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Originally Posted by rivethead  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.
rh |
I will look for some of those at the bookstore when I head to lunch.
I thought Cryptonomicon & Snow Crash were both awesome, but I really loved Cryptonomicon. At the time I read it I was actually working on encryption protocols for offshore banking transactions which made it even more awesome.
As general recommenation for everyone, look for Raptor or Aztec by Gary Jennings. They're sort of historical fiction, but only marginally. Raptor is about a hermaphrodite that winds up fighting with Charlemagne, and Aztec is the story of the rise and fall of the Aztec empire as told to the Spanish Priests by an Aztec. Raptor is the best, as the whole concept leads to some believeable though hiliarious situations.
He has another one called Journeyer about the travels of Marco Polo, I haven't read it but it's been highly recommended by some friends.
They are kind of in a similiar vein with a juxtaposition history, fiction, and down right hiliarity.
Job: A Comedy of Justice is similar too, though it was written by Heinlien. If you've got a good sense of humor about religion its awesome.