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Originally Posted by lordpyro  What by Powers would you suggest as a first? |
Depends on what era strikes you closer to home.
Declare deals with British espionage in WWII and the Cambridge Spy scandal. Nice allusions to T. E. Lawrence, and I'd just read the Golden Warrior before it came out.
Last Call is about poker, tarot cards and the Fisher King saga. It was the first one I read. Deals with the founding of Las Vegas by Siegel, fractal mathmatics and chaos theory, and is the first--and best--of a 3 part series.
Expiration Date deals with T. A Edison's ghost, and a culture in LA that is addicted to inhaling ghosts. Not a sequel to Last Call, but the second in the trilogy.
Earthquake Weather manages to tie in the first two and complete the series. The time setting for all of them is contemporary CA.
The Drawing of the Dark deals with post-Crusade Europe from the perspective of a brewery in Vienna besieged by the Turks in the early 16th Century. Deals with beer making, Finn MacCool and Arthur mythos.
Anubis Gates deals with time travel and Egyptian mythology, set in the 20th and 18th Century. Probably best time-travel book I'd read.
Stress of Her Regard and
Hide Me Among the Graves deals with the romantic poets [Byron, Shelley, Keats] and vampires. Graves is the most recent book Powers has published, and it's killer.
On Stranger Tides was made into a crappy disney Pirates' movie. I haven't done any of the research, but I think they offered him the book deal because the first Pirates of the Caribbean film stole so much of his ideas that they didn't want to get sued. The movie sucked, but the book is pretty great: BlackBeard as a voodoo practicioner, looking for the Fountain of Youth. Zombie pirate crews, swashbuckling, jungles, stuff like that.
Three Days to Never also deals with time travel, Einstein, the Mossad. It's pretty killer. Contemporary CA again.
I go through phases on which one I think is best. They're the kind of book you can read more than once.
I haven't found any of Power's stuff as an audiobook, but I did find both
Snow Crash and
The Cryptonomicon from Stephenson as audiobooks, that were awesome for when I was traveling a lot this summer. I don't generally enjoy audio books as much, but the humor in these really came through perfectly in the medium.
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