Swashbuckling adventure novels to start your year

Welcome to Ask a Book Critic, a members-only feature packed with personalized book recommendations from senior correspondent and resident book critic Constance Grady. To get your own recommendation, ask Constance here, and subscribe to the newsletter here.

So much of the fiction these days glories in complexity and what is supposed to be going on in people’s brains. Or wants to grind away at some current social issue to which I have already made my peace. Or thinks grisly descriptions make up for a weak plot. Or has so many characters (some not really essential to the plot) that I can’t keep track of them and their relation to the plot. What I am looking for is simply a good action page-turner, well written and paced. Like the C.J. Box books or the Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester. Any suggestions?

I have to admit, books about the strange complexities of what goes on in people’s brains and timely social issues are some of my favorites. But who am I to dismiss the glories of a good adventure novel? We can like more than one kind of thing!

If you like the Horatio Hornblower books, you will probably like Patrick O’Brian, specifically Master and Commander. It’s got men of honor having swashbuckling adventures at sea during the Napoleonic Wars, a satisfyingly detailed naval world, and surprisingly elegant prose.

For the C.J. Box fan in you, I’m also going to point you toward The Suspect by L.R. Wright, a thriller that won the Edgar when it came out in 1985. We open with the murder, committed by an 80-year-old man who realizes, once his crime is complete, that he “is going to survive this astonishing thing.” He knows that the act he’s committed will shake his sleepy Canadian town to the core, but he doesn’t know yet how much the murder will haunt him as he tries to cover it up anyway.

Hey there! I am looking for detective-fiction books that tackle a nonlinear and often incoherent case, that are not afraid to work in some oneiric imagery, esotericism, and complicated (often times upsetting) social commentary. If the writing is fixated on the mood, surroundings, history, culture, and prejudices of the characters or place where the story unravels, even better. My closest references to this style are Disco Elysium, True Detective, Twin Peaks, and The City & the City.

This question absolutely screams Haruki Murakami. A detective story that plays with time and is riddled with dream-like imagery? Please. A Wild Sheep Chase is probably the book of his that is closest to true detective fiction, so let’s start there.

Looking back a little further, you might enjoy William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the book that invented the cyberpunk novel. This novel, which features a proto-hacker hired to investigate an AI, has a trippy, unconventional structure, and the virtual landscape Gibson’s hackers travel through functions like a dreamscape. Plus, the mystery is beautifully constructed and tricky to wrap your head around.

Finally, the most canonical version of a nonlinear and dreamlike detective novel is probably The Crying of Lot 49, with its mystery built around paranoia and conspiracy. To be honest, I occasionally find Thomas Pynchon’s sense of whimsy to be exhausting, but I cannot deny that the man’s sentences positively crackle with energy. Give the book a whirl and see how you like it.

I’m always looking for books that delve into languages and the history of how they are formed, preferably with a funny twist. Any recommendations will be greatly appreciated!

Researching this question for you, I came across a book that I myself am now dying to read.

Suzette Haden Elgin wrote her 1984 novel Native Tongue in response to the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment. After reading feminist theory that argued that English is too deeply rooted in patriarchy to adequately express women’s experiences, Elgin, who is a linguist, imagined a group of women in a dystopian future developing a language that would speak directly to their own experiences. The language she developed as a result has a word for emotional labor, and for the action women perform during penetrative intercourse (as opposed to English’s passive “to be penetrated”). In Native Tongue, these women have been utterly disenfranchised by their own government, but in creating their own language, they find the possibility of their salvation.

“What would happen to American culture if women did have and did use a language that expressed their perceptions?” Elgin writes in an essay about the book. “Would it self-destruct?”

If you read Native Tongue, I hope you’ll tell me what you think of it!