The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. I love reading science fiction from people with engineering and science backgrounds. Another good book I finished recently was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
Literature
Pretty straightforward: books and literature of all stripes can be discussed here.
If you're interested in posting your own writing, formal or informal, check out the Writing community!
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Project Hail Mary was such a fun read for me! I loved how concrete the engineering problems were throughout the book. It kept me tied to the stakes of the story.
Haven’t been able to finish Three Body Problem, unfortunately, it kind of lost me within the first 100 pages. May have to give it another shot! I hear a lot of good things about it.
If that's your vibe, try Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's a very technical examination of the phenomenon of consciousness which isn't afraid to get into the weeds, but never quite gets lost in them.
This book seems to have an equal measure of haters to fans but I loved the entire series. As it goes on it gets weird but imo was soo worth the read. Enjoy!
I'm re-reading all the discworld novels from sir Terry Pratchett, currently at Soul Music.
You're a few ahead of me on the re-read; Lords and Ladies is my next one. I'm taking my time though, I started in 2019.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
That's great! Whenever I'm feeling down, his books are mental comfort food that help me re-center. GNU sir Pterry!
Just got a few books from my local library that I'm excited to start. I'm starting off with "Focused Forward: Navigating the Storms of Adult ADHD" by James M. Ochoa which I picked out because it was the smallest book in the ADHD category, ha.
I also got a book on Linux/Unix, Diabetes, a workbook for Bipolar, a healthy snack book, and an organization book. Not too too sure if I'll be able to finish it all by the time they're due, but its a nice varied selection.
That second paragraph is peak ADHD lol.
I mean you aren't wrong! Hahaa.
I just picked up a copy of house of leaves. Saw it referenced a few times in some other media I liked and figured I may as well check out the book itself.
I just finished up reading The Return of the King for the first time since childhood. I like it a lot more than I remember. I think two things stuck out at me most: how dense it was compared to modern fantasy and how great the hobbits were portrayed. Fantasy tends to portray great heroes that came from nothing (ex. the chosen one/orphan trope). However, the hobbits were solely because they were common that they were able to do things the great heroes of their age couldn't.
Since then I've started reading Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. I kept hearing Pynchon's name come up for about a month at random and figured I should pick up one of his books. He has a very frenetic style that can be a bit difficult to parse but I'm loving his sense of humor.
Just finished Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (loved it, just discovered the "new weird" genre and it's totally my vibe). Now started reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, the structure of the book and the setting seems cool and intriguing.
The Expanse, the whole book trilogy!
It's a bit more than a trilogy lol. It's a nonology!
H.P. Lovecraft - Tales of Horror
I've been blown away by all of this, up until the one I'm currently powering my way through (Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath). It isn't terrible, though. It just feels very out of place after the overall tone and flow of all his other stories within the volume.
Just started book 8 of The Expance series
Currently I'm finishing the fifth book of the Wheel Of Time by Robert Jordan. Next will be the sixth book of the Wheel Of Time by Robert Jordan :)
Finished the sequel to Becky Chamber’s A Psalm For The Wild-Built. Can’t recommend this series more highly for a glimpse into a calming and peaceful alternative future.
Just finished Children of time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Absolutely amazing uplift-scifi, but you better stay away from it if you have arachnophobia
Got all three volumes of Capital on a whim, not very engaging lol.
Bumped, a feminist dystopia where only teenagers can reproduce. The book is very confusing to get into (it's narrated by two teenagers in 2036, so you need to learn alll the slangs) and the writing style rubbed me off as amateurish, but it's been very entertaining nevertheless. It gets even funny when you get what's going on because teens be teens.
Making my way through Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. Really enjoying it so far.
A Clockwork Orange!
I'd highly recommend We are legion we are Bob and off to be the wizard to any fellow tech nerds
We are legion we are bob is about a guy whose brain is uploaded as an AI into a Von Neumann probe and sent into space to explore the universe.
Off to be the wizard is about a guy who finds out the world is some kind of simulation, and there's essentially one big file detailing absolutely everything that can be edited, uses it to go back in time and live as a wizard and make spells with his programming skills
Both of them have plenty of nerdy references and humour
I am deciding between finishing the long way to a Small angry planet or starting howls moving castle
Currently Reading The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. Also trying to get a Lovecraft book club off the ground over at !lovecraft@ka.tet42.org
Re-reading Kaiju Preservation Society because I needed something light and fun. It still delivers on that promise !
Started book #9 of Malazan this morning on a flight. It's been a long ride, and I'm looking forward to a climax. That's literature, right? ;)
Last night I started reading Children of Time out loud to my GF as we fell asleep. It triggered an excellent conversation about biological imperatives and evolution. Plus, Portia is cool ;)
About 50% through Witch King by Martha Wells, and am so far highly enjoying whatever is going on with this worldbuilding.
Since November I'm slowly working through the The Witcher books. Just finished the 5th book recently and currently looking for a book I can read before I continue with the 6th book. Normally I read mostly in german but I'm thinking about picking a english book as my next book.
Though I'm not much of a reader anymore, my wife has been absolutely obsessed with Sarah J Maas' Throne of Glass series. I enjoy listening to her talk about it and sum up the stories, wouldn't be surprised if it ended up on Netflix soon.
Any recommendations for audiobooks to listen to at work? I'm big on science/science fiction and philosophy, anything that challenges my way of thinking really.
After quitting Reddit finally getting to my book backlog. The Expanse: The Sins of Our Fathers and then got to pick another old Star Trek book.
Terry Pratchett's Jingo, currently. After that, more discworld.
nobody reads this junk here so i'll just shout at a cloud
a deadly education, naomi novik - this should finally unjam the block i've had on fiction; i don't do well with fiction when the world is burning. i've picked this up and set it down many times, but the novelty is that normally, a fiction book that stops after the halfway point to do world-building is one that will end up propping open a door. but in this one the late add increased my interest.
keep my heart in san francisco, amelia diane coombs - an adorable fluffy book set nearby that ended up on the to-be-finished pile during some political firestorm or other.
guide du routard, catalogne - americans don't want to see what i want to see and american guidebooks know it. i often drag in other people's guidebooks when i think about going other people's places.
I really enjoyed the Expanse books, so just started one of the Author's other series, the Long Price Quartet
I really need to get back into reading, the last series I read was The Stormlight Archive and I really want to read some more Cosmere books
I’m reading through Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle for the first time, and I’m currently on Tales from Earthsea. Fantastic, unique books.
If you haven't read The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, you gotta.
Currently listening to Dust by Hugh Howey (book 3 of the Wool/Silo books)
Ive also been slowly reading MaddAddam by Margeret Atwood (book 3 of the MaddAddam series)
I'm working my way through Thinking, Fast and Slow at a chapter a day. It took me a minute to get his point (well near the 30% mark, that is) but it's illuminating about how people think.
I just finished I, Robot. I actually didn't expect to find Asimov so compelling. In general, I've never been too into the classic sci-fi authors, instead preferring more modern lighter sci-fi. I'm now reading River of Gods by Candace Millard.
I'm reading a book of short stories by John Sayles, called The Anarchists' Convention. There have been some absolute bangers so far.
I've been reading Manufacturing Consent lately after hearing so much about it. It's very interesting through the new introduction and the first part, where the propaganda model is explained, but it drags some as the authors try to apply it to certain historical events, like the 1984 Nicaraguan Election.
Still, it's interesting, and while the model still applies to mainstream media today, the advent of the internet, smartphones, and social media's resulting displacement of mass media has lessened its effectiveness.