currently listening to the 4th book in the children of time series
i love these books
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Trial - Franz Kafka The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood Fight Club - Chuck Palahnuik Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
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.
Jumping between 1984 and Inkspell when 1984 gets to bleak.
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.
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.
Looooove fourth wing, I got far more into it than I thought. I tried ACOTAR but… Eeh, don’t really get it. I currently like the slightly edgier ones, A Rain of Shadows and Endings (Legacy series) is one I was a bit obsessed with and really want to get on with the rest of the series. I also have some of the really dark romance books, the kinds that make my friends worry about me, that I need to get on and read (Twisted Heathens is first on that list).
Oh, my SO also reads dark romance, but I want check that out. From what she told me about the dark romance books, that she reads, I really don’t want to read them myself XD Just like I don’t read splater or True Crime stories. I’m really at unease with all these dark stories women seem to like
Heh, yeah they can get pretty dark… There are definitely a few gateway ones if you were ever curious without it getting too full on.
Roger Zelazny is one of my favorite authors. Roadmarks and A Night in the Lonesome October are probaby my favorites from him.
I just finished the most recent Dungeon Crawler Carl, which was fun. And I’m currently working on This Way Up.
Midgley’s Ethical Primate changed my life.
So did Hayes’ A Liberated Mind.
So did Welzel’s Freedom Rising.
Currently reading Archer’s Explicit Instruction and Groshell’s Just Tell Them.
I’m currently between books, I think I’m gonna read The Terror next. But my absolute favourite is The count of Monte Cristo. I read it three times over the past 15 years. And I love Simon Singh’s popular science bookThe Big Bang.
I don’t think I have a favourite. I have some that I liked enough as to read them more than once: The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarilion, some of the Culture novels.
Then there are long series that I enjoyed quite a bit: Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome, JJ Benitez’s Caballo de Troya series (if you ignore the author’s insistence in that everything in the book is real and you take it as an adventures book or science fiction it is actually enjoyable), I’m liking so far McBride’s detective Logan McRae series.
And I’m about to begin Mikel Santiago’s La Chica del Lago
