Currently reading "The Kaiju Preservation Society" by John Scalzi. Lightweight, humorous sci-fi. Just recently finished "The Gentleman of Moscow" by Amor Towles, which is lovely storytelling if you enjoy character building. KPS is definitely a much different feel.
Depending on what you like to read, I would recommend both - but for different reasons.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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I loved Scalzi's Old man war series. Good entertaining sci fi, with some interesting questions to ponder under the stories.
I really enjoyed Scalzi's Interdependency series. Definitely light compared to some (and there were arcs/characters I would have liked to see develop a bit more), but it's a decent enough ride.
Yeah The Interdependency felt like it really needs a few short stories in the same universe to cover a few of the characters and another novel at least for what happens after the ending!
Currently reading "The Kaiju Preservation Society" by John Scalzi.
This was a fun read. I enjoyed it enough to put Red Shirts on my reading list, just have not gotten around to it yet. If you want to stick with the Kaiju genre, Project Nemesis by Jeremy Robinson had a similar vibe.
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I just finished KPS and loved it! It was fun in a "this entire thing is fucking ridiculous" sort of way that Scalzi (and the book itself) fully acknowledges.
"I lift things" started infiltrating my spoken phrases without me realizing it and I was like "wtf‽" when I realized.
Have you checked out "Fuzzy Nation", "Red Shirts", or the "Lock In" series? All fun stories by Scalzi in similar veins (Lock In is a bit more serious, but not like The Interdependency).
I have!
I've yet to find anything Scalzi has written that I'm not a fan of.
Another less known gem is Agent To The Stars ... Had me laughing in a way usually reserved for re-reads of The HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy!
About to finish The word for world is forest, by Ursula K. LeGuin
It's sci-fi, about the clash between Earth colonizers on a world covered by a forest and the people already living there.
Beautifully written and super short. She's able to show a lot in basically 100 pages
So I cannot recommend it enough! She's just so good at depicting other societies and putting and anthropological point of view
Check The left hand of darkness too if this caught your interest
About to finish The word for world is forest, by Ursula K. LeGuin.
Sounds interesting. Is this a standalone or the first in a series? Or, should I read any of her other books before this one?
They are part of cycle but they are independent stories
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I'm maybe a quarter or a third of the way through it and I quite like it! It's been a slow-go mostly just because I'm not good at dedicating time to read. I recently got the audio book to make more progress while driving.
Such a good series. Hoping he finishes it someday...
Patrick did a short cameo on the twitch show "Critical Role" which is a D&D campaign that is led and played by voice actors. It's incredible if you've never watched it. Patrick's role was a paladin and he was a little awkward with the format, but his character was very good and some of the notes left behind by him were incredible for building the story up even more even after he left.
American Prometheus, the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
I wanted to check it out before the movie comes out, and I highly recommend it for a very in depth view of his life.
I also recently finished On the Origin of Time, by Thomas Hertog, which I also recommend. It's about Stephen Hawking's final ideas and theories, told by one of his closest proteges. There are some incredible ideas in this book that I had never heard of before, and I'm a cosmology nerd.
Halfway through book 2 of The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons
My friend described it as a "scifi version of the Canterbury Tales" and I am loving it so far!
Hyperion is my next in line to read. I caught a thread on reddit before leaving about best scifi books to read aside from the classics and Hyperion was way up there in recommendations. I'm pretty excited for it.
I'm having fun. I love seeing all different perspectives from different characters and world building.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Hard sci fi. I like it a lot. I would highly recommend it.
Might have to give it another go. Loved the first 2/3, but remember hating the last bit. Seems I was alone in that, though.
The last bit was jarring for me. I still love that book, but it felt like two separate novels back-to-back.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel. probably my favorite depiction of the fey/elves.
I just finished Heart of Darkness. Wow, what a dark and wild ride. I also rewatched Apocalypse Now and it's amazing as ever, and much better now that I've read the source material. Side note, but the Theatrical Edition is so much better than redux it's not even funny.
I've also been reading Anne of Green Gables, when I need something a bit brighter. I'm not going to lie though. After Heart of Darkness, it feels a bit unimportant and I'm losing steam with it a bit.
I'm also rereading Watership Down. I might take a break from this to focus on Anne of Green Gables. I love Watership Down, but two kids books at the same time is a bit much.
For my next serious read, I'm probably going to pick up some Hesse. I have Narcissus and Goldmund, or Beneath the Wheel, excited for both.
I just finished Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It's an autobiographical piece from the Author of Little Prince about his days flying between the wars.
https://bookwyrm.social/book/196242/s/wind-sand-and-stars
I'm just about to move onto Femina by Janina Remirez. Which is a history of the world told through the eyes of the deliberately women left out of it. I'm looking forward to it, it sounds excellent. Filling a much needed gap in the popular understanding of women's role in history.
I loved "Wind, Sand, and Stars", It somehow made me cherish the "Little Prince" more.
Had a need to be silly for a bit so I decided to re-read both The Zombie Survival Guide (Max Brooks) and The Zombie Combat Manual (Roger Ma). Been a long time and guess it's time to 'brush up on the basics' lmao.
Sci-fi book Stargate SG-1 Sacrifice Moon by Julie Fortune. And I like it so far it's written fairly well. At least well enough to satisfy my craving for new Stargate stories.
I am also readying the fantasy book Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson. And so far it's great! But I just started this one so it's hard to really say much right now
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Pratchett battle of the nouns (sorry of the title is inaccurate, I have a German copy). It's about little gnome guys living a hidden life in a mall
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Finished book 4 of Murderbot Diaries and eagerly moved on to book 5, and am about 44% done with that. I expect I'll be reading book 6 by tomorrow at some point. They're by Martha Wells and they're sci-fi, but very light fun reads. She tells very tight stories with excellent characters and pacing.
Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor. A friend of mine turned me onto the book, Tharoor does a really good job of laying out how exactly the British Empire decimated in the indian region's economy through its brutal rule
On my nightstand:
The Wandering Earth, by Liu Cixin (author of the famous Three Body Problem trilogy), hard(-ish) sci-fi.
It's a collection of short stories named after the first story, Wandering Earth. I'm still only in the very beginning of the first story but it already introduces some really interesting ideas which is what I loved about the Three Body Problem. So I'm sure I'll like the rest. If you liked TBP, I'd definitely recommend.
On my phone:
Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, 1989, sci-fi/space opera(?)
Does it need introducing?
Anyway, since I don't read on my phone all that much and usually only in short bursts (meaning I usually read each page at least twice), for the past month, maybe even more, I've been slowly getting through the first chapter (The Priest's Tale) but once it got to the cruciform thing, I had to finish that chapter in one sitting. Now I started the second chapter, The Soldier's Tale, and can't wait for being mind blown again. Already got amused by this:
There were tales of cadets receiving fatal wounds in the OCS:HTN sims and being pulled dead from their immersion creches.
So... If you die in the Matrix, you die in real life too. Is that where they got that idea from? :) It's always fun reading through old sci-fi classics and finding likely inspiration for newer stuff or even inventing something that everyone else then uses later. Asimov's Foundation was all like this, so many things that eg. Star Wars straight up copied (eg. Trantor/Coruscant).
Just started the last Witcher book (The Lady of the Lake) by Andrzej Sapkowski. Far better than the show, although I do think I enjoyed the earlier books more than the later ones.
Leviathan Falls
James S. A. Corey / Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck
Science Fiction / Space Opera
I'm about half way in and enjoying it so far.
As for recommending it ... well, it's book 9 in a series that also includes a ton of short stories. I'd definitely recommend the series, but wouldn't recommend starting here!
I'd also highly recommend the show since it was a fantastic bit of story telling and thee authors (mostly Ty from what I gather) were involved and had writing input on.
Quick series summary stolen from Wikipedia and edited to not give overall spoilers:
The Expanse is set in a future in which humanity has colonized much of the Solar System, but does not have interstellar travel. The G-force exerted during acceleration when travelling across the Solar System is debilitating without the use of special drugs. In the asteroid belt and beyond, tensions are rising between Earth's United Nations, Mars, and the outer planets. The residents of the outer planets have developed a creole language due to their physical isolation from Earth and Mars. The series initially takes place in the Solar System, using many real locations such as Ceres and Eros in the asteroid belt, several moons of Jupiter, with Ganymede and Europa the most developed, and small science bases as far out as Phoebe around Saturn and Titania around Uranus, as well as well-established domed and underground settlements on Mars and the Moon.
Also - as a sidenote: Not really sold on Bookwyrm being a replacement for Goodreads, but I hope it becomes one!
Loved the series as a whole! Books 7-9 might be my favorite of the 9!
Finishing off Ken Follett's A Column of Fire before I launch in to John Lewis-Stempel's Meadowland.
Still trudging ever so slowly through Crossroads of Twilight. I've barely been reading lately, hopefully I can find the willpower to finish it out so I can move on to the next books which I've heard get more interesting.
ah close to the end of the 5 book slog. Honestly only Jordan could get away with it (barely).
Currently Heaven & Hell by Bart Ehrman about where the concepts of heaven and hell actually came from - surprisingly, they're not really mentioned in the Bible.
Some stuff about Greek and Roman philosophy and I'm imagining later in the book it'll get into his the Church retconned Hell into Christianity which is what I'm looking forward to finding out!
I'm finishing up "Summer Reading" by Jenn McKinlay, about an out of work chef who visits family on Martha's Vineyard to chaperone her 14 year old half brother while the parents are away for the summer. She is dyslexic and ends up falling for a local librarian. Very much a summer "beach read" type book and so far really entertaining. I love Jenn's cozy mysteries and just started reading her stand-alone contemporaries. I love her characters and the humor she adds to all her books.
Next up is The 5 Years Before You Retire by Emily Guy Birken, a retirement planning book. Have to get my ducks in a row for retirement in a few years!
What book is currently on your nightstand?
The Last Watch
Who is the author?
J.S. Dewes
What genre?
Scifi
How do you like it?
Not sure, yet. I just started it last night. But I hear it is great.
Would you recommend it to others?
I'll let you know in next week's thread. 😁
Listening to To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf while I do chores. It's literature so I have to listen to it since there's no plot, really, and it's all thoughts inside people's heads, so far all on the same day.
Just finished book 2 in the Seraphina series, Shadow Scale, by Rachel Hartman. I almost didn't finish it because for most of the book the main character didn't have anything going in her favor and the relentless piling on of bad news made me anxious.
I've got to finish the other stories in Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang, because I got it to read "Story of Your Life" after reading a thread on Kbin about the movie Arrival (which I had really enjoyed by apparently hadn't understood fully).
I'm enjoying a little non-fiction at present. The Secret Life of Fungi: Discoveries from a Hidden World by Aliya Whiteley. Last year I started hiking, and as a resulted started falling in love with mosses, lichen, and fungi. Once I get interested in something, I desire all the knowledge. Possibly an ADHD thing. The book is a wonder, such a relaxed style of writing. Not academic and with no flow, like some non-fiction books can be. The knowledge just flows from every sentence, and it has made me walk further and get out much more. It really has given be a boost. The book is simply so engaging. I have caught my partner reading it, and devouring it. She is not even interested in fungi at all.
Neuromancer by William Gibson. I guess I must have missed reading most of his books for a very long time despite the topics being of interest to me.
Great book. I do love the world he creates, it still holds up even now. His other books are just as good. I wish there were more cyberpunk books, I do love that genre.
Since Brandon Sanderson's Secret Project #3 came out on Saturday morning (Yumi and the Nightmare Painter) that's what I'm reading for the next week.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
It's a comic that breaks down and analyzes comics as a medium, from how it manages closure, to the abstractions it presents, to how time is depicted spatially.
Very good so far, gives me a window into the deeper artistic world of a medium I care for. Would heartily recommend if you care to assess comics and manga mechanically.
I used to assign segments of this book to students when I taught a Graphic Novel class. McCloud does a great job of explaining the medium using it as a vehicle throughout.
If you like books in a similar vein, "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" by Thomas Foster is a solid book to check out as well.
Fantastic, I'll check it out! I do want to learn to engage more with entertainment media of all forms on a more mechanical level, so this might be just for me
That sounds awesome. I'll definitely add it to my, far too long, reading list.
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