Ask Lemmy

One i recently read that i immediately fell in love with : Here There Be Dragons by James Owen. Combines some of the most popular literature throughout history and makes it all one world.

The Protectorate series by Megan O'Keefe is also very high on my list. Sci-fi, aliens, space portals.

The Red Rising series by Pierce Brown had me in a chokehold. My wife is still obsessed with it. More space theme, but no aliens, sadly.

Currently waiting on The Institute by Stephen King.

Reading through all of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Never read a litRPG before and I’m having a blast with it.

I read a lot of scifi and it's by far my favourite genre of anything.

I'm on a bit of a reading roll this year so far and have been averaging a book a week, I haven't been consuming books at this rate since I was a teenager!

I finished Children Of Time last week and managed to get in The Scar (China Mieville) before my copies of Children of Ruin and Children Of Memory arrived, and now I'm about half way through Ruin.

The 'Children Of' books are fantastic, we all know this by now, but only read The Scar if you can deal with a vast 800 page anti-epic with an utterly unpleasant anti-hero at its helm. And the ending, while very fitting thematically, otherwise sucks. There is no catharsis and the anti-hero clearly doesn't learn anything, despite (again) writing otherwise in their letter.

The world building in The Scar is stunning though (albeit rather puissant...), and the characters, despite being nearly entierly all awful people*, are very well written. Plus there's a very clearly lifted from The Matrix fight scene at once point which got a giggle out of me when I recognised it.

*Tanner is a good man, and so is Doul, probably. Doul is also quite funny, but the humour of his actions mostly lands in hindsight once you've got a better idea of his character/motivations

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Favourites wise though (the rest of this comment is copied over from a previous one I made elsewhere but I feel might be appreciated here more), I reread Year Of The Flood by Margarete Attwood every summer lately. Toby and her little rituals are very comforting.

YotF was the first one I read of the Oryx And Crake trilogy too, but it doesn’t make for quite as good a username with all those christian connotations.

I’ve read all the books in the correct order several times since then, but I far prefer reading O&C after YotF, it makes Maddaddam feel so much more cathartic and deserved and it really improves the pacing. The slow build up in YotF, leading to all the action and exposition in O&C and then winding down in Maddaddam and the story coming back to Toby, flows so much better as a three book narrative. Also piecing everything together with this order is much more interesting too imo.

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.

Favourite is watership down. Reading at the moment is half a soul by Olivia atwater

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.

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.

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 read a lot of fantasy when I was younger but gradually fell out of love with the genre. It started to feel really trope heavy and I got tired of everything feeling like it needed to be a 3-5+ novel epic series that was so enamored with its own world-building it felt more like a history lesson. Perhaps my choices on reading material were to blame, but still. I moved onto sci-fi and fiction for a good while.

I've been trying to rekindle my passion for it with one off "weird" fiction. Standalone stories that are just interested in doing weird stuff, whatever that may entail. It's not well-defined and if anyone has any recommendations I'd be happy to hear them but so far some of my best discovies,

• The West Passage, Jared Pechaček. A palace the size of a city ruled over by giant, eldritch ladies and mired in ancient bureaucracies is threatened by a forgotten prophecy. I like it because it doesn't overexplain its world, it just throws a bunch of interesting events and scenery at you while gesturing at the architecture of the world that holds it up, leading you to speculate on the mystery of it all.
• The Starving Saints, Caitlin Starling. Claustrophobic, horrifying, vaguely sapphic. It follows the storylines of a knight, a nun, and a peasant girl trapped in a castle under siege. As supplies diminish and things are looking grim, their saints miraculously appear to save them but not all is at it appears etc. etc. Just a good read, I liked this one a lot
• Currently reading: Mad Sisters of Esi, Tashan Mehta. This one got off to a bit of an uneven start but it's an interesting mashup of myth and sci-fi where the universe is referred to as the black sea, planets are islands, and spaceship may be literally ships with sails. Not done with it yet, but enjoying it as it has strong characters and a good emotional core.

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.

The Alice books by Lewis Carrol get frequent rereads from me.

I am currently reading (for the first time) The Night Circus

Favorites: the book version of the blog Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh and also The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Currently reading Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell and the new Penguin Classics translation of Towazugatari/A Tale Unasked by Lady Nijo, translated by Meredith McKinney.

reading now ?

The Culture of Contentment by John Kenneth Galbraith

https://bookwyrm.social/book/1805003/s/the-culture-of-contentment

it's somewhat depressing to read for its prescience

favourite?

Tom Neale's An Island to Oneself

https://bookwyrm.social/book/385228/s/an-island-to-oneself

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.

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.

My favorite is probably The Books of the North of The Black Company series. The rest are good too but the first 3 are great.

Currently I'm reading the bakemonogatari series just finished kizu. Only started because my friend sent me a screenshot of him listening to the audio book but then he gave up cause it's too complicated to listen to in the background.

My favourite book when I was a teen was Bloodtide by Melvin Burgess. It an imagining of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga (so lots of Norse gods and myths) but set in post apocalyptic London controlled by ganglords.

I think my overall favourite it probably Shogun by James Clavell - people are probably more familiar with it now because of the recent TV series but the book is huge and goes into huge amounts of depth along with a gradual shift in focus and character as you migrate from being thrown into this alien society with strict but unclear rules to large scale political outmanoeuvres

Right now I'm reading Her Majesty's Royal Covern by Juno Dawson - about milennial witches operating in secret in modern society (think nature, earth, pagan witches, not the ones from the series that must not be named). Written by a trans woman with trans topics in the plot.

I also want to read a new series I only discovered a day or two ago called Custodians by Dan Alexander. I don't actually know a huge amount about it other than it is a detective mystery that involves magic and queer representation. I only mention it as, in a bizarre chain of events, I met and spoke to the author and the actors involved in the audiobook and tv pilot.

Currently I'm dipping my toes into romantasy, out of curiosity. My SO like to read that genre. So I'm reading the Fourth Wing series by Rebecca Yarros. I'm at 75% of the second book. All in all a good fantasy series, with quite some smut/horny jail material. In the second book a bit to much for my liking.

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.