Seeking Specific Book Recommendations

Hello friends,

I am looking for some fairly specific types of reading material to assist in a particular undertaking:

  • Good writing about Hell
    • Your favorite translation of Dante
  • Writing about alchemy; specifically, the one alchemical glyph that involves pelicans
  • Sci-fi or fantasy authors who practice some sort of magic themselves
  • Fiction with non-cringey depictions of social media use
  • Good fiction about musicians (I have extremely high standards in this category but am trying to be open-minded).
Thank you!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: You Don't Love Me Yet, by Jonathan Lethem

There are, one feels, slightly too many literary Jonathans. The mid-2000s were positively rotten with them, with notable books by Jonathans Franzen, Lethem, and Safran-Foer appearing seemingly every few weeks. From what I remember, I found Lethem to be the least objectionable of them; I haven't re-read any of his books aside from the subject of today's review in several years but I recall thinking that the one that's kind of like Blade Runner but with more talking animals was pretty good. Even when compared to the one that's kind of like Blade Runner but with more talking animals, You Don't Love Me Yet is a weird book. The book takes place in Los Angeles in a vague time period that might be the early 1990s. The main characters are members of a fledgling band and their various bohemian friends. At the outset of the action, the band's singer and bass player have just broken up, while the drummer and guitarist are tentatively getting together. The bass player ha...
Read more

GOOD books about elves

Friends have reassured me that, because I am writing a work of fiction, it absolutely does not matter if I get the date of a 2006 snowstorm or the price of a video rental special wrong, forgetting that I am the kind of person who gets angry at fantasy novels if they are mythologically wrong about elves. "Which books are mythologically right about elves, Rose?" I'm so glad you asked! What irks me about many fictional portrayals of the fair folk is that the authors try to make things up about them out of whole cloth and in so doing miss a lot of the fascinating details that make elves so interesting. The vast body of existing lore, encompassing "fictional" accounts as well as "true" memoirs of fairy encounters, contains so much ornate weirdness that it's always disappointing to me when authors pass it up as source material.  One of the greatest books on elves is of course Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin , a wonderful short story colle...
Read more