What book is on your nightstand? Readers!

[passedpawn]

Orogrande is one of the finest rockhounding areas in New Mexico.

STOP IT! I don't need another hobby. Thankfully, florida is sand and shells to the limestone, about 100' down.

 

[corkybstewart]

STOP IT! I don't need another hobby. Thankfully, florida is sand and shells to the limestone, about 100' down.

I certainly understand. My compulsion to collect rocks was under control until my wife caught the bug. She's even more obsessive than me. When we moved here it was primarily because of the outstanding collecting possibilities and a very active local club. And we bought this particular house partly because there's an abandoned copper/gold/iron mine 200 yards away.

 

[govner1]

Just finished Crytonomicron & starting Follet’s Pillars of Fire

 

[passedpawn]

Follet’s Pillars of Fire

Is this a prequeal/sequal to Pillars of the Earth?

 

[Immocles]

Any fantasy type readers out there? I'm looking for recommendations. New or old. I'm about 2-3 weeks from finishing up my kindle backlog and will be caught up on a few different series. One off books are fine, or trilogies, but prefer series that are under five books. (I'm not diving back into Song of Ice and Fire. I quit reading them for a reason.) I use fantasy pretty loosely. Wizards, swordplay, but also altered history/steam (or clockwork) punk. Not so much the sci-fi end of the spectrum though.

 

[passedpawn]

Any fantasy type readers out there? I'm looking for recommendations. New or old. I'm about 2-3 weeks from finishing up my kindle backlog and will be caught up on a few different series. One off books are fine, or trilogies, but prefer series that are under five books. (I'm not diving back into Song of Ice and Fire. I quit reading them for a reason.) I use fantasy pretty loosely. Wizards, swordplay, but also altered history/steam (or clockwork) punk. Not so much the sci-fi end of the spectrum though.

Old one, but I really liked it: Magic Kingdom for Sale--Sold! (Magic Kingdom of Landover series Book 1):Amazon:Kindle Store

Guy walks into a Chinese pawn shop, buys some gadget, and is transported to a world of magic and wizards etc.

 

[bleme]

Any fantasy type readers out there? I'm looking for recommendations. New or old. I'm about 2-3 weeks from finishing up my kindle backlog and will be caught up on a few different series. One off books are fine, or trilogies, but prefer series that are under five books. (I'm not diving back into Song of Ice and Fire. I quit reading them for a reason.) I use fantasy pretty loosely. Wizards, swordplay, but also altered history/steam (or clockwork) punk. Not so much the sci-fi end of the spectrum though.

I've been reading through all of Brandon Sanderson's works. My favorites are the Mistborn series, The Reckoners series and Skyward. Since you specifically mention steampunk, The Rithmatist was pretty good too.

I really want to like The Stormlight Archive, but I just can't read Oathbringer in a 2-week library check-out, and by the time I get through the waiting list to get it again, I've forgotten where I was and what happened...

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

I went out on a limb as my wife was telling me Amazon was giving a $5 credit for buying >$20 in kindle books yesterday, and I am out of things to read...

I ordered the entire "Broken Earth" trilogy by NK Jemesin. I don't know much about it, except that all three books won the Hugo in successive years, so I'm hoping it's good.

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

In other news, I've owned a hardcover copy of The Princess Bride for longer than I can remember. Yet I've never read it. So that was my most recent read.

If you like the movie and haven't read the book, give it a shot. The plot is, of course, basically the same, as is much of the dialogue, although there are a few differences where they had to simplify things to fit it into a movie format. But the format of the book carries much of the same whimsy and lightheartedness of the book due to the way that the entire novel is framed--I'll not ruin it here but it's a lot of fun.

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

Up next is a re-read of To Kill a Mockingbird, followed by a first time through Go Set A Watchman.

Sometime around the 2004 timeframe I went through and decided to read several of the "classics" which I had never been assigned in school; To Kill A Mockingbird was one of those. Now that there is a "sequel" I want to read it, but it's been long enough that I need to revisit the original first.

 

[Big Monk]

Up next is a re-read of To Kill a Mockingbird, followed by a first time through Go Set A Watchman.

Sometime around the 2004 timeframe I went through and decided to read several of the "classics" which I had never been assigned in school; To Kill A Mockingbird was one of those. Now that there is a "sequel" I want to read it, but it's been long enough that I need to revisit the original first.

You may like it, but the "sequel" was never meant to be released and likely coerced out of Harper Lee by unscrupulous individuals. I personally did not.

 

[Big Monk]

My lineup is as follows:

1.) Dennis Etchison - California Gothic
2.) William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
3.) Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper
4.) Peter Straub - Ghost Story
5.) August Turak - Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks

 

[passedpawn]

I'm just starting The Andromeda Evolution - sequel to Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain. We'll see how much the author (not Crighton) can emulate the great one. Then, back to classics with Steinbeck on deck.

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

You may like it, but the "sequel" was never meant to be released and likely coerced out of Harper Lee by unscrupulous individuals. I personally did not.

I haven't researched it deeply, but I've heard it was controversial both due to subject matter and also due to the circumstances of its publishing.

But my wife bought it and it's sitting on the bookshelf, so I figure I might as well give it a shot. At least I'll learn what the controversy is all about.

 

[Big Monk]

I haven't researched it deeply, but I've heard it was controversial both due to subject matter and also due to the circumstances of its publishing.

But my wife bought it and it's sitting on the bookshelf, so I figure I might as well give it a shot. At least I'll learn what the controversy is all about.

It's supposedly a rough draft of "To Kill A Mockingbird", evidenced by passages that were used in both novels. You may enjoy it and I definitely don't want to sway you or give the wrong impression.

 

[YaleH]

History of D.G. Yuengling..... (think actual title is just Yuengling)

 

[estricklin]

Game changer for my cheese making:

Just finished some tech type books and this one stood out:

 

[passedpawn]

Just finished this - quick read. If you've read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it's something like that. Sad ending, but inspirational.

 

[passedpawn]

Zipping my way through John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Holy cow, Steinbeck can write. What a masterclass in character development. Though, this book is partly non-fiction, as one of the families involved are real characters from his mother's side of the family, early settlers in the Salinas Valley, just east of Monterey Bay in Calif.

I've read several of his classics, but I might stick with him and read through some of the books I missed.

 

[riceral]

Zipping my way through John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Holy cow, Steinbeck can write. What a masterclass in character development. Though, this book is partly non-fiction, as one of the families involved are real characters from his mother's side of the family, early settlers in the Salinas Valley, just east of Monterey Bay in Calif.

I've read several of his classics, but I might stick with him and read through some of the books I missed.

View attachment 685483

one off my all time favorite books

 

[betarhoalphadelta]

It's supposedly a rough draft of "To Kill A Mockingbird", evidenced by passages that were used in both novels. You may enjoy it and I definitely don't want to sway you or give the wrong impression.

So I've reread To Kill a Mockingbird, and have read Go Set A Watchman.

SPOILERS BELOW FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVEN'T READ THEM

I completely understand why people have such a hard time with the latter. And it took me a little bit of time to grasp why reading it pissed me off so badly.

After the end of the book, they expounded on the history. Apparently Go Set A Watchman wasn't really a rough draft of Mockingbird, nor was it really a sequel. It was a completely different book, written first, and never made it to being published. One of the publishers apparently asked Harper Lee to continue with the ideas, because there was a lot of merit there, and Harper Lee did so. In doing so, the characters grew in ways that made them incompatible with Watchman.

So although Watchman takes place with the same characters and takes place later chronologically, the characters had changed so much by the time that Mockingbird was written that they weren't really necessarily the same people.

Reading Watchman you feel betrayed that characters that you believed in were turned into something that you could never see them being after reading Mockingbird. It feels like your heroes are being turned into villains, and you ask yourself "Why would Harper Lee do that?!"

But in reality, that's reversed. The characters who were villains in Watchman were reformed BY writing Mockingbird. But then Watchman was published as-is, and was never made to reconcile with what those characters turned into.

So it's a sequel that was completely inconsistent with its predecessor, and thus people got angry.

Aside from that, I don't think it was nearly as well-written as Mockingbird. The dialogue was much too glib, everything seemed a little too contrived.

But at least now I know what all the controversy was about.

 

[bleme]

I've been going through my local libraries Overdrive/e-book collection. I look mostly for Fantasy/Sci-Fi, sorted by popularity. Downloaded one last week: Stars of Fortune by Nora Roberts. I thought it was promising because the author's name seemed familiar. It didn't take me long to figure out this was not the kind of fantasy novel I was looking for...

 

[Dinadan]

I have given most of my paper story books away, my bookshelf now has a mixture of reference books for brewing, fly tying, backpacking, motorcycle repair, and I.T. related books of all sorts.

My story books are all in digital format. That library is more than 600 strong. Some of my favorites being:

The Safehold series by David Weber
The Honor Harrington series by David Weber
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Dune by Frank Herbert
IRobot by Asimov
HHGTG by Douglas Adams
The Dark Elf trilogy by Salvatore
The Dragonlance Chronicles by Margeret Weis and Tracy Hickman
The Hobbit and TLOTR series by Tolkien
The Frankenstein series by Dean Koontz
The Harry Potter books by J K Rowling *If you do the audio books you MUST get the ones with Stephen Fry as the narrator!
Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey
The Lost Regiment Series by William Forstchen *He said he would expand the series, but has so far not done so. The last book does not provide closure at all, just a warning if you are one who needs closure.

I know there are MANY excellent ones that I am forgetting, but those rose to the top of my mind.

That is a pretty good list off the top of your mind! I agree with most of those. I would add Peter F. Hamilton's books: especially The Great North Road, Pandora's Planet, and Judas Unchained. And Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye and The Prince series.
What is the best new scifi you have read in the last couple of years? These days I struggle to find new books that I like the way I like the old ones.

 

[passedpawn]

That is a pretty good list off the top of your mind! I agree with most of those. I would add Peter F. Hamilton's books: especially The Great North Road, Pandora's Planet, and Judas Unchained. And Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye and The Prince series.
What is the best new scifi you have read in the last couple of years? These days I struggle to find new books that I like the way I like the old ones.

Did you read the Silo Series (e.g., Wool)? I thought that was stellar. Also, I highly recommend Dark Matter and Recursion, both from Blake Crouch.

For a bit of sci fi horror, try The Girl With All the Gifts. I loved that one.

 

[corkybstewart]

Right now I'm reading Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing. It happens not too far from my neighborhood. I just finished his novel All the Pretty Horses. He's one of the great underrated American authors IMHO.

 

[passedpawn]

Right now I'm reading Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing. It happens not too far from my neighborhood. I just finished his novel All the Pretty Horses. He's one of the great underrated American authors IMHO.

He's brilliant, with a daunting vocabulary and incredibly intense characters. Have you read Blood Meridian?

 

[Stormcrow]

I try to read The Once and Future King every other summer. I love it. It's also about time to revisit the C.S. space trilogy. Perelandra is perhaps my favorite piece of Christian fiction. The space trilogy as a whole is a great setting for Lewis to flesh out the ideas dealt with in his non fiction works. Any Christians or Lewis fans who have never read it should really do themselves a favor.

 

[corkybstewart]

He's brilliant, with a daunting vocabulary and incredibly intense characters. Have you read Blood Meridian?

That was the first book I read by him. Definitely an eye opener that made a lasting impression, He has an amazing way with characters and dialogue-it perfectly fits the character every time.

 

[passedpawn]

That was the first book I read by him. Definitely an eye opener that made a lasting impression, He has an amazing way with characters and dialogue-it perfectly fits the character every time.

Well for sure then read The Road. Post-apocalypse, not the fun kind

 

[estricklin]

Well for sure then read The Road. Post-apocalypse, not the fun kind

I wouldn't know whether to recommend he read The Road first or No Country For Old Men. I've yet to find one of his I don't like yet. He's so versatile too, when you consider how different books like Suttree and The Road are.


I've been sucked into Master and Commander as of late, all the other reading has been programming and much too boring to mention here.