 So that's a pretty good track record. Helped to write this wrong. I almost didn't want to put on this list, or you'll go, what? I don't know what that is. The next one is for my Shakespeare fans, but don't listen to them, they're crazy. Okay, so I did a video called books that don't deserve the hype. I did a video on books that do deserve the hype, and I don't know why it didn't occur to me to make it a three-parter, which I mean I am doing now, but it didn't initially occur to me to do a three-parter, which is also books that deserve more hype. So thankfully one of my patrons pointed out that that is the natural third video in this series. And I did already have a list on my phone. I just called it underrated books, which is the same thing. Books that should have more hype. And I was like, well that's why I didn't think of it, but anyway, here we are. So thank you to my patron for pointing this out to me. And without further ado, here's a list of books that should get more love. First up I have Blackwing and the entire Ravens Mark trilogy by Ed McDonald. I've been singing this series praises since I first read it or started reading it when Blackwing came out. Pretty much everyone that I've convinced or forced to read it has at least liked it. So that's a pretty good track record. If you don't enjoy Grimdark, well then maybe don't read this. It's extremely Grimdark. I've before said that first law is Grimdark, but doesn't really, it's not really depressing to me anyway. Blackwing is a little depressing. I'm not gonna lie. This is a post-apocalyptic world that feels very like post-nuclear fallout in Vibe, although it is absolutely not about post-nuclear fallout. We have this magical wasteland called the Misery, which again feels like kind of a nuclear fallout zone because it's the very air you breathe, it's like poisoned and toxic from this like really destructive magic that occurred there. We have these kind of Lovecraftian godlike monsters that are playing their own game and we're just pawns in it. The main character, Ry Haldiel Harrow, is this kind of like over-the-hill guy with some kind of a past that you learn about as you go. And his job, his day job, is to ferry people across the Misery. So he's able to navigate this wasteland. And there are waystations across the Misery that are kind of part of the Doomsday engine that keeps the Lovecraftian god monsters at bay. So his job is to navigate the Misery for people. So people who need to travel to these waystations are able to do so. And it is dark, it is twisted. The magic is pretty unsettling, but it has a very sort of like conspiracy plotline. It feels kind of almost like a Jean Le Carré mystery where you're like, well, the government may not be doing what they should be doing. Ry Hald starts asking the right questions of the wrong people or the wrong questions of the right people. And it's, I think it's so well done, so inventive. I've never really read anything quite like it before. I really like the main character. And I, yeah, I really love the series. So if that all sounds good to you, frickin' read it. Next up, I have a new addition to my rotation and that is Let in the Mist by Hope Merlies. I was saying Nearless for a long time and I was wrong. This is a book that is much lauded by Neil Gaiman. That's what brought it to my attention. In fact, the blurb on the cover is from Neil Gaiman saying the single most beautiful and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the 20th century. I forced the ladies of blades and bodice repers to read this for book club this year. This is a pre-Tolkienian fantasy. And I think anyone who's a fan of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell would very much enjoy Let in the Mist. Let in the Mist heavily inspired Stardust, which is by Neil Gaiman, but Let in the Mist is much better. Stardust is a pale imitation of Let in the Mist. So this is a quirky little story. It's about this town that's on the border of fairy. There's this kind of black market in fairy fruit. There's kind of this like whimsical nefarious politics and social commentary. Again, if you like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and the tone of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I think you'll really, really feel at home here, both in the way the they are depicted and the way that like people of the town are depicted. And I just think it's a charming, quirky, fascinating little book that I think is definitely, it's like cozy and unsettling all at the same time. And I just had an absolutely delightful time reading it. Neil Gaiman is right. This novel should not have been forgotten. This is better than a lot of classic novels that I've read. So help to write this wrong by adding this to your reading list. Next up I have another book that I constantly force people to read and that is The Diabolic by S.J. Kincaid. This is a YA story, but again I think it is more on the mature side of YA. To tell you what inspired this book would be spoilery if you were familiar with what that thing is. So I can't tell you, but it's very interesting to know it if you are familiar with it. After the fact. So just like look it up after you finish the book. And you'll go, oh, or you'll go, what? I don't know what that is. So The Diabolic is sci-fi and it takes place in the future where we sort of distrust technology, but they're still using technology. And The Diabolics are these like engineered bodyguards basically. And the way they work is they're created to be the super strong, super fast, you know, can protect you because they're a bodyguard type of thing. And then they're kind of brainwashed. If you purchase one, it's kind of brainwashed into loving the person that they've been purchased for so that The Diabolics like reason for existence is like protecting this person who they were purchased to protect. So the main character of this book is a diabolic. So it's seen from the perspective of one of these creatures, I guess you could say. And so this book is a lot to do with exploring, you know, what makes us human. So Nemesis is a diabolic who was purchased to protect the daughter of a rich family. And then the daughter of this rich family is in danger. That is to say that the government wants her to be brought to the capital to be a hostage, but no one knows what she looks like. And so they send Nemesis the diabolic in her stead as a decoy. So Nemesis has to learn to present as human and leave the side of the person that she was purchased to protect. I think it's a really complex and amazing story. It's very exciting. It's filled with twists and turns. It's filled with sort of deeper questions. And I think it's so good and so underrated and freaking read it. Next is a book that I almost didn't want to put on this list because in our little corner of Booktube, I would say it's quite hyped. But overall, in the grand scheme of things, it's really not. It's only like our little corner of Booktube. So Empire of Silence in the Sun Eater series by Christopher Rock, you know, I've been reading all these books with Alex from Alex Nieves and doing live shows about them. I have a video on should you read the series. I have been collecting them. I have signed copies of them. And our little corner of Booktube is also, you know, big fans and eager to read these books as they come out. But the hard covers are out of print and there are not that many ratings of it on Goodreads. People outside of this corner of Booktube probably have not heard of it. And Empire of Silence is so good. It remains my favorite in the series, which isn't to say like, oh, it's all downhill from there. That's not really how I feel about it. I mean, technically, I guess that's how I feel about it if this is my favorite. It's a very, very good series. I just like nothing is quite the first book for me. The real building in this series is complex and intricate and mysterious and expansive and epic. I think a lot of pieces of this world and this storyline are quite anthropologically done, and in particular, the attention to linguistics. This is a far future space opera that spans galaxies and centuries. And it's the scale of the series is like kind of hard to overstate. Again, I really like the, for the most part, the way that the treatment of aliens and the understanding of aliens is handled in the series. And again, the linguistic part of things is very interestingly done. I just think that these books are so underrated. If you like a good space opera, if you like Red Rising and you like the sort of like archaic feel, but in space, you know, Dune does it too. Red Rising does it, Book of the New Sun. If you like that feeling of like noble families and kings, but in outer space in the far future with spaceships, but we still have swords for some reason. If that's something that you are into, then you should absolutely read the Sun Eater series. The next one is for my Shakespeare fans. And that is the Queens of Innisfilir by Tessa Gratton. When this came out, it got kind of poo-pooed, so I didn't really want to read it. But if you are a fan of Shakespeare and if you are familiar with the play King Lear, this is one of the best examples of a retelling that I've ever read. Because if you've read King Lear, it doesn't feel like, oh, I know what's going to happen. Why am I even reading this? It's the when and where it changes King Lear and recontextualizes King Lear and reframes King Lear and refocuses your attention from where it is originally in King Lear to now the Queens. It's just so marvelously done. It also stands well on its own. If you were not familiar with King Lear, if you've never read King Lear, I think you could still also really enjoy this. I was so engrossed and impressed and amazed by this book. And if you are into Shakespeare, I do highly recommend refreshing yourself on King Lear and then picking this up because it would just add to your enjoyment and add to when and where you're going to notice kind of nuances and interesting things she's done to sort of play off of King Lear. But I really, really enjoyed this. It's a slower book. It's more contemplative. It's very character-driven. It's inspired by King Lear. But I think it's really well done. The writing is beautiful. The characters are really well written. Everything is, it's like Lear but deeper and more fleshed out and a new lens through which to view King Lear. If any of that sounds good to you, I highly recommend. Next is probably my favorite classic and it's kind of like letting them list where like it's unduly forgotten. And that is Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. Some of my patrons read this and hated it, but don't listen to them. They're crazy. Ivanhoe is the reason that we had a resurgence in the interest in popular interest in like the Crusades and King Richard and Robin Hood and all of that era and that kind of storyline. And so Robin Hood remained popular and everyone forgot Ivanhoe, even though Ivanhoe is the reason for that. I really love this book so much. If you are, if you like Shakespeare and you read a lot or watch a lot of Shakespeare, I think you'll feel really at home with the prose because there is a sort of Shakespearean style to the prose and the way the characters talk and even in just the narrative. And a lot of the humor is the kind of humor that you find in Shakespeare where like it rewards you paying attention for the whole of the sentence. So there's a lot of really interesting humor in it but you kind of have to pay attention to pick it up and it's very kind of like nuanced in its portrayals of Saxons and Normans and Jewish people at this time during the Crusades and the Crusades as well and royalty and nobility and the politics of the day and it's quite intricate and complex and layered and gray and I think it would make such a good movie. I mean there is, there are some adaptations of it but they're like really old or like low budget. This deserves like a proper big screen Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe, maybe not Russell Crowe should not play Ivan Howe. You know what I mean? It needs one of those because it's got so much, like it's got adventure and humor and romance and mystery and suspense and it's got everything you could want. So like if you haven't read it, read it and also let's get an adaptation of it, okay? Next up I have another one for fans of Donaldson Strange and Mr. Norrell and that is a declaration of the rights of magicians and the whole shadow history is duology. This is an alternate history fantasy that reimagines like French Revolution era and the debates about abolition and the rights of man and the sort of thing and reframes all of that as questions to do with the right and to use and access magic. So it takes real historical figures. Characters in the story include Wilberforce and Ropes Pierre and Toussaint Levard Tour and again all of this is kind of reframed and restructured to be a question of magic and I think it's so excellently well done. I guess there are some dryer bits because we have you know lots of scenes that are just like debating in the house of cobbins and this kind of thing but the way that she's gone about tanking these kind of historical events and these historical questions and reframing them to be magic of related questions is so brilliantly done while also making these characters kind of come to life where I really like even though these are people from history I care about them as characters in the story and yeah it's uh I think it's a really really excellent book I guess a little bit on the dry side but if you're a fan of history and you're a fan of fantasy well then what are you waiting for? Speaking of alternate history next I have The Wolf and the Under the Northern Sky series by Leo Karoo you should know by now that I'm a big big big big big big fan but these books are not hyped not outside of my channel anyway for the umpteenth time Under the Northern Sky series is an alternate history that imagines what if other humanoid species had survived the ice age to form language and culture so this is sort of a middle ages Europe but instead of just humans who are like fighting and warring and building castles and forming nations in Europe we have other humanoids doing this as well and they're in conflict with each other so the Anakim are this society of developed Neanderthals basically and they formed their own language and culture and they kind of occupy the northern part of Britain we watch this political conflict unfold between the Anakim and the Southerners aka Homo sapiens but the way that Leo Karoo was gone about developing Neanderthal into this like cultured other humanoid to be on par with humans in a way that's familiar but distinctly different from humans is so intensely anthropological which comes no surprise because Leo Karoo studied anthropology that is his background and is kind of the reason for the series but if you like a politics and battle-centric story with conspiracy there is a like a genre carry element of conspiracy to what's going on with the powers at play somewhat of a like not coming of age but coming into power story if you like um to sort of like root for the bad guys as much as the good guys where it's sort of like a meeting of equal but opposite minds homes in Moriarty almost feel between the good guys and the bad guys where it's like sort of like a game of chess that is political warfare it's just so good it's just so good and the third and final book in the series was my favorite book of the year last year it's it's so good guys it's so good great it keeping the theme of history the next one I have is the Half Drowned King and the entire golden wolf saga by Linnae Hartziker this is Viking historical fiction it's not fantasy at all the wolf has a speculative element with the addition of the Neanderthals this is not even like speculative in like an alternate history sense there's no magic none of that this is basically thinking what is known about these peoples in particular the sagas about King Harold fine hair and kind of fleshing them out giving them life in a way that like okay well we have these sagas about these legendary figures but what might their day-to-day lives actually have looked like what might the people behind these legends actually have been like the politics and the war and the personal relationships of these people and the way that I personally feel like you've kind of like transported to this viking world the day-to-day lives as well as the more epic struggles it's not just raiding you know the that era of Scandinavia had its own rules and economy and laws and the women were at home not raiding they had their own things going on there were marriages there were alliances there was a lot more going on than just getting into long boats and raiding so the way that she's like fully fleshed out this like viking era Scandinavia is amazing and then I also just really like the characters in particular Solvee but I like reading about all these characters and they're all very very well written and I just highly recommend if you're at all into vikings or that era of Scandinavia and last but not least is Dawn of Wonder by Jonathan Renshaw this is a self-published book that I never see anybody talk about and it is so good if you're a fan of Name of the Wind then I highly recommend this book because that's what it most reminds me of the main character it doesn't sing like a cloth the main character is though a prodigy in a very very different way from cloth and this is kind of like a brutal story of like a young man who's put through the ringer but is able to find his way and like get into school and be learning things because he is a prodigy it's not a copy of Name of the Wind though I feel like I'm making it sound like it is but it has a lot of similar appeal and the prose is also really really good not exactly the same as Patrick Rothfuss' but it has really gorgeous prose really heartfelt character moments and the way that characters are written is extremely emotional and also the book is illustrated so yeah if you're a fan of epic fantasy and like a Name of the Wind-esque vibe in storytelling and in the type of character and situation that we have going on there then I can't recommend highly enough dawn of wonder and those are some books that deserve more of the hype than they've got so do me a favor and read one of them or all of them and love them most importantly love them you've already read these books let me know if you plan to read these books let me know if you read and hated these books then don't let me know or whatever you want to let me know I post videos on Saturdays other random times as well but definitely Saturdays so like and subscribe join my Patreon if you feel so inclined and I'll see you when I see you