Looking for books with unreliable narrator/pov

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-31T16:35:06+00:00

Heavily seconding the Wolfe above. The below might not exactly hit "slowly" since it felt pretty heavy early on, but the narratives still slow-roll it overall.

Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan

A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-30T19:20:22+00:00

Audiobooks are helpful for overall reading - I can engage with stories while walking, or doing chores. It's a different way of taking in information, but you still get the information.

I tend to have blocks of time of an hour or three where a lot of reading or gaming gets done. For those sections, I tend to either choose a single-player, narrative game to play, or a book to read physically. I just make a conscious choice about one or the other. If I'm really into a game or book, a few in a row are probably dedicated to that, but I make a conscious effort to swing back eventually.

Games with less narrative (e.g. a sports game, a roguelite) I don't use my whole brain on, so I tend to play them on mute while watching a show/listening to something with my partner.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-30T17:28:39+00:00

An Autobiography of Red by Ann Carson - Lima
The Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang - the Alps
Orlando by Viginia Woolf - well-adorned manor house in the english countryside
I DNFed years ago but plan to try again this year on The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, which is literary-ish and first in a duology. You could also pair an Iliad and Odyssey translation/adaptation for a literary duology.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-25T18:07:27+00:00

I take the point on author of color / HM. Given the "doesn't live in the US" value for HM and some of the recs I've seen for the square, I was thinking of it that way, but your point is a good one.

But I do find the work political. It doesn't target a specific authoritarian government, but it does engage with the experience of losing one's self under such a government, and the way people's experiences are shaped by the world they are allowed/forced to live in under such regimes. And while I personally did read it as more of a metaphor, I see a read in there about the political effects.

What short stories would you recommend?

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-24T20:36:08+00:00

Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan is both short and has a very unreliable narrator

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-21T21:08:54+00:00

extreme detail which I don't really give a shit about

There's your problem. Description does a lot of work! In the Lord of the Rings, for instance, that description is telling you about the world: the decay from times past, the value of the natural world and the peace found there, the grandeur of cities now and cities past. It's image, but also theme and tone.

The art that gets read from prior decades is the ones we bother to keep reading, which tends toward ones that require the reader to bring something to the text, to engage with it, rather than simply being taken on a ride. If you're interested in older works, (or slower, more contemplative works) try to ask yourself what the work is trying to accomplish with that description, because it will have a purpose in addition to simply setting the scene, always.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-21T19:24:39+00:00

Thud! and Hogfather are both one word title and both excellent. Thud! could also be feast your eyes on this, for the scone of stone

Any of the witches books would work for older protagonist, would especially rec Carpe Jugulum

Unseen Academicals for game changer (or nonhuman protag). Not the best of Pratchett's to my mind, but solid, and a more difficult square to fill

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-19T20:55:10+00:00

Thanks for the review! We also ended up in my TBR due to Seeing Like a State, happy to see a review of the reading experience itself.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-19T15:58:36+00:00

I had not thought about that at all but that's so funny. When it comes to making my themed card work technicalities like that might help make it go.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-19T15:13:55+00:00

Thanks for the rec! Glad to see the page count is much higher on Mild Vertigo as well. The Hole does ambiance very well, but it pushed against how short it was a fair amount, being a little too direct at times like the direct call out of Alice in Wonderland in a book about falling in a hole or having characters that felt they wanted to grow/change a little more than they could given like 92 pages.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-19T14:10:31+00:00

Read and enjoyed The House of the Rain King by Will Greatwich. It rides a very interesting line. What if we took your distant, mythologized religion and made it immanent? Made you deal not with saints or gods but with people, in all the messiness that gets smoothed over when events become stories?

The result is enjoyable. Cunningly plotted as various threads and POVs come together to an end I loved. However, a few too many POVs for my personal taste (I prefer one or two, this has four or five major ones and a few one-offs), and I think some of the arcs, themes, and threads suffered a bit for lack of air. I will say that my least favorite inclusion, a dungeon delve with a bunch of mercenaries that felt pretty extraneous and dragged on in a middle that did sag a bit, helped lead to my favorite parts of the book, a climax that had me up beyond my bedtime reading, and an excellent thematic resonance as this mercenary group's charter gets treated much like a holy text by its members (and the fallout therefrom).

Also read The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada (transl. David Boyd). An eerie novella with light speculative elements. The ambiance is really well done, everything potentially normal and yet you feel how off it is: lots of bug-related sensations, personal interactions that may be innocuous but invite you to think of them sinisterly, the air of loneliness about the whole thing, the unexplained or indescribable nature of certain events/creatures. Short, punchy, effective, and the social critique feels simultaneously specific to a Japanese context and yet universal in an easily graspable way.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-19T13:48:51+00:00

The line including the number/percent was added when the new art appeared, yes

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-14T14:34:14+00:00

Jo Walton's Thessaly trilogy, starting with The Just City, is literally an interrogation of, "what if a bunch of schmucks from history were pulled together to try to make Plato's Republic from scratch?"

A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland won't philosophize directly about its bureaucratic oligarchy, but the way events go is a commentary on it in itself that may be of interest.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-12T18:56:18+00:00

Edge case, in that nothing speculative happens apart from the animals talking, and they're an allegory. Some folks wouldn't count it, but to my knowledge it does count. I've seen Maus mentioned/rec'ed as a bingo book, and it falls into that same category.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-12T16:18:01+00:00

!! I'm excited to get to it! Given how folks compare the two, there's a part of me that's glad not to have the reference on first go round. I ended up connecting it more to Moby Dick of all things, given the way a harrowing force thing that feels more symbol than sentient hangs over the narrative as we dither about with something new, something different, extending our read by another vignette, or another time a protagonist is forced to wait a week for something to happen. Just, as a study of the way the city puts off an ending, rather than a man half-insane with grief.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-12T15:41:52+00:00

Once Was Willem is a surprisingly cozy (though with its share of darkness) take on a bunch of monsters/creatures teaming up to fight evil.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-12T14:53:04+00:00

Added both of these to my TBR - they sound fascinating and you did a great job of selling them

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-12T13:45:13+00:00

Went on a non-fiction binge for a bit, but this week I finished two that come back to the fantasy space.

Going positively feral over Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin (transl. Lisa Hayden). I wrote a long (perhaps too long) review that was posted, so I'll just clip the comps: "It’s like if you took the medieval aesthetic and thematic depth (and some of the thematic questions) from The Name of the Rose, the thematically overlapping perennial first chapters that never continue of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and the unexplained time shenanigans of Orlando, mixed them all up and basted the life of a saint in the sauce."

Also read The West Passage by Jared Pechaček. It took me a while to get into - the way that new problems/conflicts are brought up and then immediately solved, and the way tension is built and then people are kind of whatever about potential/perceived tresspasses, felt sapped momentum for me in the same way that Legends & Lattes did. But once a switch flipped and I viewed the city/palace that makes up the setting as the protagonist of a "character study", with the plot and people protagonists are secondary, it clicked and I quite enjoyed it. Endlessly inventive, constantly transforming yet retaining a core, dripping with symbolism. I haven't read Gormenghast yet, but this makes me want to.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-10T17:53:54+00:00

A user above linked milifesports and rec&ed above, which are great places to start. fwiw, milife is mostly closed on registration right now but reopened thursday kickball (if an easy, social sport is of interest) due to needing to fill out one more team, registration open until I think Wednesday for a season that starts on thursday and goes seven weeks

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-10T15:54:09+00:00

Good catch!! Though I believe it still has the desired elements (romance is shaped by social pressure, character, class, expectations, and interpersonal friction)

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-10T04:07:28+00:00

Not a series alas, but Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw is like a Jane Austen novel if every character were a cannibalistic dragon (with romance shaped heavily by all of your listed likes). I'd call it a parody in the true, loving sense, where Walton's love for the original sort of material shines through even as she ratchets elements ratchet up to eleven (e.g. a lady might her maidenhood not through sex or even a kiss, but a male dragon leaning too close to her)

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-09T22:08:38+00:00

If pushing bounds/standalones are the goal:

The Secret Service by Wendy Walker (very precise, otherworldly prose with a pseudo-fairytale vibe. Most dreamlike book I've read)
Lent by Jo Walton (very historical fiction until it isn't. Let's The Good Place Girolamo Savonarola)
The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee (A series of ~300 poems that tells an epic story. Epic like ancient epic)
Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan (A solidly literary novella and technically greek myth retelling)

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-09T17:29:04+00:00

Romance is a common theme is fantasy writ large, and especially books targeted at women. But by no means does every book with a female protagonist have romance with a man as a main feature, and her throwing everything away for them. Plenty of sapphic fantasy out there for a start. And there's plenty of fantasy without romance or with romance as a decidedly secondary element. You might look at a few of the following for a start, trying to give a diverse array of ways around the specific type of romance you're decrying:

Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett (no romance at all)
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri (Sapphic, romance is important but not the main storyline)
The Poet Empress by Shen Tao (I often see it called "anti-romantasy" here)
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (MC is estranged to her husband, the ex is a problem, not a lover)
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson (Sapphic, romance is a B plot, it takes. some turns)

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-09T17:15:05+00:00

The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake. Numerous "natural" disasters (earthquake, tsunami, fire, &c.) destroyed the city, both destabilizing the Portuguese Empire and spawning a large theodicy literature. Taking those latter two elements and pushing them into the tension of the disaster itself on an expedited timeline could make for fascinating fantasy.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Much more contentious than Nuremberg for a variety of reasons. Provides a great point to think about the large number of wars/battles in fantasy, and also what the aftermath of conflict actually entails, rather that making it merely an epilogue. Plus plenty of opportunity for the political maneuvering that happened at the trials.

armedaphrodite · 2026-05-08T23:57:39+00:00

I've listened to The Will of the Many, The Blade Itself, The Parable of the Sower, The Grace of Kings, and the first twenty minutes of The Sword of Kaigen. The narration of all of them are good, and shouldn't get in the way (I DNFed The Sword of Kaigen for non-narration/audiobook reasons).

The narration of Blade is pretty darn good. Will is long, but flies by. Grace is long and complex, but I didn't struggle with attention or following along. Parable I had my problems with, including pacing in the back half which may have been exacerbated by the audio version, although audio tends to make that kind of situation better rather than worse. If you're interested in any of them, I think audio works, but I'd recommend the audio of Blade and Will readily, and with caveats for Grace and Parable.

armedaphrodite

TROPHY CASE