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What is a favorite book of yours, and why should people read it if they haven't?
I know it's about impossible for me to come up with a favorite of all time, so pick one of your favorites, and tell the rest of us why we should read it!
Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks.
It's part of a non-chronological science fiction series that focuses on a space-faring, post-scarcity, anarchist, utopian, quasi-society known as "The Culture".
The common thread within the series is a society finding meaning when its only big problem is the pack of big problems to deal with. They get in other societies' problems. They agonize over whether intervention is the right thing to do. They have a sense of humor about it.
This book in particular, deals with the purpose of soldiers in peace time. Both people and intelligent machines of war, whose psychology is geared toward violence and force.
Banks' prose is beautiful, something you don't see in the genre outside of Vonnegut or Atwood. It's incredible. I need to reread everything again.
I think it's worth suggesting people don't read Use of Weapons as their first Culture novel. Having an understanding of the universe is I think helpful prior to diving into UoW.
Player of Games is generally my go to for first introduction to the series especially for any fans of Civ 2 (Banks was an admitted fan).
Consider Phlebas was the first Culture book Banks wrote, it loses something if you read others first. Amazon are apparently turning this into a film?? No idea how that's going to work...
For me the best in series is either Use of Weapons or Surface Detail. I love the whole series though.
The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy. It's an excellent spy/naval thriller, and one of the classics of the genre. It was so scarily accurate during it's time that the author was investigated by the FBI under the assumption he was leaked classified information.
The movie is good, too.
I thought that happened after The Sum of All Fears?
You might be right! It's been a few years since I heard this, but considering the subject matter in Sum of All Fears.. I'd believe it there, too.
I just watched a few episodes of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan on Amazon and it's pretty good. I mostly watched it because Twitch was giving out free bits for watching an episode but it actually hooked me.
Also I think the only Tom Clancy novel I read was Rainbow Six which I enjoyed. I think I started The Sum of All Fears but didn't finish it.
Sum of All Fears is great! It paints a terrifying geopolitical picture that's still accurate today, albeit without the Soviet Union.
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
I think we all know and have those times and places where everything is up in the air and you're just not quite sure of where you are or where you want to be. It happens a lot when you're younger, of course, but it's a constant in life, I think. Sometimes you reach a goal and for a short time everything feels up in the air and you're just looking for any sign of what direction to go next. That was happening to me when I found this book.
Vonnegut is just an absolute master, in my opinion. He has a quirky style of writing, but more importantly he has an excellent grasp of characters and how their stories and momentum can intertwine. Each character in Sirens is unique and has emotional depth to them. I found myself compelled by everyone's individual story and where they were going. I also love the way the story plays with the concept of free will too. I love seeing each character struggle with how their circumstances are and struggle to comprehend and understand it.
Vonnegut is the perfect mix of a crotchety but deeply loving old man. :)
Everyone should read at least one Vonnegut book.
Sirens of Titan is one of my favourites. Douglas Adams has cited it an inspiration for the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy.
I think my favourite Vonnegut book though, is Cat's Cradle. It's a really good showcase of his cynicism towards humanity and religion. It's about how life is tragic and hopeless, yet beautiful. How humans are so deeply flawed, they're capable of both incredible and destructive things.
Cat's Cradle is incredible as well and for all the reasons you list. Another favourite, for sure. I also really love Breakfast of Champions.
Dune is a must read. It did for sci-fi what Lord of the Rings did for the fantasy genre. Frank Herbert is a master at building a detailed and believable universe for his stories to take place in
I love Dune. I’m not much of a reader, and it’s definitey the longest book I’ve ever read, but boy was it worth it. Are the other books in the series worth reading?
It kinda depends on your taste really. Dune Messiah and Children of Dune (the next two books) are still pretty story driven, though not quite on the scale of the first book. God Emperer of Dune is the next book and it's way more philosophical with not much plot.
The Animorphs series.
It's a long series, 54 books in the main story line and a few spinoff novels like the Chronicles books or the Megamorphs
But each novel is a fairly quick read, taking a few hours at most to read each book.
For starters, the books are a great 90's nostalgia trip. Basically reliving my childhood reading those novels
The books are about a group of teenagers, given the ability to morph, by a dying alien. The alien informs the teenagers that Earth is under a secret invasion by a parasitic life form. The alien offers the teenagers the ability to morph, to acquire the DNA of any living creature or being and literally turn into them. The alien urges these young humans to use this ability to somehow resist the invasion until help can arrive.
The real draw, however, is how each character, just a teenager, is changed by war. One character starts off as little more than your average valley mall girl. By the end of it, she's a cold blooded killer. Another, your typical high school goofball, is arguably the most ruthless, in his words, able to see the bright clear line from A to B with little regard for cost. A third is trapped in his morph, doomed to live out his days as a hawk. The saddest part of that? It's actually an improvement for him. His home life was so bad that it's always been considered possible he willingly stayed in his morph to escape it.
Over the course of the 54 novels, and the side books, these child soldiers are forced to fight for their very survival in fairly graphic fight scenes. Numerous times, you read how one of them is literally holding their intestines or is gushing blood from wounds. They make decisions that no teenager should ever have to make.
And the author, KA Applegate, writes the books in such a way that characters are aware of this. They know they're in over their heads. They know they're fighting a losing battle. They're fighting a battle on the slimmest of hopes that help will arrive before it's too late. And even then, they're not 100% sure they'll actually be saved.
And this is all in books that were marketed to YA before the HP craze made Young Adult novels the market of choice for publishers. I was reading these books in ELEMENTARY school.
And I still read them to this day, as a 30 year old. They were that good to me.
Now they're not without fault. About midway through the series, they started using ghostwriters and the quality and consistency does suffer. There's some seriously out there story lines.
But overall, they're a fantastic series about the brutal and harsh realities of war, of PTSD, of children and young adults making life and death decisions they never should've had to and that affect a planet of people and by extension, a galaxy of races.
I own all of them, and kinda grew up with them, my age matching the age of the characters for a while. Rachel's descent that basically made her unable to adapt when the war finally reaches its conclusions, and the way Tobias falls apart for so long (filthy bird still gives me a bit of a wince), and even the way Jake is forced to step up didn't happen overnight. It wasn't forgone at the start that this is where the characters were heading. It was gradual, and slow.
They all battled PTSD, depression and anxiety. Not one of them comes out of it unscarred in serious, human ways. And the books don't give a cushey child-friendly ending. Life doesn't go back how it was. It isn't rainbows and sunshine. You're not laughing - you feel hollow.
I remember reading that final book. I reread it again. And again. And again. I must’ve read it a dozen times before I’d finally accept the ending.
I hated it. I couldn’t read any of them for months.
But eventually I accepted it.
And when I reread the series as an adult with a fresh, more mature, and understanding perspective, I realized that, while I’ll never like the way it ended, I respect that the authors didn’t sell out for a happy ending. I think it was a worthy ending, a realistic ending.
My main problem with the ending wasn't that it ripped out my heart, but that it set up new questions and ended on a cliffhanger.
We'll get spoiler tags someday, but I think it's obvious what I mean.
Alright, you've made me wanna' read them. I probably read the first 20-30 books when I was younger, and I think I re-read The Andalite Chronicles a crazy amount of times just because I loved the story and how it perfectly folded in so much context to the main series. They're YA novels, and the do read like that, but they're very adult in theme and content. Tons of violence, sometimes extremely graphic, serious psychological issues are addressed and in very real terms, the whole thing is very intense from what I recall.
Great suggestion!
The Andalite Chronicles was fantastic but the Ellimist Chronicles is my single favorite novel in the series.....if you couldn’t tell by my username lol.
But yes. They read like a YA novel but with very adult themes. Very dark themes but not your typical grimdark that aims to be as dark as possible for the sake of it but real human darkness. The best and worst of humanity. GoT level gore(sometimes)
In the words of the Emperor, DO IT
Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand.
An incredible character in one of the best romance of all times, the play is excellently paced and witty. It is also written completely in alexandrines, a classical form of rhymes. It is the most famous french play, played all over the world, and also incredibly difficult to perform (Cyrano as a part is more than 1600 rhymes in total). It also makes for a great read, at times poignant, at others incredibly funny, and is over a little too quickly.
The chosen form lends a rhythm to the book that is rarely found in classical literature, and the amount of different scenes makes for a breathtaking adventure.
I read it in it's french original, but heard that the Burgess translation was better, so maybe look for that particular one. ^^
It's been on my list to read for a while now. The 1950 film adaptation with José Ferrer is a personal favourite.
Here's one that I doubt many people have read in the modern age: Herodotus, the Histories.
And though you haven't read it, you probably have heard of it, or some parts of it, anyway. It's one of the primary sources we have for the Battle of Thermopylae, where '300' Spartans, and 10,000 free Greeks stood against the might of the Persian empire.
Herodotus has it's problems. He wasn't the best historian, including plenty of folklore beside things we know probably actually happened, and getting some kings mixed up leading to wildly differing stories to our history... And each of the Histories has a different level of authenticity to those around it.
The Histories instead, serve as way to record culture, philosophy, reason and religion. They tell us about the pasttimes of Spartans, how their women enjoyed a different set of freedoms and controls to the ones we may be more familiar with. (Not free to choose a husband, but free to castrate him if he dared to attempt to force her into sex. Not free to speak in public, but a husband isn't allowed to speak publicly about something his wife disapproves of, and the priesthood who would enforce those rules with great zealotry.)
They tell us of god and heroes, but only as a vessel to allow Herodotus to describe the various worlds of the past, and how differing they are in almost every way.
... That's probably enough. I translated most of Book VII (Battle of Thermopylae) when I was learning ancient Greek as part of a theology course.
And if you buy the argument that Herodotus was writing his histories to be performed rather than read, then you get to analyze his narrative structure to look for ways that a speaker might be able to grab the imaginations of (his) audience, and you might have a better eye for what dramatic license might be being employed where.
Herodotus to me is the closest I'll ever get to feeling like I'm time traveling. And that's good enough of a reason to read him as any.
Xerxes: No way... They can't be serious. If they fight me, they'll die. That's insane!
Lots of great fiction recommendations in here. For non-fiction that I’ve personally found useful I recommend:
Leading Snowflakes - Oren Ellenbogen
Fantastic book for programmers and technical contributors making the jump to technical management.
Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss
A range of negotiation techniques from a former top FBI hostage negotiator.
If we're doing fiction, I really enjoyed Worm. A very fun and fairly long web serial; it's pretty great. The community is downright cancerous, though, barring a little bit of it. The elevator pitch for it:
Imagine your favourite comic book. Now make it realistic(-ish). Make the powers cooler. Make all of your favourite characters get killed off. Make it unpredictable enough that the author didn't even know how some chapters were going to end (SPOILER). Make every. Single. Mechanic. Be. Explained. Now make it really, really long.
A lot of people don't like the first few arcs; they're a bit...amateurish, really. They tend to love everything beyond that, though.
ANSWER TO SPOILER FOLLOWING THIS, MIGHT WANT TO LOOK AWAY NOW.
NOTHING BUT SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT.
I MEAN IT.
SPOILER: he even went as far as rolling a die to see if he'd kill off the main character, multiple times.
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins. It lays out in thorough but understandable terms what we know about evolution and how we know it. It starts out talking about breeding and artificial selection and how that relates to natural selection, and then goes through geologic time scales, the fossil record, developmental biology, DNA, etc. It's a book that I wish everyone who has any doubt about evolution would read.
Secondhand Time, by Svetlana Alexievich. It is non-fiction, but a sort of weaving of interviews maybe not very dissimilar to Studs Terkel; she interviews people just after the fall of the Soviet Union through 2012.
I think it's worth reading because it's sort of a study of people reflecting on a great change -- the only constant is change. Some people find themselves rich and long for the past, some people find themselves poor but find great promise ahead. Some people woke up one day to find themselves the target of ethnic hatred they'd never so much as suspected, while others fear new insecurity. Some have become corporate raiders, while others think of themselves as an evolutionary dead end, Homo Sovieticus, who will die as the last of their kind.
I think it's a very interesting reflection on what we come to believe, how it shapes us, and how we let beliefs go (or don't). I think it's interesting because it's easy to get into a "ideology [x], in which I've been grown, is the human default from which I can't be startlingly awoken" mindset, and, well, that's what these people thought too.