what do you read?
- Thread starter bonefishjake
- Start date
jklett
Well-Known Member
My oldest daughter turned me on to that one, fascinating read.
I forgot to mention the author Jonas Jonasson. Definitely fits your fun mandate.
I just finished The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden. Good read, would recommend it but I would go with his other one first, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. Goofy, fun, easy reads.
Author Frederick Backman is also in the same vein. A Man Called Ove is an excellent book. I read another but I forget the name.
90 degrees to that I just finished Digital Fortress, which is Dan Brown's first book. Super easy read, 500+ pages in 5 days. Nothing as intriguing as his other stuff but if you go into it knowing that, and that this was his first, it's passable. This would probably be excellent on audio.
TimBay
Well-Known Member
Nice. I shifted gears to playing guitar, but am going to try and read something soon since I need a guitar break. I've read Da Vinci Code and a couple other Dan Brown books, so I'm down to give it a shot.
Whoa blast from the past...read that years ago. Still have it on a shelf somewhere, maybe have to pull it out again for a quick re-read.
1speed
Incredibly profound yet fantastically flawed
I've been using Goodreads a bit more often lately, and since it's linked to Amazon, I've been getting a lot of emails with Amazon book recommendations. This morning, the top recommendation was "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone."
Come on now, Amazon ... Your algorithm generally knows before I do when I'll need more Osmo or if any of my cycling gear is going to wear out soon. You can do better than this.
Come on now, Amazon ... Your algorithm generally knows before I do when I'll need more Osmo or if any of my cycling gear is going to wear out soon. You can do better than this.
i've got a billy joel song on a playlist i seeded with downset.
the computer sees connections which we can not.......
Big Dumb Animal
Hippo Nipples' #1 Fan
Started the Way of Kings series by Brandon Sanderson. Got through the first 3 books really fast only to learn the 4th doesn't get published until November of this year. A very good fantasy series that's more original then anything I've ever read, you can't even find one parallel to Tolkien. Well, I couldn't anyway. Also the two people they have reading the audio, Michael Kramer and Kate Reading, they do an amazing job.
I bought the first book on the recommendation of a coworker like a year or two ago, but I haven't started it yet. It looks like quite a commitment.
Big Dumb Animal
Hippo Nipples' #1 Fan
They definitely are a commitment but it makes the commute to and from work so much better. Especially with the first book, let the story build. It can be confusing and all over the place but it comes together so nicely. Before you know it you're wrapped up in this world and these characters.
sundaydoug
Well-Known Member
Currently on a deep Stephen King bender. My mother-in-law recently gave me a box his stuff I've never read. Gold mine. I'm about half-way through Waste Lands, the third book in The Dark Tower series.
In the last 5-10 years 95% of what I've read has been either King or Nietzsche. Make of that what you will.
In the last 5-10 years 95% of what I've read has been either King or Nietzsche. Make of that what you will.
just finished 11.22.63 thumbs up.
1speed
Incredibly profound yet fantastically flawed
A few years ago, my younger brother said something to me that changed my reading habits forever. He was telling me about a conversation he had with my younger sister where they both agreed that there is just too much out there to read to justify finishing a book you aren't enjoying. Before he said that. it never occurred to me to just not finish a book I was reading, no matter how bad it might be. That probably sounds ridiculous to most people, but it honestly never occurred to me before that to simply put a book aside if I didn't like it. Now, I think I've done that a dozen times in the last few years. Recently, I even put one aside that I did want to read because it just wasn't a good time to read it (it's "The Uninhabitable Earth" by David Wallace-Wells, which is an especially harsh analysis of climate change that paints a pretty grim picture of a future that we're now too late to do anything about. I'll eventually return to it, but I put it aside for now back in April because reading something like that during a pandemic kind of felt like putting a hat on a hat ...)
I had an English teacher in high school that told us this once. It's one of the few useful things that I can remember learning from a teacher in high school. He also told us that bringing a date to a wedding is like bringing a sandwich to a buffet.
one piece crank
Well-Known Member
1speed
Incredibly profound yet fantastically flawed
Just finished reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. If you are into sci-fi, check this one out. Incredible story with a truly unique slant on the concept of "uplift" (familiar to anyone who's read David Brin's stories on the concept, like "Startide Rising") and what it means to be an intelligent species - the good and the bad. There's a lot more to it than that, but I wouldn't want to give even a little away.
I am interested in what medium you read this. So let me frame this discussion. I have 3 formats I "read" in:
* Actual book
* Kindle
* Audible
I find that not all books work for all of these. I have not figured out what works best for what medium, but I will give you 3 examples:
Kindle - I bought Children of Time on Kindle and could not get past 22% (I just checked). I don't know what it was but I found it impossible to get into. Someone else who likes the same stuff as me loved this book. I also know that you and I like the same stuff (see next point). I have read the Bobiverse series as well as Murderbot on Kindle and loved them all. So I guess not especially deep books work better in that medium for me?
Actual book - I have about 50 pages left of Death's End, the 3rd book of that Three-Body Problem trilogy. Holy shit this is good - Like 1 of the 3 or 4 best series I have ever read, up there with the Foundation stuff and Hyperion (Dan Simmons) as well as Tolkien.
Audible - This is my most fickle medium because if there are too many characters I have a hard time following. By nature I cannot just listen to a book. So I'm always doing something else. I found Goldfinch excellent on audio, as well Readme & Seveneves both solid by Stephenson. Yet the same author's Anathema was impossible on audio.
So how did you read Children of Time? I wanted to like this but I did 0.0 for me.
1speed
Incredibly profound yet fantastically flawed
I'm always an actual book guy. I just like the "thing-ness" of a book, if that makes any sense. It's actually part of what I enjoy about reading - the feel of the book itself. (I even have a preference on the size of paperbacks - I prefer the larger size paperbacks because they're just a nicer thing to hold.) I had an early Nook but it just didn't click for me. It wasn't anything specific - it just didn't feel like a book. To be fair, I only read one or two books on it (I think one of them was Philbrick's The Last Stand, which I loved, so I don't think it was the book itself that was the problem.)
And maybe that's the case for you, too, in reverse - it may not have anything to do with the medium. Maybe it's just not your thing. I do think the way it's written may turn off some readers (the constant alternating chapter structure could be disruptive, especially if one of the two worlds has a more compelling story going on at the moment.) But it might just be as simple as the idea that the story didn't appeal to you - I've had that happen a bunch of times. (In a totally different genre, I really wanted to enjoy Nassim Taleb's Antifragile because I loved both Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, but I couldn't get past the first couple of chapters. I know why that is - I hated how he seemed to be constantly beating you over the head with his central theory - but that was his style in all of his earlier books and for some reason, this time around I just couldn't stand it.)
I'd love to hear what you think of the entire Three Body Problem series when you're finished. That's unquestionably the most epic trilogy I've ever read. There are so many ideas flying around in that series that I could probably read it a half dozen times and still only capture half of them.
As a sidenote, I'm trying to mix it up following Children of Time. Right before I read that, I read American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Barrett (a sci-fi/fantasy hybrid) so I wanted to take a step away from this genre for a moment. But I'm still a bit too real-world weary to read any non-fiction at the moment. So last night, I started Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom. I don't think I'll read the entire series (I think there's something like 18 books total), but I'd like to read the first three. (I think there's a Netflix series based on it as well, so I'll probably check that out once I'm done.) But if you have any other sci-fi you'd recommend, I'd love to put it in the queue for after this series!