Book Recommendations?

ranalin wrote:
Katy wrote:

Speaking of over-long books, Neil Stephenson has a new 800 page book coming out in June. While I didn't care for most of Seveneves, I'll be giving this one a try.

Holy sh*t!

If you want to be completely in the dark do NOT read the description.

Spoiler:

It's a sequel to Reamde!! ...Kinda

Oh yesssssssssssssss. I'm down. I'm with Katy, Seveneves was rough but I am super ready for this one.

Kindle Unlimited has a special for 3 months at $.99. I think it works as long as you aren't currently subscribed.

I'll probably do it just for the discounts on a couple of audiobooks I'm expecting to come out. If you have a book checked out on KU that doesn't include the audio with KU for free, if the book has a discount on audio if you buy the Kindle version, just checking it out on KU gives you that same price option without actually buying the title.

Just finished The Bear and the Nightingale. Loved it. Looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy in time. Thanks to all who recommended it here.

Have started to read Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana. It's clearly written in a different era (1958), but I'm finding it's humorous take on intelligence activities fun so far.

Also, someone here (I believe) recommended Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon. For anyone interested, I just saw that a compilation of the trilogy led off by that book is on sale for $3 on Kindle.

Firesloth, if you like Havana, try Le Carre's "The Tailor of Panama". Great stuff.

My progress since last Friday on the first batch of ten books on my book backlog pile:

Poetry Adventure and Love by Ed Elgar
Tick (Book 1) by Allison Rose
Indecent Proposal by Jack Engelhard (Currently at 37%)
Proximity: A Novel of the Navy's Elite Bomb Squad by Stephen Phillips
Progeny by Shawn Hopkins
Secrets in the Shadows by T.L. Haddix
Trapped on the Titanic by Tammy Knox
Rowena Through the Wall by Melodie Campbell
Pandora's Genes by Kathryn Lance
Tomfoolery by Lou Harper

I really liked Tick and so also read the next book in that series called Vice. Part 3 is coming out this year. It had something of a "Fallout" feel to it, particularly in the second book. Seems to be a type of book that people here in this thread might also like. Starts out with a bit of an Orwellian glimpse of society, then turns apocalyptic, and some mad science and scientists.

Poetry Adventure and Love turned out to be an Australian romance with a silly title, but I enjoyed reading it.

Supposedly the book I'm currently reading, Indecent Proposal, has been made into a movie, but the book is said not to be like the movie, which really doesn't matter to me since I've neither seen the movie or read all of the book!

Also, I'm about 50% through The Idiot and just started a non-fiction, "Christ-Centered Preaching".

bekkilyn wrote:

Also, I'm about 50% through The Idiot

Dostoyevsky or Batuman?

Also, someone here (I believe) recommended Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon. For anyone interested, I just saw that a compilation of the trilogy led off by that book is on sale for $3 on Kindle.

I mentioned it, but didn't actually outright recommend it. It's not a bad series, but it wanders. I don't think she had an overall plan, and kinda got lost in the weeds. Strong start, but it peters out and becomes a bit directionless.

I really like Novik as an author, though. I was extremely pleased with Uprooted, which won the Nebula and was nominated for the Hugo, and then her most recent release, Spinning Silver, is better still. Uprooted is pretty cheerful, but Silver ... isn't. It's vaguely based on Russian folklore, and Russian folklore can be grim. She lightens it up enormously, but it's still far darker than anything else of hers I've read. I think it benefits a great deal from the influence. She's normally way out on the shiny/happy end of the fantasy spectrum, and Silver is much closer to the middle, maybe even a little on the dark side.

Dunno what the schedule is for the awards each year, but if this one doesn't at least get a nomination, I'll be surprised and disappointed. I might well have missed some other book that's better, so Spinning Silver could certainly lose out in the end, but it's good enough that it definitely belongs on the shortlist.

Has anyone read Cixin Liu's "Ball Lightning"? I happened across it at my friendly neighborhood bookstore this morning (while I was picking up REAMDE for a re-read). I really enjoyed his Rememberance of Earth Past trilogy despite finding it an uneven experience (possibly due to different translators?). I find myself hesitant to add it to my pile without having a sense of how it compares.

Natus wrote:
bekkilyn wrote:

Also, I'm about 50% through The Idiot

Dostoyevsky or Batuman?

Dostoyevsky

I recently finished Pliny's Natural History, which I mainly wanted for the bestiary that ended up being too short for my satisfaction. I did read the rest, which was interesting for learning what an educated Roman believed 2000 years ago (Pliny died near Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE). It's funny that he refers to Greek's as "gullible" and condemns Zoroastrianist Magis for practicing false "magic", but Pliny himself spreads some real whoppers and spreads "medical" knowledge that sure sounds like magic to the modern reader.

bekkilyn wrote:
Natus wrote:
bekkilyn wrote:

Also, I'm about 50% through The Idiot

Dostoyevsky or Batuman?

Dostoyevsky

Mad respect

PewPewRobo wrote:

Has anyone read Cixin Liu's "Ball Lightning"? I happened across it at my friendly neighborhood bookstore this morning (while I was picking up REAMDE for a re-read). I really enjoyed his Rememberance of Earth Past trilogy despite finding it an uneven experience (possibly due to different translators?). I find myself hesitant to add it to my pile without having a sense of how it compares.

I have read it.
I have a coworker (who read all of the Liu's in Chinese) who thinks Ball Lightning is his best book.
Its not as good as Remembrance trilogy in my mind, but it's a fairly quick pulp read and definitely better than REAMDE.

I f*cking hate REAMDE.

Reamde is my favorite Stephenson, for perspective:)

SallyNasty wrote:

Reamde is my favorite Stephenson, for perspective:)

I just started it. I kept meaning to get to it, but never got it to the top of the list.

Reamde's very good, but not much like his other books. I don't think it's even SF, really. It's more of a backwoods adventure novel. The only SFish part of the book is that the main protagonist got rich from making an MMO, and has a very powerful character in the game he created. IIRC, it's really tangential to the overall plot in most respects. A couple of key developments hinge on the MMO, but I think it was just a method of communication. With minor plot changes, I'm pretty sure he could have substituted telephone calls without much effort.

Everything else that's important could have happened anywhere from 2000 onward, pretty much, and the only reason there's a time limit is because the main character has a history in the area that couldn't have been much earlier than the 1970s. Oh, and then the main antagonist probably needs to be in the 2000s as well, for different reasons.

If you went in expecting a normal Stephenson SF novel, you'd probably be disappointed. Taken on its own merits, it's a good book. But the naming for it is ... weird, and a bit misleading. A truer subtitle, though, like "Reamde: The Misadventure In the Canadian Wilds" probably wouldn't have helped much with sales.

Seems like a bit of an experiment and a stretch, perhaps a break from the big stuff.

Neal Stephenson on REAMDE.

David Ewalt: What inspired you to write this particular story?

Neal Stephenson: The idea had been kicking around in my head for a number of years, inspired by stories about teenage hackers in places like the Philippines inventing viruses. For most of us, they're just annoyances. But I got to thinking about what would happen if such a virus caused serious problems for a powerful person who decided they wanted to get even. So that was the idea that got it started, and then the various plot elements fell into place over the course of a few years as it was rattling around in the back of my mind.

A lot of your books have a big idea --you're exploring cryptography, or nanotechnology, or quantum mechanics. But REAMDE seems to skip that, and focus on adventure.

I think that's absolutely correct and it was a somewhat conscious decision. I would say I went about as far as one could go in the direction of writing the big idea novel with Anathem. I'm very pleased with how Anathem came out, I'm glad I wrote it, but I don't necessarily want every book I write to be that way from now on. So when I was thinking about what to do next, I thought a nice little change in pace would be to delve into just plot, an aspect of the writer's art that I happen to enjoy, and wanted to have some fun with.

When friends ask me about the book, I've been describing it as like a spy thriller.

Yeah. I can remember when I was a kid, I used to read the classic thrillers by people like Alistair MacLean, which I found highly enjoyable. In addition to just being good thriller adventure stories, they frequently had interesting characters in them, which made them more interesting on a literary level.

Thanks boogle and Sally for your perspectives! I will add Ball Lightning to the virtual pile!

Malor wrote:

Reamde's very good, but not much like his other books. I don't think it's even SF, really. It's more of a backwoods adventure novel. The only SFish part of the book is that the main protagonist got rich from making an MMO, and has a very powerful character in the game he created. IIRC, it's really tangential to the overall plot in most respects. A couple of key developments hinge on the MMO, but I think it was just a method of communication. With minor plot changes, I'm pretty sure he could have substituted telephone calls without much effort.

Everything else that's important could have happened anywhere from 2000 onward, pretty much, and the only reason there's a time limit is because the main character has a history in the area that couldn't have been much earlier than the 1970s. Oh, and then the main antagonist probably needs to be in the 2000s as well, for different reasons.

If you went in expecting a normal Stephenson SF novel, you'd probably be disappointed. Taken on its own merits, it's a good book. But the naming for it is ... weird, and a bit misleading. A truer subtitle, though, like "Reamde: The Misadventure In the Canadian Wilds" probably wouldn't have helped much with sales.

I like the aspects of the MMO in the book. No one had come close to it at the time it came out. EQ:Next would've been the closest to it if it had ever been finished.

What about "Halting State", Ranalin? Didn't that center around an MMO?

Robear wrote:

What about "Halting State", Ranalin? Didn't that center around an MMO?

I've not read that one. I'll add it to the list.

There's been multiple books that center around MMOs. The newer generation of the LITrpgs books like Awaken Online and Ascend Online definitely do as well.

If you look up the EQ:Next announcment

22:55 for emergent AI and then again at 27:51 about the geological foundation of the world. It's like they took the MMO part of Reamde and built their game around it's core aspects.

Charlie Stross' "Halting State" was originally going to be one of three set in the same world, sharing some protagonists throughout. They were each Scottish police procedurals. "Rule 34" came out as planned, but the third book was overcome by events in the real world that would have made the theme seem trite. It's an intriguing situation when important parts of a near-future story show up in the news shortly after it's published, which happened with the first book, and the second book had to be rewritten to account for the global recession of 2007. The third book was apparently going to center on "speculative" NSA capabilities that actually showed up in the Snowden documents, so... No longer exciting edgy "is this moral?" SF. Stross walked away.

Robear wrote:

Charlie Stross' "Halting State" was originally going to be one of three set in the same world, sharing some protagonists throughout. They were each Scottish police procedurals. "Rule 34" came out as planned, but the third book was overcome by events in the real world that would have made the theme seem trite. It's an intriguing situation when important parts of a near-future story show up in the news shortly after it's published, which happened with the first book, and the second book had to be rewritten to account for the global recession of 2007. The third book was apparently going to center on "speculative" NSA capabilities that actually showed up in the Snowden documents, so... No longer exciting edgy "is this moral?" SF. Stross walked away. :-)

Charlie said on his blog recently that he still plans to write the third book, but he's going to wait until the aftermath of Brexit has settled down a bit before writing it, to reduce the odds that it will be obsolete before it's published.

I saw that, but I think that he's building that plotline into the new "Merchant Princes - Generation" trilogy. Or did I read that wrong?

Robear wrote:

I saw that, but I think that he's building that plotline into the new "Merchant Princes - Generation" trilogy. Or did I read that wrong?

As I understood it, he said that part of the plot he originally envisaged for it ended up being used in Merchant Princes TNG, but that Halting State 3 is still something he plans to write, with a new storyline he's still thinking about and adjusting to fit current events

Cool! I'm up for that.

ranalin wrote:

I like the aspects of the MMO in the book. No one had come close to it at the time it came out. EQ:Next would've been the closest to it if it had ever been finished.

True, but as I recall, they weren't actually that critical. I'm remembering more of the plot now, and while a telephone wouldn't have sufficed, the basic plot would probably have worked with the lead being an important exec of any highly networked company. I don't think the MMO aspects were unusually prescient or anything, either; he'd covered a lot of the same ground in Snow Crash, in 1992. Snow Crash was amazing SF for the time, so influential on what actually got built on the early Internet that it now reads as trite. In Reamde, it was more or less the same thing, just confined to an MMO, instead of the MMO being the entire 'Net.

It's a good book, but it's really just barely SF, and with only a little revision could probably be made into a completely standard novel. It's definitely worth the time, but it's only got a toe in the water in terms of being speculative fiction.

Malor wrote:

I don't think the MMO aspects were unusually prescient or anything

No offense, but you'd be wrong. Like i said before the only one that has even been remotely close was EQ:Next. Even the next set of MMOs that are based on voxel tech coming out this year aren't even close. The game talked about in SnowCrash was more along the lines of Second Life mixed with a Shooter. Very similar to RP1's Oasis game.

I do agree the book is more adventure than SF.

Goodreads recommended A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt after I finished up my last book and it was surprisingly enjoyable as a scifi mystery/future history book. There was one scene in the middle that was so out of left field that it made me laugh, but other than that the book was a lot of fun. I've never read McDevitt before, so I think I'll pick up the next book in the series and see how it goes.

Stephenson has admitted that he totally missed that interactive games, not passive TV, would drive graphics development.

Forbes wrote:

In Snow Crash, you wrote about the Metaverse, a virtual reality city where people meet and socialize. Do you think that could be born out of something like World of Warcraft? That when we do meet and talk in cyberspace, it will be within the context of a game?

That was the thing I totally missed in Snow Crash. When I was thinking up the Metaverse, I was trying to figure out the market mechanism that would make all of this stuff affordable. Snow Crash was written when 3D imaging graphics hardware was outrageously expensive, only for a few research labs. I figured that if it were ever going to become as cheap as TV, then there would have to be a market for 3D graphics as big as the market for TV. So the Metaverse in Snow Crash is kind of like TV.

What I didn't anticipate, what actually came along to drive down the cost of 3D graphics hardware, was games. And so the virtual reality that we all talked about and that we all imagined 20 years ago didn't happen in the way that we predicted. It happened instead in the form of video games. And so what we have now is Warcraft guilds, instead of people going to bars on the street in Snow Crash.

So games motivated the market, but what about society? Do people need the excuse of a game to step into a virtual reality?

Yeah. It's just inherently more interesting to enter into an art directed alternate world, where you can go on adventures and get into fights and engage with the world that way, than it is to enter a world where all you can do is kind of stand around and chat.

Bill, that's my favorite McDevitt series, and for me it really picked up with "Polaris". So you're in for a good ride.