looking to expand my horizons. My last 2 books: the power of introverts and the subtle art of not giving a f*ck.
You must log in or register to comment.
Pick any of the Asimov’s books if you’re into science fiction.
In the same genre: Brene Brown: Dare to lead; Connor Beaton: ManTalks, Lindsay C Gibson: Adult Children of emotionally immmature parents, Kelly McGonigal: The Willpower instinct, and Thais Gibson: Learning Love.
Fiction: James SA Corey: The expanse series, and Sofia Oksanen: The dogpark. I also just started Dimitry Glukhovsky: Metro 2033 (Don’t know if its good yet)
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 have trouble keeping up a reading habit, but I’ve read 5/6ths of the Lord Of The Rings over the last year. Just can’t seem to find the time/motivation to finish it, although I quite enjoyed it and I expect Tolkien to focus even more on the inner struggle of the ringbearer in the final book. That was the biggest advantage of reading the books thus far, over watching the movies.
Apart from that I’ve read the German Romantic (as in era) novella “Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts” by Eichendorff. But despite it checking the boxes for that era and adding to my canon of bourgeois education, it didn’t give me much. It was rather shallow lighthearted entertainment.
But I guess you could say I lean towards the classics. I don’t know if I’d recommend it, for finding stuff that is actually good. But skimming through modern books in my library, I’m often already put off by their covers.
We are legion we are Bob
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.
Kaiju battlefield surgeon
I like Dungeon Crawler Carl but Kaiju felt like torture porn to me. I did not enjoy it.
Yeah I’m almost done with Dungeon Crawler, I thought I would check out other things by that author, and yeah it very much is torture porn. But it’s also pretty damn good. It’s a struggle to get through some of the gore though
Liberalism: A Countrr History, by Domenico Losurdo. Mostly so far looking at how all the liberal revolutions and theorists ended up being at least lukewarm to slavery.
Thinking fast and slow - Daniel Kahneman
I’m currently on book 5 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, I started book one In January.
It’s all so good
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.
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
The only thing I am reading rn is Capital but I don’t think you came her 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.
Recently read Piranesi. Wonderful book in a unique setting. A page turner which can be finished in a day.
Recently my favourite genre have been “2019 lesbian sci-fi debut novels about an empire, starting a series”.
A Memory Called Empire is absolutely amazing. A very close second is Gideon the Ninth and its sequels.
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.
Yeah that makes sense, the writing style of Ancillary Justice is really unique.
have you ever read This is how you lose the time war? I’m considering reading that one next
Well, I didn’t really have a problem with the unique part, more that there’s a lot of stuff happening that feels like filler. It’s been a while, but as a I remember it there’s the ancilliary, the main character, on a journey, and that is interspersed with flashbacks. Those were really interesting. The rest was mostly her being put in very dangerous situations which we knew were dangerous because the book keeps telling you just how dangerous they are, but the way the character was built up it just didn’t work for me as something to build tension. Just a constant, yeah, she’s going it be a badass and overcome it. And she does. And it didn’t feel like it pushed the story forward, but rather allowed time to pass so there could be another interesting flashback.
The ending, when things started moving and the whole deal with multiple emperors was revealed was great, but the way to get there just wasn’t doing it for me.
There was a slight annoyance with the language gender thing, since my native Czech is a gendered language, so the whole thing wasn’t completely unfamiliar or surprising to me, and the way the book had to go out of its way to explain that this is what’s going on, since English is not gendered and the mistakes had to be pointed out. It felt a bit tortured and overstaying its welcome, but not a dealbreaker by any means.
Anyway, adding your suggestion to my Pile. Sounds like a more serious take on One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which ultimately annoyed me with its tone and unlikeable protagonist.
have you ever read This is how you lose the time war? I’m considering reading that one next
Just finished it and I love it. And it actually fits into the genre I mentioned above really well.
Lesbian sci-fi? Check. 2019? Check. Debut? Kinda - seems it’s the first novella of one of the authors. There are two empires, even though they’re not called that. It just didn’t start a series, so I guess I’ll drop that part and list it as one of three books that fit the rest.
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 :-)
I’ll second Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.
RF Kuang’s Babel
Adam Levin’s The Instructions
and my favorite novel, PKD’s Galactic Pot-Healer
