looking to expand my horizons. My last 2 books: the power of introverts and the subtle art of not giving a f*ck.
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Not exactly a new book, but All Quiet on the Western Front was a fantastic read. It’s a grotesquely frank depiction of the unfortunate "Have Not"s fighting a meaningless war for the "Have"s in society, set in the german trenches of WW1.
From the same author, Erich Maria Remarque, “A night in Lisbon” is also very good.
I’ve read this one as well. It’s not bad, but the three comrades, along with all quiet, are both masterpieces.
We are legion we are Bob
I mean I’m a communist so YMMV, but I’m re-reading the Vietnamese textbook on Dialectical Materialism that Luna Oi translated. I’m re-reading it because I also have the second textbook she translated (on Historical Materialism) and I wanted to brush up before diving in to that one.
Luna Oi is a great comrade! She is doing so much for the cause!
Noice. I hope to get this sometime.
Recently my favourite genre have been “2019 lesbian sci-fi debut novels about an empire which spawned a series”.
A Memory Called Empire is absolutely amazing. A very close second is Gideon the Ninth and its sequels.
Lesbian sci-fi is on my radar … the best by far that I’ve read so far has been The Chronicles of Alsea series.
It’s just fantastic sci-fi, the lesbians are merely a bonus :-)
thats such a specific genre haha. Have read the Traitor Baru Cormorant? Very slightly outside of your criteria but I’d recommend it
It isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
I’ll throw your suggestion on The Pile. Looks promising.
There’s also Ancillary Justice which just barely misses the exact genre. Unfortunately I didn’t really enjoy the way it is written, though the story and universe is super interesting.
New Scientist magazine, the paper version so that I can put it down, think about it, and come back a week later. I’m not a scientist, and not highly educated, but I’m curious about the world, and many of their articles are easy to read at my level.
I’m currently on book 5 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, I started book one In January.
Book 5 is my next read. I try and stagger them with other things to draw it out some and make sure I don’t burn out.
The audiobooks are amazing, super-talented narrator who does a while host of voices.
It’s all so good
The only thing I am reading rn is Capital but I don’t think you came here for political theory so I will recommend The Hot Zone. It’s the last book I read and it’s about the discovery of Ebola, its investigations, and how it got to the US.
Non-fiction:
- The Demon-Haunted World
- The Fourth Turning is Here
Fiction:
- There is No Antimemetics Division
Demon Haunted World is very timely
If you are into fantasy, then I need to recommend you the books of Brandon Sanderson, especially the Stormlight Archive series. It’s so epic, nothing else comes close
I’m reading a famous superhero web novel called “Worm” part of the Parahumans universe.
It’s pretty good. I heard it’s got 30 or so arcs with 1.4 million total words.
I am at arc 10 currently, and I got here super fast because the story is pretty good.
Such a fun series. The fights especially are so captivating.
Liberalism: A Counter History, by Domenico Losurdo. Mostly so far looking at how all the liberal revolutions and theorists ended up being at least lukewarm to slavery.
For non fiction I’m reading The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle, and can highly recommend. Short, thought provocative, and engaging. For fiction, Children of Strife is great, latest instalment in Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series which I really enjoyed overall.
Children of Time is great. I also thought Alien Clay by Tchaikovsky was interesting. Although I’m a little skeptical about how aliens work in that one.
I was gonna say, it was a neat concept, but he didn’t really spend the time to make it convincing or explain the mechanism for how life would evolve to be like that. It’s like he just had this idea that life could be more modular, but didn’t bother fleshing it out past that. I actually enjoyed Shroud a lot more, I feel like he put more work into making it plausible. Can recommend if you missed it.
I haven’t read Shroud. I will put it on the list, thanks.
Will definitely check those out
Recently read Piranesi. Wonderful book in a unique setting. A page turner which can be finished in a day.
Dungeon Crawler Carl. The premise is that aliens take over the world and immediately kill 99% of the population. The remaining 1% are forced to compete on an intergalactic reality TV show called Dungeon Crawler World. The series is a scathing critique of modern capitalism, dressed up like a fart joke. If you liked The Good Place, you’ll likely enjoy DCC. Book 8 just released earlier this month, with more on the horizon.
He Who Fights With Monsters is a fun fantasy isekai series. The world-building in this one is absolutely top notch, to the point that I have considered ripping entire cities out of it for my tabletop games. The main character is pretty divisive, and enjoying the series is dependent on liking him. So the people who enjoy the series really enjoy it, and the ones who dislike Jason simply can’t like it. It has 12 books currently. It would have been 13 by now, but the author was in a medically induced coma for lots of last year. That kind of put a damper on his writing schedule. But he is back to writing now, so book 13 is set to release soon.
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) was a nice sci-fi series. It’s still ongoing, but book 6’s release date is TBA. Nerdy computer programmer gets Futurama’d and frozen. But instead of waking up in a distant future like he expected, he wakes up as an AI in charge of a self-replicating space probe.
I’m on book three of the Bobiverse. I’m enjoying it. The nice thing is that they’re not super dense.
Yup. It does a good job of breaking up the action by having multiple parallel storylines going at the same time. This helps it avoid feeling like “all gas, no brakes” that many fiction authors tend to fall into.
And the “sci” in sci-fi is typically kept fairly light. Lots of authors (looking at you, Crichton) get bogged down in trying to explain all of the minutiae of how their science works. It’s like they’re afraid that if they fail to explain the science, their world-building will all fall apart. But this means they can be a slog to get through, because the author spends entire chapters explaining background features, instead of focusing on the action. The Bobiverse managed to avoid this, and only touches on the science side when it’s relevant.
Currently reading about all the horrors of the CIA - finished The Jakarta Method and Washington Bullets, currently reading through Killing Hope, and next on my list is Operation Gladio.
