What book is currently on your nightstand? How do you like it? Would you recommend it to others?
For We Are Many: Bobiverse Book 2
Great series!
Just finished The Expanse books, and now reading The Wall by Adrian Goldsworthy. It’s absolutely beach-reading sword-&-sandal nonsense, but the author loves his (paper thin) characters and is an Oxford-educated professional historian who writes novels on the side, so it’s fun and the world building and research are impeccable.
Technically I am also still wading through In the Name of the Rose. Gotta get back to that one and wrap it up. I’m fond of ol’ William, but my bandwidth to understand and allegorize the intramural politics of late-medieval monastic orders is limited.
If you enjoy novels written by historians, try Essex Dogs by Dan Jones. I just finished it last week and absolutely loved it. I’m itching for the sequel to come out, it’s a long wait until October for me now.
Oye Bosmang!
I read Leviathan’s Wake last year and it was really good. They really undersold Fred Johnson in the TV show, he’s a badass. I’ve only read about half of Calaban’s War and then set it down for some reason or another, and never went back to it. I should really finish that while I’m waiting on my Libby holds to be released.
They’re really good, but while I may be influenced by having seen the show first, I think it’s one of the best adaptations I’ve ever seen, especially given the offscreen drama with budget, network, cancellation, and some unfortunate awfulness from one of the cast members.
Some characters are slightly better in the show, some in the books, but I’ve rarely seen a show nail the tone and spirit of the source material like The Expanse did, but that said, there’s so much more space to live in the characters’ heads and soak up their world in a book, that’s it’s absolutely worth it to go back and pick them up, and they’re easy to start and stop, I’d say.
Just started Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer after seeing some good reviews about his Book of the New Sun series, going in blind though and it’s pretty slow so far. Let me know if you liked it and think I should keep going
I like to fancy myself an appreciator of good writing, but man, Gene Wolfe just didn’t quite do it for me. Felt pretty ponderous and self-important, like a Ralph Bakshi animated film meets Frank Herbert meets J.D. Salinger meets the Old Testament, and it was all just too much. I think Wolfe had ambition and intention and was a stylist in a genre that doesn’t often reward stylists, but it was all just just… off somehow, and left me feeling yucky. I finished The Shadow of the Torturer and had no desire to deal with Severian or his world ever again.
I definitely recommend reading the whole series. Agreed that some passages are slow or just obscure due to the style, but I found it quite enriching. I think this is one of these where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, though.
I loved it, but it is definitely very weird and kinda slow sometimes. I’d say you should keep going!
It’s definitely weird, but I did enjoy reading it. I feel like it would make more sense if I read it again, but at the same time, I’m not sure I really enjoyed it enough to read it all again.
I just finished This is How You Lose the Time War today. It’s a pretty short read, but I think it’s as good as everyone says.
I’m still working my way through The Social Distance Between Us by Darren McGarvey. I mainly read at work, so maybe only 30 minutes a day, but I’m slowly getting through it.
I also just finished reading through George RR Martin’s A World of Ice and Fire.
I’m just starting Brandon Sanderson’s The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. Not far enough in to speak on how I like this book specifically, but Sanderson is one of my favorite authors, so I anticipate that it will be a good time.
The hardcovers for the larger Secret Project kickstarter collection of which this book is a part have also been absolutely gorgeous so far, for those here who, like me, are as excited about the design of a book as they are about reading it. There are so many beautiful full-page illustration inserts and little flourishes. The attention to detail is just lovely.
Just a note for OP, June is the sixth month, and you wrote 7 in the title xD
As far as what I’m reading, I’m starting ‘Noble Roots’, by Drew Hayes, one of my favorite authors. The book is part of an RPG-lit series that it’s really fun and interesting. I’m not quite sure of where it’s going, but I’m enjoying the ride so far. The first book is called ‘NPCs’.
I sure did, whoops! It was past my bed time when I started the thread. Fixed.
Dragon’s Egg from Robert L. Forward. I heard about it on the fediverse, and I am really glad I did. It’s a hard sci-fi book about the interactions between humanity and a highly intelligent alien species that lives on a neutron star with 67Billion Gees.
I loved it! Haven’t seen many people talk about it outside of whatever initial recommendation list I had heard it from. I really enjoyed the mix of hard sci-fi and socio-political commentary. Really reminiscent of Heinlein’s best in that aspect, from what I recall.
Roadside Picnic
The original story that was the inspiration for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series.
Translation State by Ann Leckie, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. It’s a standalone novel set in the Imperial Radch universe, and I would absolutely recommend it.
I finished it a couple of days ago and I was very pleased. Ann Leckie expanded the universe in a really effective way. It also has a lot of heart, which I love.
Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer
The Dragon Republic by R. F. Kuang. Progress has been a bit slow with it as the main character is going through a phase that drags on and on… Though, I do also get the impression that it is deliberate to hammer home how hard it is to detach from drugs.
Now I’m about half way through and it appears to be picking up the pace again. If it goes nowhere, I’m chucking the damn book out the window!
I am about half way through Dark Age by Pierce Brown. Despite some minor annoyances I have with Pierce’s writing style the series is an absolute page-turner and I’m finding myself blazing through the books.
That’s a great series. And the series conclusion comes out in 6 days!
My partner and I finished the audiobook of Le Guin’s Tombs of Atuan over the weekend and started The Farthest Shore, both really enjoyable reads.
I personally am reading through Jane McAlevey’s A Collective Bargain, a nonfiction about the importance of unionization and collectivism as it pertains to both work and democracy. She tells the stories of four folks who managed to fight for and win the right to a union in their workplace. It’s accessible and a fairly short read (just a couple hundred pages), so I’m going to go ahead and recommend that one here too :)
Ursula LeGuin’s ‘Earthsea’ books were some of my favorite Y.A. reads when I was young. I reread the first one a few years ago and it was so nostalgic that I had my son read it too. He blasted through all her books after that one.
If you and your partner like LeGuin, I would also recommend reading her ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’.
I’ve read Left Hand and loved it!! My partner asked about it a while back and said he’d love to read it after Earthsea. Do you have any other recs of hers?
Sadly I haven’t read any more of her novels, although I do have a 5 novel compendium from her on my shelf I should revisit sometime…
Alexander Munro: The Paper Trail
Francis Beeding: The Three Fishers
Lindsey Fitzharris: The Facemaker
