I've been reading book club recommendations lately and have about thrown books against the wall! Nonsensical plots, beyond-stupid protagonists, laughable endings. Are you wondering how some of these books are so highly promoted? I am.

So, how about it? What is your rec that hasn't been discovered yet? Mine is Polly Ticks by Mary Nova. Dark, but satisfying.

Please help me find more like this! I'm looking for another good read.

Makes me curious if the recommendations are paid adverts or ranked by reviews. It's a trend now to beg for reviews, not earn them. Case in point. My own work gets read but seldom reviewed because I don't beg people to review it. Oddly, I do have readers who find my stuff. How? I guess some minimal promotion on my behalf that I did over the course of a decade. I'm not super active on social media anymore because I'm burned out on that for the same reason you are book club recommendations.

With that noted, I'll just say this. If you visit Twitter and look for books, check the ones by self-published authors that don't have super glossy, highly polished, bestselling book covers. Sadly, a lot of writers spend more time on designing covers then they do their stories. I've found some of the best stories are the ones with no retweets or likes.

Also, I've read some good stuff on Wattpad.

Hi Kira,

What kind of books do you like?

You didn’t state your interests in your request so maybe you are open to any suggestion. My recommendation would be “Stalingrad”, a novel written by Vasily Grossman.

I just wrote a post about this but try "eXam Week" by Zack Seldon & Robert Foster. It's brand new and I found out about it on TikTok. It's a Thriller/Mystery if your into that genre Here's a link to it

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRKJF65T/re ... 328&sr=1-3#

One fun method I found is to read books from the list of major award winners in your favorite genre and see where it takes you. A while back I was looking for good scifi books I'd never heard of and started going through decades old Hugo Award and Nebula Award winners that don't get much attention these days and I wish I would have done it sooner. Of course they're not undiscovered in the sense you mean but it was awesome to rediscover them!

I'm not sure how unpopular this is elsewhere, but it just sits collecting dust at the school library. The book is called The Ghost of the Tokkaido Inn, set in ancient Japan and following a merchant's son through the investigation of a theft. I'm not going to spoil anything important, but the ending is quite chaotic.

Kira wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 8:37 pm I've been reading book club recommendations lately and have about thrown books against the wall! Nonsensical plots, beyond-stupid protagonists, laughable endings. Are you wondering how some of these books are so highly promoted? I am.

So, how about it? What is your rec that hasn't been discovered yet? Mine is Polly Ticks by Mary Nova. Dark, but satisfying.

Please help me find more like this! I'm looking for another good read.

I recommend:

The Bible, NASB, 1995 or later revision,

Horrors & Heresies
By Robert M Price

Lost Scriptures
By Bart D Ehrman

What Entropy Means to Me
by George Alec Effinger

When Gravity Fails
by George Alec Effinger

Satan Burger
by Carlton Mellick III

Watership Down
By Richard Adams

I, Claudius
By Robert Graves

Depends on the type of genre you like. If you like science fiction or fantasy then I would recommend my books. Written under the name B. Camp. My next book will be a Western.
Also within the science fiction genre: I really enjoyed Treason by Orson Scott Card and Radix by A. A. Attanasio.

I might have missed it, but I didn't see any recommendations for The Sin War trilogy by Richard A. Knaak, or any other titles set in the Diablo universe, such as Moon of The Spider, Demon's Bane, Legacy of Blood etc

They're dark fantasy, worth a read.