Book Recommendations?

I finished the first Expanse book last night and really enjoyed it. Just weighing up whether to dive straight into the second or have a a palate cleanser first.

bbk1980 wrote:

I finished the first Expanse book last night and really enjoyed it. Just weighing up whether to dive straight into the second or have a a palate cleanser first.

You could also do The Butcher of Anderson Station somewhere soon. I don't know that I'd pay the $4 Amazon wants for the 36 pages, but you library may have it for download.

As I pick through and try and select my next book I circled around re reading either Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. As ever I feel I should try something new but is there anyone out there writing really good really funny genre fiction? I am sure someone must have picked up the mantle but I can’t find them! My beloved Terry and Douglas have both been long gone unfortunately I’d love a recommendation in their oeuvre.

Did y'all know there's a 4th Bobiverse book out? I sure didn't!

I just finished it - it was great.

bbk1980 wrote:

As I pick through and try and select my next book I circled around re reading either Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. As ever I feel I should try something new but is there anyone out there writing really good really funny genre fiction? I am sure someone must have picked up the mantle but I can’t find them! My beloved Terry and Douglas have both been long gone unfortunately I’d love a recommendation in their oeuvre.

Try Cat Valente's Space Opera

bbk1980 wrote:

As I pick through and try and select my next book I circled around re reading either Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. As ever I feel I should try something new but is there anyone out there writing really good really funny genre fiction? I am sure someone must have picked up the mantle but I can’t find them! My beloved Terry and Douglas have both been long gone unfortunately I’d love a recommendation in their oeuvre.

I am planning on reading Hitchhiker’s Guide for the first time sometime this year. I am on book 3 of an 8 book series right now so no way I will be able to do it on or before my birthday next month when I turn 42

Try Tom Holt for comedic fantasy. (His other well-known pseudonym is K. J. Parker, but those books, while they have humor, are much more dark.)

Christopher Moore has a very Pratchett/Adams kind of anarchic tone to him.

James Bibby's Ronan The Barbarian series really felt Pratchetty too.

Rykin wrote:
bbk1980 wrote:

As I pick through and try and select my next book I circled around re reading either Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett. As ever I feel I should try something new but is there anyone out there writing really good really funny genre fiction? I am sure someone must have picked up the mantle but I can’t find them! My beloved Terry and Douglas have both been long gone unfortunately I’d love a recommendation in their oeuvre.

I am planning on reading Hitchhiker’s Guide for the first time sometime this year. I am on book 3 of an 8 book series right now so no way I will be able to do it on or before my birthday next month when I turn 42 ;)

You are in for a treat I’m genuinely jealous. If I can advise going for the original radio series first ( he adapted it to a book later) it’s for me the best version, it’s on iTunes in the u.k.

just wondering if anyone has read 'The Master and Margarita' by Bulgakov.

Apart from "Dune" by Herbert (first book) and "Arthur, the Once and Future King" (by T.H. White), I think it is really really really good - along LOTR and Harry Potter and so on... Though Jack Vance remains king.

From a recommendation upthread, I just finished Peter Hamilton's Salvation Sequence. Man, if you like far-future SF, this is an extremely well-done example. The crafting of the overall story is particularly adept, as he's running two separate stories simultaneously, at very different tech levels and in very different societies, but he stitches them together with consummate skill. I have a vague idea that I've been pretty unhappy with Hamilton in the past (I think he's the author that kept skipping all the peak-interest stuff, jumping straight to the aftermath instead), but if that was him, he didn't do that here.

This is one of those series I don't want to say too much about, because a great deal of the experience is figuring things out. It's hard to be clear about why these are good without giving too much away.

I will say that if you want some fantastic imagination about far-future tech, this would be first-rate source material for a pen-and-paper SF RPG, or maybe a 4X space game. There are so many ideas to yoink... I could probably make a long post listing only some of them. Some of the space battles (there are a few over the trilogy) reminded me vaguely of Master of Orion, in the sense that some new tech totally changed the outcome. That part of it can be a lot of fun, "oh nooooo!", or both.

The overall focus is a bit mechanistic, and some of the characters lack much definition, but others are painted with a fair bit of detail. The political scene was well handled (lots of politics in one story, less in the other), and the dual plot is extremely intricate. I didn't really fall in love with any of the protagonists; they were interesting, but they didn't have the pull that some books have. They tended to be a bit on the bland side, but were perfectly serviceable.

This is a trilogy more about big ideas, societies, and the way they might react to major changes in their circumstances, more than it's about individual people. It's also got some interesting ideas about gender... one of the societies is peopled mostly by "omnias", humans that have been genetically modified to swap back and forth between genders every seven to ten years. They have new pronouns (sie and hir are two I remember) and have their own rather Utopian society, and a minor subthread to the whole thing is how that society works and interacts with mainstream humanity.

It's just a really cool trilogy. I would expect the most recent book (out in November) to be on both the Nebula and Hugo lists. I'm not sure if it would win either award, but it really ought to be a candidate for both.

Purchased on your recommendation. Will be my next after The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, which i started this morning.

Malor wrote:

From a recommendation upthread, I just finished Peter Hamilton's Salvation Sequence. Man, if you like far-future SF, this is an extremely well-done example.

I really like his work so I will have to check that out.

SallyNasty wrote:

Purchased on your recommendation. Will be my next after The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, which i started this morning.

And you just reminded me that Becky Chamber's newest Wayfarers book is due out in like a month.

The Pile Grows.

Jonman wrote:

Christopher Moore has a very Pratchett/Adams kind of anarchic tone to him.

James Bibby's Ronan The Barbarian series really felt Pratchetty too.

Also can't go wrong with Good Omen's Pratchett's collaboration with Gaiman.

Peoj Snamreh wrote:

just wondering if anyone has read 'The Master and Margarita' by Bulgakov.

Yes, but it was years ago and I'm thinking it's time to revisit this ABSOLUTE GEM and say hello to Bohemoth again.

I think the english language Wikipedia description of Bohemoth is darn good for an encyclopedia: "Behemoth is a character from the novel The Master and Margarita by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov. He is an enormous demonic black cat who speaks, walks on two legs, and can even transform to human shape for brief periods. He has a penchant for chess, vodka, pistols, and obnoxious sarcasm."

Peoj Snamreh wrote:

just wondering if anyone has read 'The Master and Margarita' by Bulgakov.

I wrote a report on it in college. So no, I did not read it.

mortalgroove wrote:

A Desolation Called Peace, the follow-up to A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine came out today. Instant buy for me and it's all queued up on my iPad.

EDIT: Spelling is hard.

I just finished it this afternoon and was not disappointed.

Peoj Snamreh wrote:

just wondering if anyone has read 'The Master and Margarita' by Bulgakov.

Apart from "Dune" by Herbert (first book) and "Arthur, the Once and Future King" (by T.H. White), I think it is really really really good - along LOTR and Harry Potter and so on... Though Jack Vance remains king.

I really really need to read The Master and Margarita. Thanks for the nudge.

Which Vance?

Which Vance? The Dying Earth series is classic. Reading order is as follows:

"The Dying Earth"
"Eyes of the Overworld"
"Cugel's Saga"
"Rhialto The Marvelous"

These are short stories and novellas, in collections. Where you see what seem like direct references to Dungeons and Dragons in the first 3 books, you are actually seeing the *source* of D&D's original system of magic and spells, including "Prismatic Spray" and a few others you will notice.

Ever since getting a Kindle Oasis 6 months ago my dead tree books have been languishing on the bedside table. I’ve got some great stuff there but for some reason I just enjoy reading on this Kindle so much more. I’m considering doubling down on some of the stuff I already own just to get back to them.

If only the Australian library system would start allowing borrowed books to be read on Kindle instead of the app on tablets.

I’m finally getting the hang of using bookmarks with my kindle so I can read endnotes with nonfiction!

Currently reading Astounding about Campbell, Heinlein, Hubbard, and Asimov. Finding it fascinating!

For most books, the link in the text takes you to the end-note, and the link at the anchor of the end-note takes you back into the text. You might not notice that second one. So usually - not always - you don't need to set a bookmark.

On my very old Kindle DX, you could use the back button to return from footnotes and endnotes, but I have a vague idea that new Kindles don't have those anymore.

They don't.

I don’t see links in mine. Footnotes, yes, but not endnotes.
May be a setting I have off.

There is, however, a back "arrow" on my Paperwhite Kindle that often (but not always) works like the back button. In some books when you start scrolling pages, it also often offers up a "return to page ___" option that can put you back to where you were before the footnote/endnote. The bookmark seems to be the only consistent guarantee that works with every book.

Some books do footnotes, some do endnotes, some don't provide a link back (usually the footnote number), others do. It's a formatting crapshoot. But it's easy to miss the link in the foot/endnote because often it's just one number.

These might have moved back to full price by the time anybody reads this, but Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott and The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter F. Hamilton are both $2.99 on Kindle and look really neat. Any thoughts?

Costco is now selling audiobooks. Of course they're bundles. And they have their own app.