yes. I honestly wouldn't have thought about it much, because it's not something that bothers me, but in broad strokes: yeah there's plot-important on-page cannibalism and if you don't want to read about that I totally understand and this probably isn't a book for you.
[click for spoilers/more detailed cannibalism content warnings]
One character, obviously framed as an antagonist, eats the turtle god to gain access to her children's telepathic network; it is gross but primarily off-screen. That same character also plans to consume his mother, the goddess of the moon, in order to gain her powers. He succeeds in eating one of her fingers, which is... gross! And we are in her POV for at least part of that happening!The goddess of the moon (once rescued) asks the main characters to eat her, since she's dying and she wants them to have her power/protection as they finish their journey. This is a plot-important scene! Neither of the main characters like this! It is also intensely important to the story as a whole.
...also there's the half-god kid who gets thrown human prisoners as food. Mostly that's off-screen. It's still terrible.
...and with that I will sigh and say that I might be forgetting something but honestly that's enough to go "yup, plenty of cannibalism content in here".
(As someone who watched and enjoyed NBC's Hannibal, I think that it's a similar level of aesthetic grossness that doesn't bother me—neither piece of media finds the act of consumption to be interesting as a focus, but instead cares about the how and why of it. Other people still thinking it's more gross than anything else is totally reasonable though.)
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Re: Hauge, I like that poem you mentioned too!! Definitely worth a look if poetry if your thing and if if you like that one in particular; I would say it is a good example of what's in the rest of the collection. Might be possible to ILL this volume depending on what your library network is like.
While I am here I will also suggest:
Tomas Tranströmer - The Half-Finished Heaven (Bly's translation)
Appeals to me in a similar way to Hauge, in that his work tends to have great images and is usually on the short side.
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Thank you for all the extra information about The Spear Cuts Through Water! And yeah, based on what you've said here, it sounds like it's something that I can't handle;;; Cannibalism is one of my biggest squicks (like, if I could only choose three things to DNW in an exchange context, that would make the list). It's a bit of a shame, because a standalone fantasy with lovely prose & interesting use of POV sounds otherwise like something I'd enjoy.
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Yeah. Alas! Perhaps I'll catch someone else who reads these suggestions, though, so it's all good. :) And I'd definitely rather you not read something containing such a big squick for you; much better to find something you'd really like!
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Ooo, that makes Starless sound even more appealing... my library doesn't have it, and the ebook seems to be a little pricier than I like to pay for ebooks; otherwise, it honestly would likely have been the book I picked to read for that prompt. As it is, I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for a sale, haha, and I'm strongly leaning towards choosing Swordspoint, since that one seems easier for me to get my hands on.
As for my five picks... ha, that's a question that I feel like I should have been more prepared for than I am! I just spent a fair bit of time wandering around staring at my bookshelves, contemplating, after having made a shortlist that was far too long. But here's what I settled on:
- The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton
- Chalice by Robin McKinley
- Thousand Autumns by Meng Xi Shi
- The Countess Conspiracy by Courtney Milan
- Dragon's Bait by Vivian Vande Velde
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Contact by Carl Sagan
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin
Immortality by Milan Kundera
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
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Thank you in return for your list, I'm very pleased to receive it. My wife enjoyed The Queens of Innis Lear, and I've always meant to read Robin McKinley, so I'll be putting Chalice on my list. ♥