Project Hail Mary was amazing. Can’t wait for the movie too.
I’m glad you enjoyed it. I think I must be one if the few people on the planet who didn’t care for it.
The Dark Tower series. All of them
Don’t ask me silly questions, I won’t play silly games I’m just a simple choo-choo train, and I’ll always be the same I only want to race along, beneath the bright blue sky And be a happy choo-choo train, until the day I die
Yes. Another good series; some better than others - I personally liked the first the most - but I think they’re all important pieces of the story.
Definitely on my “read again” list, although I only discovered and read them all a couple of years ago; maybe next year.
That series was amazing and I’m still mad they tried to cram it all into a single movie.
That was definitely pitchfork worthy. I haven’t even seen it and I never will.
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Most of The Culture series
Lord Of The Rings.
He Who Fights With Monsters.
Thrawn.
The Hunt For Red October.
The Cardinal of the Kremlin.So many I will give another listen to.
Just because this is the first post that I see that mentions LoTR, I’ll throw in
The Silmarillion
Children of Hurin
Beren and Luthien (personal favorite)
The Fall of Gondolin (incomplete, but incredible)
These are all Tolkien works and I could read them over and over.
I’m on my 13th or so read of Blindsight. Think I’ve unpacked it all, finally. I feel like a fruitcake having read it and *Echopraxia" so many times, but damn they’re deep.
Not a fan of all of Watt’s novels, but those two feel like he packed something to think about into nearly every single sentence. Easy read if you want to go fast, or, take your time and dig in. Never read a novel(s) that could go both ways.
Fuck me. Just talking about it is getting me hype for another run.
Blindsight:
"I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.
To this day, I still don’t know what went wrong.”
Echopraxia:
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
A few I’ve read at least twice and will definitely read again at some point:
- Catch 22
- Infinite Jest
- The Windup Bird Chronicle
- The Handmaid’s Tale
- Full 5 part Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy
- His Dark Materials Trilogy (plus the Book of Dust series, if we ever get that last one!!)
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Brave New World
- Slaughterhouse Five
It’s 2025 and I’m reading Slaughterhouse Five again. So it goes.
Poo tee weet 👍
Neuromancer moves faster than some movies. Absolutely worth rereading
Just done a reread of these and would gladly reread again.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (all 5 books in the series)
They are short enough that you could easily read all of them in a couple months at a steady pace.
That’s a good series, too. Another set of books I used to re-read every few years, but got out of the habit.
The Murderbot diaries.
This is also an awesome thread. I see a lot of books I love and a lot that I’m interested in.
The Bobiverse recommendations seem to go hand in hand with Murderbot. Read both series back to back, didn’t know what I was missing.
I hadn’t heard of the bobiverse before. I look forward to checking those out. It sounds like a neat premise.
Murderbot series is a mixed bag. Some of the books are great fun. Others read like filler to me. Wondering what you think about casting of Alexander Skarsgård in the upcoming tv series? Personally I think he’s way too old for the part.
Speaker for the Dead
Eisenhorn
Count of Monte Cristo
The Emperor of All Maladies
Moby Dick
Lords of Silence
All Honorable Men: History of the war in Lebanon
Adams and Victor’s Principles of Neurology
The Biology of Cancer (Weinberg)
Japan to 1600
History of Medieval Russia (Martin)
The Baltic: A History
On War (Clausewitz)
The Back Channel
Timbuktu (Villiers)
Sorry if this is too many, just looked at my book app for ones I keep reading.
Edit: Fuck it, I’m having fun. Here are a few more I remembered while roasting a bowl.
Dune
Amulet of Samarkand
Venice (Madden)
The Golden Compass
First and Only (Abnett) - read the first omnibus
Harrisons Manual of Medicine 18th ed
Gomorrah (Saviano)
The Gunpowder Age (Tonio)
The Money Illusion (Sumner)
Speaker for the Dead
Interesting! I enjoyed it much less than Ender’s Game, but they were such different books it doesn’t surprise me that someone else would prefer it.
Moby Dick
Right‽ Such an amazing read. It does take a bit to get into the cadence, I find, but so worth it.
I loved Enders Game, Enders Shadow and Speaker for the Dead. It had a great emotional importance to me. Especially Enders Shadow, it was one of the first books I read that properly described starvation. I went through a lot as a child, and Beans story of a starving, smart, small kid really resonated with me in the period after my own tribulation. I don’t think Shadow has the same impact on people without some of my experiences, so I chose to use the main arc and I’ve always felt that Ender would rather be remembered as The Speaker more than anything else. Probably silly, but I’m fine with that. In short, I agree, Enders Game is the better book. Speaker is just the pay off.
Moby Dick has always infuriated and enthralled me. I read 5 pages, hate myself. Start reading again in 15 minutes because I can’t get it out of my head.
I liked Ender’s Shadow much more than Speaker for the Dead, which felt preachy to me. I just didn’t click with it.
Both Game and Shadow are great books, and excellent choices.
Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
Adam Levin’s The Instructions
Ecclesiastes
Philip K. Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer — actually most Dick outside of A Scanner Darkly
Neal Stephenson’s… well, anything, but especially Zodiac, Anthem, and Diamond Age
Brian Daley’s Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds
Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and The Blind Assassin
Anything by Ursula LeGuin, ever
Hugh McLeod’s Ignore Everybody
Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series
Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Trilogy
Adam Levin’s The Instructions
I have that on my shelf, but have only read the first chapter or so, I think, just couldn’t get into it. Bought on a whim, partly because of how huge it was!
I take it it’s worth another shot?
If you only read the pool scene, you didn’t really get into the meat of the book. That said, if the content of the pool scene was a big turn-off for you, there will be several other scenes throughout the book that will also be big turn-offs.
At the very start you mean? That was fine, not bothered by that.
I started reading it again today (and found my old bookmark!) and apparently I got a fair bit further than that.
Today I read as far as Gurion being in the office after fighting, and I was quite enjoying it, so maybe it’ll stick this time 😁
Where he ruminates on the finger pointing-flicking being like the lights on construction barriers flashing? And he meets Eliza and rubs the foundation off his thumbs? I’d say that’s where it kicks into gear, yeah.
Damn, you really do know this book!
Yeah, the construction barriers bit - not got to Eliza yet (or at least not this time round).
I’ve read Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch three times, currently reading The Color of Magic for the first time and then I’m going to re-read Mort
I’ve read Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game three times, but that was for school. Pretty good children’s mystery book, though
Several that others have already mentioned, and:
- The Golden Age Oecumene, by John C Wright
- The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, by Barry Hughart
- Any and all of The Culture novels
- The Hobbit, and TLotR trilogy. Used to read them every summer, for about twenty years.
- Armor, by John Steakley. Sadly, the only sci-fi novel he ever wrote, and one of only two books he ever authored, IIRC.
- The Jean le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is on my list to read again this year.
- A Wizard of Earthsea trilogy, which I’m about to read again as soon as my wife finished them.
- The Chronicles of Narnia, which I used to read frequently when younger. I’m almost afraid to pick them up again now, for fear that they won’t be as good (for an adult) as I remember.
John Steakley was a full time ghost writer so he wrote a lot of other books but not under his name.
He was working on a draft of Armor 2 when he died. I think I still have a copy of his first draft of chapter 1 somewhere. It’s to bad it will probably never be finished or published.
I’ve heard that, about that first chapter. He, and Iain Banks, are two writers I’m particularly sorry about having had their times cut short.
Love the culture series! Communism… In space!!! Though I’d say to anyone who hasn’t read them yet to skip the first and come back to it. It’s a great novel, but it smells like the 80’s. Was my first read in the series and it turned me off to the rest of them until years later when I have the series another chance
IMHO, post-scarcity is really the only way communism works. And it’s not true communism in the Culture; people still own things - artifacts, art, themselves. And it’s also not communism in the Marxist sense, where the workers own the means of production, because there isn’t a working class and production is largely automated. It’s some sort of post-Communism thing we don’t have a name for. Or, maybe we do, and I just don’t know it?
I think your issue is that the Culture’s economy is so often depicted from the perspective of humans. I have two guinea pigs, and from their perspective they are living in a post-scarcity world. Same for the humans of the culture. Their economy isnt really visible from a human scale.
Either way, Ian M Banks isn’t really interested in the economics of his setting and spends much more effort detailing the politics of how such a setting works socially, which i should point out doesn’t need a post-scarcity economy to create. I’m not sure if you noticed this, but the culture punishes criminals primarily through shunning. (Sure, there’s also the slap drones, but I’m fairly certain that slap drones are a humane alternative to shunning.) The theory is that their laws are lax enough that the only real crimes left require actual malice to commit, and shunning serves two purposes:
- Social isolation is the most painful punishment for nearly all humans, which makes it a strong deterrent.
- You cant commit violence or theft if you aren’t allowed near others, so those who don’t care about having friends or family also get prevented from committing more crimes.
- It looks completely bloodless, since the subject doesn’t physically suffer, and if it turns out they didn’t do it you can just stop shunning them.
so often depicted from the perspective of humans.
You’re right; AFAICR, the economy is only ever depicted from a human perspective. Either in contrast to external cultures, or just describing daily life. Your Guinea Pig example is quite apt: humans in The Culture really are just pampered pets; or, maybe more like working dogs, although ship remotes could probably do all the stuff Contact agents do.
Have you ever read The Golden Oecumene trilogy, by Wright? The last chapter, in particular, is what I’m thinking of.
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
