Since Reddit went, I actually have returned to books for my reading material, which had been replaced basically by massive ask reddit threads. As a result I'm trying to read some things I shouldve a long time ago.
Just finished the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I'm on to the second book in the series. It was as good as its legacy lead me to believe!
Also, promotion for !books@lemmy.ml and https://literature.cafe/ !
Currently on chapter 85 of Pierce Brown's Light Bringer, the latest installment of the Red Rising series! Granted, I'm listening to the audiobook, but audiobooks are still books. And man, like the rest of the series, I can't put this shit down!
After this? Not sure yet. Still waiting on Sanderson's next book in his Stormlight Archive series. Maybe I'll re-listen to The Wheel of Time again while the final books of these two series wrap up.
Just finished a book from the 1930s by a Czech author Karel Čapek called War with the Newts.
It’s sci-fi based on earth in 1930s but what I found the most interesting is
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seeing an author from 1930s write and think on paper (casual racism and sexism, for example),
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the echoes of the looming WWII
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the retro futurism - I love seeing what people from the past imagined would happen with technology. They are often right, often cutely wrong.
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Currently reading Red Rising. Awesome book, when I start reading it's very hard to stop.
Going through the Red Rising series, which some of my friends praise immensely. Lightbringer just came out, though I'm only just finished Morning Star, book 3/6 in the series. Going to be starting Iron Gold soon. But until them, I'm reading 1984, which I just acquired a nice hardcover copy of.
I picked up American Prometheus after watching Oppenheimer. It's very interesting and gives a really good idea of who he was throughout his life, and how he changed over time. One of the things that isn't depicted much in the movie was how much of his political views changed over the years. While he never officially joined the communist party, he was certainly communist-adjacent before the war, but during the war and after, his priorities seemed to shift to being pro-American first and foremost, and often took the establishment position on things. Of course it's more complicated than that, but I've found it very interesting how someone's life experiences can change them.
On my to read are some historical accounts of WWII, i've suddenly become interested in learing everything I can about this period of history that I only know the basics of.
I have 5-20 minutes between calls at my work, so I've had plenty of time to sneak in some books on the clock.
I've been rereading through the Cosmere, so Mistborn eras 1+2, Warbreaker, and I'm currently reading Elantris.
To-read is Tress of the Emerald sea, then I probably should go for a non-fiction book to feel more enightened
Currently reading "The Last Watch" because I wanted some fun sci-fi, but the liberties the author is taking on physics and the universe makes it very hard to suspend my disbelief.
Looking at starting a re-read of "All Systems Red" in anticipation of the new Murderbot book coming out. I can't recommend this series enough
Currently getting back into the Redwall series after enjoying them as a kid (British cottage-core fantasy with woodland critter characters). Currently reading the Rogue Crew, where the hares of the Long Patrol team up with the Sea Otters of the titular crew to fend off the forces of the pirate Razzid Wearat.
I started reading the Wool series after recently watching the Silo TV show. Pretty good so far, the world building is surprisingly fun.
Currently Reading "The stormlight archive" series by Brandon Sanderson (still on the first book "the way of kings" though). I already read most other books of the cosmere (Sanderson's Universe where most of his books take place). Highly recommend it!
Just finished 'The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet' by Becky Chambers - quite fun space opera (if you like Firefly etc.), I'll definitely pick up the rest of the series at one point.
Started reading 'They Never Learn' by Layne Fargo - Starts interesting, I feel I'll finish this one.
After that I will definitely start reading 'All Systems Red' by Martha Wells - I've been hearing about 'Murderbot Diaries' and how good they are for years now...
I like reading scifi most, but always try to squeeze some other genre in between.
The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Eskov
"Echoes of the Great Song" - David Gemmell. A rare standalone scifi/fantasy novel. I read Legend a few years ago and enjoyed it so much that I'm now reading every book Gemmell ever wrote. Saving the Troy books for last (appropriately). Though some are better than others there's not a single bad book in his entire oeuvre.
Currently reading Man in the High Castle, and also Scythe since I saw it on a friend's bookshelf and am always looking for something new to read while waiting for more malazan books (can't commit to another reread right now).
I’ve recently stopped reading book three of the Malazan series and don’t actually know why tbh. Kinda bored me after binging the first two books.
I started the Way Of Kings just yesterday though. What a weird world Brandon Sanderson crafted there.
finished "do androids dream of electric sheep?", started "a scanner darkly"
Infinite Jest.
Or rather, trying to read it. It's more like an eternal cycle of starting, stopping, and then restarting again.
DFW's writing is great though.
Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea". After that, I plan to read "The Dark Edge of Night" by Mark Pryor, a mystery novel that follows a French detective's investigations in Nazi-occupied Paris during the Second World War.
I just finished Dune: Messiah and am gonna read a short monograph about Commodore Perry and the Battle of Lake Erie before cracking into Hornblower: Flying Colours
My 6 favorite authors either haven't published in a long time, or they've begun publishing early works that weren't good enough to get published when they started out. 2 of my other favs have died. This has pushed me out of my comfort zone and delved into Steven Fry's Mythos series... and I rather like it. Oh, and if anyone sees Patrick Rothfuss around, please smack him upside the back of his head.
- Finnegans Wake - my 'big read' which I am doing over the year along with a group over on reddit: one of the only things that still has me dipping into reddit now. Fascinatingly incomprehensible.
- Tchaikovsky's Children of Time - some good thoughtful worldbuilding and a solid story.
- Robert Brightwell's Flashman's Waterloo - one of his series of Flashman prequels featuring the uncle of George MacDonald Fraser's protagonist. Very well researched and entertaining
- A collection of Neil Munro's Para Handy tales - gentle humour and a glimpse of a very different world - albeit rather stereotypical and patronising in some ways.
Why we are polarized - Ezra Klein
Wouldn't consider myself a bookworm but
Finished recently:
- Handmaid's tale
- the eerie silence (the german one from Harald Lesch)
- Jesus Video
Reading currently:
- One trillion dollar
And I think the next one is gona be Sci-Fi. Maybe I will check out The Wandering Earth from Liu Cixin. But I am open for recommendations.
One of the Wheel of Time books.
"The Peacock And The Sparrow," by I.S. Berry. It's a spy novel the same way 'Catch-22' is a war story. The narrator is a burnt out CIA agent trying to convince himself and the world he isn't a loser.
"The Crook Manifesto" by Colson Whitehead. Stand alone follow up to 'The Harlem Shuffle.' It's like going into a local bar on Malcolm X Blvd. and listening to the oldtimers talk about back in the day. A semi-retired fence goes to a crooked White cop to get tickets to a Jackson 5 concert for his teenage daughter. High jinks and hilarity ensue.
Currently reading Drunk by Edward Slingerland. https://www.alcademics.com/2021/09/review-of-drunk-by-edward-slingerland.html
Pro difficulty: I am only reading it in bars.
Reading "A Tale of Two Cities" for the first time.
Currently reading Manifolds, Tensor Analysis, and Applications by Abraham et al. Basically, how do you do geometry and calculus on surfaces or objects that are enough like a surface?
For STEM nerds: this book discusses manifolds in infinite dimensional spaces as well as finite dimensions. I believe there is a fluid dynamics application in the book that requires the infinite dimensional theory. There are far simpler books to learn this material if you just need to speedrun into calculations, but I really want the "full story".
After a long time of no reading, I started reading on the beach The Handbook of Epictetus. I bought it thanks to the recommendation of PewDiePie of all people in the video he did after losing the first spot in YouTube rankings
"Full Sea" by Chang-Rae Lee. Dystopian fiction, but not sci Fi and not like any dystopian fiction I've ever read. It's about a young girl who makes her living as a tank diver in a giant hydroponics farm/fish farm. They make her boyfriend disappear for genetic experimentation, because he's the only human the researchers have ever seen who is completely cancer-free. She poisons the fish and leaves the farm compound forever to find him. Very few workers have ever left the compound, because it's so dangerous outside. Some bad stuff happens.
Currently reading The Wandering Inn, a fantasy web serial.
It's really hard to communicate just how good it is, because the synopsis sounds very much like a million really bad books.
It's set in a fantasy universe where RPG things like levels and classes and skills are all real... And humans from Earth start appearing in this world for reasons unknown.
Told you it sounds like a bunch of other (bad) books. I promise it's great though. The writing goes hard. Characters are distinct and feel fleshed out, and the author isn't afraid to kill off a character you like - or to give you sympathy for the devil.
It's a long series, but it's never been dull. And if you don't believe me (fair, you hardly know me), it was also the highest-grossing serial on Patreon for long time. I still pay my monthly due just to get access to the latest chapter a few days early.
The whole thing is available online for free (barring the latest chapter delayed for a few days).
Start here. Have fun!
Misery. My second time reading it.
Before two years ago it was the only Stephen King book I’d ever read. I read it when I was a teenager, then never read any other King.
A couple years ago a friend talked up the Dark Tower series, but listed me off some other books to read beforehand as the books tended to loop in with each other.
I decided I’d just give myself the fan-since-way-back experience and read all of King’s books in order of publication. There’s like 50+!
So far I’ve read:
- The Stand
- Salem’s Lot
- Per Semetary
- The Shining
- The Long Walk
- Firestarter
- Carrie
- The Dead Zone
- Cujo
- Roadwork
- The Running Man
- The Mist
- The Gunslinger
- Christine
- Cycle of the Werewolf
- Thinner
- It
- The Eyes of the Dragon
- The Drawing of the Three
- (currently, again, at age 40) Misery
I love how Misery’s about an author. I bet King started with the image of himself with broken legs, looking out at the barn. The presence of the sadistic jailor, the big evil nurse woman acting as his editor. I bet that image is where the whole notion of the book began.
How to make a setup that enables that scene to exist?
Reading Stalking Darkness, by Lynn Flewelling. 2nd book of the Nightrunner series. Up next is the rest of the series! :P This is my 2nd read through. After that, I'm planning to re-reading a few Mercedes Lackey books before finally reading the newest one. Might just hop into the newest one if I get impatient though.
Finishing up “The demon-haunted world” by Carl Sagan, which is really good but a little repetitive, and I’m a few chapters into Bertrand Russell’s “The Problems of Philosophy”, which is a great little book that summarizes the big questions of philosophy up to that point in time (in Russell’s view, of course).
After those I’m looking to start Richard Feynman “The Pleasure of Finding things out”, since the Sagan book got me wanting more popular science stuff, as well as “the people’s history of the United States”, since that comes recommended from some friends (and will hunting of course!).The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow
Belgarath the Sorcerer, part of the Belgariad series by David and Leigh Eddings. I read the series as a kid and pick it back up once every few years.
Currently reading The Golem of Hollywood, by Jonathan & Jesse Kellerman, I'm half through it and enjoy it very much.
Nothing on the shelf yet (except Holly by Stephen King but I think I will read one or two novel before the release). I'll probably look on the lemmyverse for suggestions.
Currently re-reading Matter by Iain M. Banks. The Culture books just get better and better as they go on.
Wish the best
I just finished Tatouine by Jean-Christophe Réhel.
I LOVED this book. It was written from the first person POV and tons of pop culture references but I was really sucked in and enjoyed the read.
- Python Crash Course by Eric Matthes
- Icerigger by Alan Dean Foster
Just finished Ministry for the Future and now planning to jump in to Nemesis Games.
Just finished re-reading 1984 (George Orwell)
Now reading Altered Carbon (Richard K Morgan). And the 2 sequels after.
Though maybe I'll read We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) or Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) before the mentioned sequels.
I did just finished watching The Expanse and tempted to start the book series as well...
I'm in the middle of the d&d book starlight and shadows series.
Beyond Command and Control by John Seddon, my second time though and a good book about systems and how systems dictate human behavior and how to alter them instead of beating people up to get results.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang, a series of short stories. I'm on the third story in the book now and I've loved each one of them. Compelling hook, well written. They have all gotten me obsessively thinking about the world he's created.
Juggling multiple books:
- Naked Don't Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins. It is definitely recommended if you are interested in refugee issues, border control and similar topics.
- Mind is Flat by Nick Chater, in which the author argues that we don't have any kind of mental depth and our mind just makes sense as it goes along. I am not bought in on the idea yet.
- The Strategy Paradox by Michael E. Raynor is an amazing read if you are interested in business strategy. Almost on par with Rumelt's Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.
Currently: The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate
On the shelf: Political Ponerology by Andrew M. Lobaczewski
Currently reading the third Percy Jackson book right now
I just finished the Eddie Flynn series by Steve Cavanagh and would highly recommend it for anyone looking for an easy but captivating read. It’s kinda like watching a decent Hollywood action thriller. You have to suspend belief for a large part but it’s kinda fun and the characters are likeable.
This isn’t a spoiler, it’s on the blurb, but Eddie Flynn is a con man turned lawyer and I really enjoy antihero protagonists, particularly in the crime/thriller genre. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know!
I'm currently reading "tremendous" by Joey Diaz and "a promised Land' by Barack Obama
No Game No Life Volume 4
The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken is what I'm currently reading. Grad school ruined reading for me and all I can manage to read these days are young adult.... This is my first book in over a year since reading both of the Avatar Kioshi books back in 2021. It's a distopian story based in modern-ish USA. Kids start developing psychic abilities and the government puts them into internment camps. I'm not done with it yet but it's okay. Author can be a little heavy-handed but it's interesting enough for me to read for a couples hours straight and be about 150 pages in. -TW for more... Unfortunate things. Sorry for vague-ness. Spoiler tags are inconsistent from my experience, especially on Jerboa. If you're curious you can DM me or Google it. I'll be as vague as you want.
I need to go back to re-read The Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. Honestly, I just think it would make a really cool campaign setting for a TTRPG.
@beefbaby182 did an audiobook of The Red Queen (Juan Gómez-Jurado) which was a fun murder mystery. At the end it had an interview between the author and narrator (Scott Brick), which led me to Bricks other narrations (he's got a wonderful voice and believable accents) - The Omega Factor (Steve Berry) was next. Hoping it will keep leading me on these novels set in other countries - pretty cool to get a taste of cultures alongside a good story
- Children Of Memory the third in the 'Children Of...' series by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by Carlo Rovelli
- A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
- Boneland by Alan Garner
