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Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like Asgard

anchored on:mythological world

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of God of War
                  God of War

                  series · 2 books · 2010

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                • C
                  Corum

                  series · 6 books · 1971

                  part of Moorcock's Multiverse

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                • Cover of The Crucible (Abigail Owen)
                  The Crucible (Abigail Owen)

                  series · 2 books · 2024

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                • Cover of The Elric Saga
                  The Elric Saga

                  series · 72 books · 1961

                  part of Moorcock's Multiverse

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                  The Elric Saga is Michael Moorcock's sequence of sword-and-sorcery novels about Elric, the frail, sorcery-dependent last emperor of the ancient island empire of Melniboné, who abandons his throne to wander a violent, magic-soaked world carrying a sentient, soul-drinking black sword. Core entries such as Elric of Melniboné, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, and Stormbringer trace his path toward a self-destructive destiny, and Elric was later folded into Moorcock's wider Eternal Champion multiverse, of which this saga is one strand.

                • Cover of Ragnarok: The End of the Gods
                  Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

                  A. S. Byatt · standalone novel · 2011

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                  Ragnorak: The End of the Gods is a 2011 novel written by English critic and novelist A. S. Byatt. Written for the Canongate Myth Series, Byatt chose to make the book about Norse mythology so she could grapple the "appalling finality" of Ragnarök.

                • Cover of Malazan
                  Malazan

                  universe · 36 books · 1999

                  Start hereMalazan Book of the Fallen · Start here

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                  Pity the historian who tries to map this world; pity more the god who thinks he rules it. The Malazan Empire marches across continents on the boots of its common soldiers, and above them move Ascendants — mortals grown into something like gods, and gods worn thin as old coin. Magic is drawn from Warrens, roads of power threaded through reality; the dead keep their grudges; and every empire, however vast, is a wager against time. This is epic fantasy told from the mud, where a sapper cracking a joke weighs as much as an immortal settling a feud older than the human race. The world began as a tabletop campaign two friends built in the 1980s, and it still moves by two hands. Steven Erikson's ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen is the spine — Gardens of the Moon, Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice, on through The Crippled God — each book a near-standalone campaign that only later reveals how it locks together. Ian C. Esslemont walks the same years from a different vantage in his Novels of the Malazan Empire (Night of Knives, Return of the Crimson Guard onward). Around them stand the prequels: Erikson's Kharkanas Trilogy, archaic and elegiac, chronicling a doomed elder people, and Esslemont's brisker Path to Ascendancy, following two adventurers before they became legends. Erikson's Witness sequence carries the tale forward, and novellas of the genial necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach supply the gallows comedy. Nothing is explained to you; comprehension is earned, and that is the pleasure. The themes run deep — compassion set against cruelty, the toll empires charge, civilizations that fall and are mourned. Begin where the saga does, with Erikson's Gardens of the Moon, and read the ten in publication order; the prequels are for the already-initiated. Trust that confusion is the price of entry.

                • Cover of Tales of the Flat Earth
                  Tales of the Flat Earth

                  series · 14 books · 1978

                  completed

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                  Tales from the Flat Earth is a fantasy series by British writer Tanith Lee. The novels take inspiration from One Thousand and One Nights and are similarly structured as interconnected stories. The series has been well received, and Death's Master, the second book in the series, won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1980.

                • Cover of The Dark Star Trilogy
                  The Dark Star Trilogy

                  series · 2 books · 2019

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                  Marlon James's Dark Star Trilogy opens with Black Leopard, Red Wolf, in which a mercenary tracker is hired to find a missing boy and is drawn into a war between kingdoms across a continent built from African history and mythology. The second volume, Moon Witch, Spider King, retells much of the same span of time from the perspective of a rival witness, deliberately contradicting the first narrator's account. The trilogy is conceived as one conflict viewed through incompatible narrators rather than a linear continuation.

                • Cover of Birthgrave
                  Birthgrave

                  series · 3 books · 1975

                  completed

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                  Tanith Lee's Birthgrave trilogy (The Birthgrave, Vazkor Son of Vazkor, Quest for the White Witch, 1975-1978) opens with an amnesiac woman waking inside a volcano with no memory of who she is, and follows her journey through a brutal, quasi-medieval world in search of her identity, wielding strange powers she doesn't understand along the way. She eventually learns she is one of the last of the Old Ones, an ancient, nearly extinct people, and must reckon with the harm her own vanished civilization once did.

                • Cover of Die Nibelungen
                  Die Nibelungen

                  series · 20 books · 1843

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                • Cover of Malazan Book of the Fallen
                  Malazan Book of the Fallen

                  series · 20 books · 1999

                  part of Malazan

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                • Cover of The Inheritance (Jemisin)
                  The Inheritance (Jemisin)

                  series · 9 books · 2010

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                • Cover of Dragonlance: Legends Trilogy
                  Dragonlance: Legends Trilogy

                  series · 3 books · 1986

                  part of Dragonlance

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                  Dragonlance Legends is a trilogy of fantasy novels written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, which take place in the Dragonlance setting. This series is the sequel to the Dragonlance Chronicles, and focus on Raistlin and Caramon. The three books in the series are Time of the Twins, War of the Twins and Test of the Twins.

                • Cover of The Sixth World
                  The Sixth World

                  series · 3 books · 2018

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                  Trail of Lightning opens Rebecca Roanhorse's series set after a supernatural disaster destroys most of North America, following Maggie Hoskie, a Navajo monster-slayer navigating a post-apocalyptic landscape of monsters and Native American gods. Maggie's uneasy mentor-turned-adversary Neizghani anchors much of the first book's conflict. Winner of the 2019 Locus Award for Best First Novel, the series continues with Storm of Locusts and draws its cosmology directly from Navajo tradition rather than an invented pantheon.

                • Cover of Eyes (Stuart Gordon)
                  Eyes (Stuart Gordon)

                  series · 3 books · 1973

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                • Cover of The Fall of Gondolin
                  The Fall of Gondolin

                  series · 2 books · 1984

                  completed

                  part of Tolkien's legendarium

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                  The Fall of Gondolin (2018), edited by Christopher Tolkien from his father's manuscripts, tells one of the three "Great Tales" of the First Age of Middle-earth: the hidden elven city of Gondolin, its long concealment, and its eventual betrayal and destruction by the forces of the dark lord Morgoth. It sits alongside The Children of Hurin and Beren and Luthien as an expanded, standalone telling of a story that The Silmarillion had compressed into a single chapter. This is legendarium history assembled from multiple drafts rather than a novel with one continuous throughline.

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                  Kushiel's Legacy Universe

                  series · 13 books · 2001

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                • Cover of Wars of Vis
                  Wars of Vis

                  series · 3 books · 1976

                  completed

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                  Tanith Lee's Wars of Vis trilogy is set on a world of feuding city-states, following the warlord Raldnor Am Anackire's rise as long-buried tensions between the pale-skinned Vis and darker-skinned Lowlanders erupt into open war and the revelation of hidden power. The Storm Lord opens the trilogy, continued by Anackire and The White Serpent.

                • Cover of The Song of Shattered Sands
                  The Song of Shattered Sands

                  series · 14 books · 2015

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                • Cover of Fionavar Universe
                  Fionavar Universe

                  series · 5 books · 1984

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                  Ysabel is a 2007 standalone contemporary fantasy novel by Guy Gavriel Kay, following teenager Ned Marriner as he stumbles into a centuries-old rivalry playing out around the cathedral of Aix-en-Provence. It marked Kay's turn toward urban fantasy and briefly brings back two adult characters from his earlier Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, though it is not itself part of that trilogy and can be read on its own.

                • Cover of Norse Mythology
                  Norse Mythology

                  series · 17 books · 2017

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                  Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology retells the central myths of the Norse gods in his own prose, moving from the creation of the nine worlds through the exploits of Odin, Thor, and Loki to the final battle of Ragnarok. It is a single volume rather than a continuing series, drawing on the old Eddic sources and shaped by Gaiman's lifelong fondness for them.

                • Cover of Blood Scion
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                  Deborah Falaye · standalone novel · 2022

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                  Blood Scion is a 2022 young adult fantasy novel by Nigerian Canadian writer Deborah Falaye. Falaye's debut novel, inspired by Nigerian and Yoruba mythology, was published on 8 March 2022 by HarperTeen, an imprint of HarperCollins as the first book in a planned series.

                • Cover of Iron Widow
                  Iron Widow

                  series · 2 books · 2021

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                  Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow reimagines the rise of Chinese Empress Wu Zetian as a mecha-piloting heroine in Huaxia, a futuristic reinvention of Medieval China. Heavenly Tyrant continues the story as the second book in this young-adult science-fantasy duology.