u/KipIngram

I have no problem with chosen ones. Luke Skywalker - sure; love it. The Dark Tower? Roland was clearly a special person, but it wasn't laid out in detail for you, so you could use your imagination. I've only seen the first few episodes of A Discovery Of Witches, but Diana seems on track to being something very special. Even Supernatural has it - Sam was "chosen" - just not by a very nice chooser.

Heck, for that matter even Jim Kirk was "special." He had no "in-world" "super abilities," but he was clearly written as special.

Now that you have me thinking about it, I think a large percentage of the fiction I've enjoyed most over the years has some element of that in it. I don't see any problem. It is fiction, after all.

Feel free. I am retired, so I've got all kinds of time. :-) PM me if you prefer.

I actually don't consider it Dresden-ish at all. The protagonist's personality is a bit like Harry's, and it shares the first-person narrative style that Dresden deploys so very well. But the "nature of the world" is entirely different. One of Dresden's strongest points in my eyes is that once you've agreed to suspend disbelief enough to accept magic, then the world actually seems like one that could be real. On the other hand, Nightside feels like Green was just trying to see how over the top he could make it. It just keeps on getting weirder and weirder. Another of his series, the one about Eddie Drood, has a very similar feel, though you don't see it quite as "thoroughly" - it's mostly confined to a bar.

That said, I did enjoy Nightside very much. Not as much as Dresden, but it's certainly a worthy read.

The closest thing I've found to Dresden is the Dan Faust series by Craig Schaefer. And if you include its related spin-off material, you're looking at like 30-ish books. Lot of good material there. He calls the world The First Story. Another of his series, The Sisterhood of New Amsterdam, also seems quite good, but it's far less mature - only a handful of books at this point.

If you like Dresden art, then you should definitely know about Mika Blackfield, if you don't already. She's got Dresden art over on deviantart.com:

https://www.deviantart.com/mika-blackfield/art/The-Dresden-Files-575902031

She completely defines my "head view" of the characters. One fantasy I allow myself from time to time is that after the series is finished Jim will orchestrate a fine leather edition that we can buy as a complete set, all in go and that he'll hire Mika to do copious illustrations. I'd pay some very serious money for such a collection (and it would require it too - that's a lot of leather books).

I toy with the idea of writing from time to time too. I had a college professor tell me once, after we did a writing exercise, that I showed real potential. My sister seems to have gotten the gene too - a professor of hers at Auburn University was personal buddies with Stephen King, and shared something my sister wrote with King, and he commented positively on it. I'm retired now, so I do have time, but... there are so many things I want to do. Boredom is definitely not my problem.

I also absolutely love history - I spend a lot of time learning more of it, in an entirely informal way.

Yes - I totally understand. And Jim has made it hard. He's just set such a high bar that things that previously satisfied me don't anymore.

The really great thing about Dresden is that it rewards re-reading. There's too much there to absorb all of in one go. There are things that you just can't recognize the relevance of the first time, because you don't have the full framework to "put it in its place." I actually found that the first several reads gave me new insights.

Eventually that taps out, of course, or at least becomes very rare and confined to very small things. I did notice one tiny little thing in Storm Front on my seventh read (but it was a very small little thing).

There is no such thing as "post-Dresden" in my world.

This is entirely uncalled for. Please review community rule #1. Persistent violations can to temporary or permanent community bans.

This is entirely uncalled for. Please review community rule #1. Persistent violations can to temporary or permanent community bans.

This is entirely uncalled for. Please review community rule #1. Persistent violations can to temporary or permanent community bans.

Yes - it's a novella as opposed to a short story. I deliberately left it out because I wasn't sure whether it's the only novella so far and hated to look ignorant. ;-) I deliberately specified "novels."

Warriorborn sits just prior to the opening events of The Olympian Affair.

This is the wonderful thing about The Dresden Files. Jim wrote these stories chock full of little bits that you simply cannot appreciate fully on your first read - you don't see how they integrate until you read them again, after having read everything that comes later. Discovering them makes rereading a whole new experience.

I found that this continued for several reads. There's just so much richness in Jim's fictional world - it takes time to absorb it all. It's like there are "tiers" of things, though I'm sure we don't all discover them in exactly the same way (i.e., something you get on your third read I might have gotten on my second, and vice versa.)

But in any case, the series is a gift that keeps on giving.

The Aeronaut's Windlass is the title of a single novel - it's book #1 of Jim's Cinder Spires series. Two novels are out so far - Windlass and The Olympian Affair.

I've never had the impression that it's a choice.

Same here. I think it makes all the difference - while exceptions of course exist, most people who see the show first seem to enjoy it at least fairly well, where as most people who try the show after reading the books are quite disappointed.

Me enjoying a supernatural-oriented TV show isn't really a terribly reliable measure of the quality of the show for the average person - I'm just a particular sucker for that type of fiction. It doesn't take a lot for me to enjoy it.

I can second Nightside, though I have to say it's very different from Dresden. One of the things I most love about Dresden is how real the world seems - how authentic (once you've swallowed the magic pill, of course). When I read Nightside it honestly felt like Green was just trying to see how ridiculously over the top he could make everything. It did hold my attention, though, and it wrapped up well.

That seems to just be Green's style, though - his Eddie Drood series has the same flavor.

I was thoroughly enjoying it until book seven. Spoiler: When I realized the timeline had jumped thirty years into the future, it just totally changed everything for me. I couldn't get over it, so I stopped reading.

I agree re: the Harry/Murphy thing never really feeling like it was "all there." It always felt to me like two people worried about never finding anyone and not wanting to "overlook the obvious."

I think it's somewhat of a stretch - I've always regarded the Denarians as not among the truly elite members of the Hell power structure. Harry seemed to think that Lucifer himself was involved with the "big pentagrams" that were used in Small Favor, and my understanding is that we will meet Lucifer at some point (though I'm not 100% sure of it). But I think the Denarians are small fry by comparison.

u/sanjoatc , I added appropriate spoiler protection to your post. Whenever your post contains information of a spoiler nature, please apply a flair to your post - you should choose the latest book title that your post contains information from (all prior books are also covered). Also, if the spoiler information is in the first 12-15 lines of your post, please set the [spoiler] flag - this prevents those lines from appearing "inline" in the main community feed for people using the "Card" view of the community.

If you're posting a comment that contains information from later in the series that the post's spoiler protection, please "black out" the spoiler and include in visible text a statement of the book associated with the spoiler.

I took care of this one for you, so no action is required from you on it; please just keep this in mind for your future posts. Thank you!

You misunderstand - this community has nothing to do with the city of Dresden, Germany. It is a gathering place for discussion of The Dresden Files, an urban fantasy series authored by Jim Butcher.

Good luck in your quest, though.

Very nice. The only issue I see is that Black Court vampires are not "beautiful." They are visually "dead and decayed." Less fun to draw, but that is how they're described.

Patriarchal conspiracy, no doubt. :-)

u/LawExcellent9741 , I adjusted your post flair to Cold Days. I do see that you talked a lot about Summer Knight, but there are also references to Nemesis in there, which we don't formally learn about as a "thing" until Cold Days. Prior to that we have no "organizer slot" to put Aurora's condition into.

The Cold Days flair still protects Summer Knight - a title flair covers everything up to and including that title.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

Also, thank you to the community member who brought this issue to our attention! You guys are an enormous help - we couldn't do it without you!

;-) You're a little behind the times, I think.

You should be able to read all of the stories in Brief Cases and Side Jobs safely. You might refrain from reading the most recent couple of stories until you've finished Twelve Months, but I say that mostly because I'm not super-familiar with them and can't be certain about it. Most of them, though, you're safe with.