Book recs?

[seren_ccd]

Breaking holiday radio silence to ask:

Who are some authors you enjoy who write novels where the main characters actually do research or go on searches, quests, even archaeological digs?

I've read Elizabeth Peters and some Kathy Reichs, and sections in Kostova's The Historian are sort of what I'm talking about. But mainly I'm talking about well, librarians and historians and archivists. Does anyone have some good recommendations?

Thank you!

I hope everyone has a lovely bank holiday weekend! :D

Comments

[verseblack.livejournal.com]

I love books like this and will be checking back to see what suggestions you get and stealing them myself :) Unfortuntally, my baby-brain fog is making it difficult for me to come up with a full list of my favorites, but the ones I can think of are..

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Perhaps my very favorite "book about books" ever :)
The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Catherine Howe
The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips (A very clever book where the reader is challenged to figure out the "real" story from a series of contradictary accounts. But it was so unbearably depressing to me that I was unable to finish it :(
I know some of the Preston and Child Pendergast novels give me that same sort of quest/"we must find the right book to save the day!" sort of feel to them, but I'm not sure if they would give quite the same vibe to everyone else... There is a minor character called Wren who is a book-restorer who shows up in a few of those books.

I'm going to have to look back through my reading journals as my mind is just blanking right now.

[melyanna.livejournal.com]

It's a different kind of research than what you're probably looking for, but I've really enjoyed Kim Stanley Robinson in part because he has a lot of characters doing different kinds of research. It's hard sci-fi, though. I loved Red Mars, but I'm not through that trilogy yet so I can't speak to the rest of it.

But like I said, Red Mars is hard sci-fi. With massive amounts of politics. It's not for everyone, but it does have interesting characters running around their shiny new planet exploring and building and doing research.

[rodlox.livejournal.com]

CJ Cherryh's Foreigner saga has a translator as the central character.

other than that, nothing comes to mind at the moment; sorry.

[aj.livejournal.com]

I read fluff, so I got nothin.

[jal80.livejournal.com]

Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches has a fair amount of that. It kind of reminded me of The Historian, but...lighter, I guess. Not nearly as literary.

[vegarin.livejournal.com]

I think verseblack covered the most that I could think of. Hmm, The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas is about three young and terribly broke historians who end up sharing a house and then somehow end up solving crime(s) in the neighbourhood. It's pretty entertaining, and I loved that they use their research skills in the process (and that they major, respectively, in pre-history, medieval history, and the Great War and therefore constanty at odds with each oher), but this isn't exactly in the same vein a Elizabeth Peters or Kostova.

There are some fantasy books like Alphabet of Thorn that I loved and are about archivists/librarians/translators, but they're obviously studying fictional history and language, so that may not count. The same goes for hard sci-fi Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds--archaeology factors greatly into his series, but it's fictional future archaeology, so may not be what you're looking for. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis and her other novels are about time-travelling Oxford historians (it's not as ridiculous as it sounds, and there're award-winning science-fiction novels), and there're quite a few books about bookstore owners who end up discovering mysteries like The Shadow of the Wind, but then again they're not really Peters-type, either.

[kristinaa1.livejournal.com]

Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. I rarely read a book twice but this got read 3 times since I first picked it up 4 years ago. It's a true story.