I’ve been on a scifi binge. MurderBot on audio is worth your time. After Atlas was quite good, stands out from the rest. Timothy Zahn’s Icarus series was fun.
As for fantasy it’s been a slog. We need better search parameters. It took the book people forever to separate scifi and fantasy, but there’s still work to do. Paranormal romance is there for some reason and clutters up Libby’s ability to search. That, and it feels like there’s a glut of books involving either the fae or dragons right now, and little else, not unlike the vampire thing 2 decades ago.
The Expanse by James S.A Corey is also worth your time. Currently reading The Faith of Beasts by the same author, part 2 of The Captive’s War. Enjoying it so far.
I’ve read the expanse twice, it’s always on the lists so I didn’t bother mentioning it. Not so keen on the last book, but that’s a tough landing.
Favourites include Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series, Ursula K Le Guin’s Hainish cycle.
Currently reading Le Guins Dispossessed.
Dispossessed is among one of my favorite books. You’re in for a really interesting time. I feel like it’s one of the few rare fiction books which manages to show non capitalistic systems quite well. I really love it! Plus Le Guin was apparently based as hell, too
I have read it before but a very long time ago and I think a lot of the societal points passed me by at that younger age. I’m definitely enjoying re-reading it with a more mature eye.
I always came down on the Hornblower side. Have you read that series? How do they compare?
Hornblower is OK. I enjoy some of it but O’Brian has a knack for humour and tragedy thats mostly absent in the Hornblower series.
I got back into reading through Dungeon Crawler Carl and now that I’m finished with that, I started to read The Colour of Magic because the discworld novels where recommended to me. Though I find as a non native english speaker the writing a little bit more challenging than DCC.
DCC is so damn fun to read! Discworld is a great read, too!
Just randomly found DCC. I’m about 65% some truth the first one, it’s hilarious.
currently listening to the 4th book in the children of time series
i love these books
Favourites include Lord of the Rings, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey & Maturin series, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy.
Currently reading Bleak House.
A.glass of wine with you Sir!
Favorite\ The 120 Days of Sodom /jk
Reading now\ The Silmarillion
The flowers of evil ( akunohana , Japanese) (manga) by Shuzo Oshimi
Picking up after having finished the above\ Les Fleurs du mal
Right now I’m reading Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism by Kwame Nkrumah. It’s a really good expansion of Lenin’s work on Imperialism as a stage in capitalism. Nkrumah was coup’d one year after its publishing with support from the US.
As for favorites, I really love both Piranesi and Roadside Picnic! The former is just a really fun mystery with a good deal of whimsy, the latter is excellent sci-fi.
My user name is the title of a book by my favourite author, Jonathan Carroll. He’s highly underrated but also a cult favourite. I couldn’t pick between his books.
Another favourite book is an old humour novel by the writer Patrick Dennis, whose most well known book was Auntie Mame. However the best of his books IMO was The Joyous Season, it was written in the 1950s and so some of the language in his books is a bit antique (like using Negro as a descriptor), but honestly there’s not a funnier book in my opinion, I reread it last month, and I realized that I still routinely say lines from it in my daily life.
Finally a great book is The Speed Queen by Stewart O’Nan, it’s dark and a tough topic to read about but it’s so captivating. All of his books are really worth reading. Last Night At The Lobster, Snow Angels, Ocean State, Wish You Were Here, Songs For The Missing, Evensong, The Names Of The Dead, The Good Wife, The Odds, Emily Alone, are my particular favorites, all pretty gritty.
Reading through all of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Never read a litRPG before and I’m having a blast with it.
Right now, I am reading Neuromancer by William Gibson (physical book) and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky (e-book), as well as listening to Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (audiobook).
I haven’t gotten far enough into Neuromancer to form an opinion yet, but I’m enjoying the other two books. Children of Ruin is the second book in a series about future humans trying to speed up evolution on distant planets and dealing with the consequences thousands of years later. Alexander Hamilton is a biography on the US founding father from childhood until his death. It has a lot of interesting facts I never knew.
I have a hard time picking just one favorite of anything, but I think my favorite book might be World War Z by Max Brooks or Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer.
World War Z is a novel about a zombie apocalypse. It stands out from other books in the genre by having a frame narrative where a journalist is compiling a bunch of interviews with survivors telling their stories. Each chapter is its own short story with new characters from everywhere on the globe, and you get a lot of different perspectives this way. If you pick up the audiobook, each chapter is voiced by a different person, and there are some famous people lending their voices.
Annihilation is about a mysterious zone that appears in a remote wilderness. Things in the zone begin to act strangely and mutate into otherworldly objects. Over time, a government agency closes down the area and begins sending in expeditions to try to discover its secrets.
My favorite are the Kushiel trilogy, anything by Ian McDonald, almost anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky or Michael Carey. Though it’s difficult to pick.
Currently reading The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.
Among my favorites I remember: Gideon the ninth, slavery by another name, worst journey in the world, anything by Ted Chiang, blindsight/echopraxia
Recent reads: little bosses everywhere (excellent), no more tears (also excellent), get in trouble (I really like parts of it but it’s classic Kelly link, super weird and abrupt)
Gideon the Ninth baffled me
The books in that series all seemed to follow the same pattern of something weird, interesting and mysterious happening, having no idea what was going on, spending the whole book getting a slightly better picture of it only for something else totally incomprehensible to happen and the cycle started again. I wanted to like it but I got sick of the antics. Really interesting world though
Yeah it was interesting but honestly I just kind of found Gideon a bit too much on the cringy side of edgy… There was a lot to like but I found a lot of it very grating somehow.
this entire thread makes me sad, i guess there’s no accounting for taste.
I still enjoyed it, I’m just highlighting the bit I wasn’t as keen on. Its purely a subjective opinion on it, I’m not saying the books are objectively bad or anything. Its fine to like different things.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch is one of my all time favorite fiction books and I’m re-listening to the audiobook right now.
How not to Die by Dr. Michael Gregor is one of my favourite non-fiction books, containing a great summary of our current scientific knowledge in nutritional science.
Don’t know if mangas count, but I’ve caught up with Berserk a few months ago. Greate story and art, can’t wait on the next volume thats coming out in a few months.
Currently reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams, about her time at Facebook. Only 50 pages in, but pretty interesting so far. Started with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it’s just to hard to follow what is happening lol. And I’ve just ordered 1984.
I do read new stuff, on occasion, but at the moment they are one and the same: the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I just picked it back up and I already noticed something new. At Bilbo’s 111th birthday party, Tolkien describes the dragon firework as passing “like an express train”, which struck me as an odd turn of phrase that I’d never noticed before.
