I would like to get slightly more educated in mathematics again - I took some basic calculus and linear algebra classes while doing my degree, but most likely forgot what I learned for the most part. Are there any good books that you guys would recommend for someone who wants to learn math again?

Hi! Growing up a boy, I was always too afraid to read Romance. I didn't want to get made fun of or give anyone clues about the way I felt about my gender and sexuality.

Besides the fact I identify as transfemme, I'm also much older and don't give a shit what anyone thinks now.

Can anyone recommend me a romance novel? I wanna add the genre to my reading. Fantasy/sci-fi splashed in would be cool but not required at all.

Please tell me your FAVORITE romance novel as opposed to the "classes" or "the best". I wanna know what you like. I think that will end up with more unique and specific vibes.

Ty xoxo

I haven't read through a book in a while, and I've been trying to get back into it! I used to read like a fiend, and I've bought many books recently but could never actually fully sit down and read them, I'm always too distracted or fall asleep. The last book I read was Simu Liu's Autobiography, because it was super easy to get into and it's super relevant to me in general, but every other book I've tried to pick up doesn't seem to grip me as much.

Are there any interesting books that are easily digestible that pulled you in? Or any tips for me to try to get through my backlog of books?

I finally have the space to finish a project I've been working on which is a study with 3 bookcases. So far, my idea is to have 1 with books that will always be there, such as classic reads, or even an encyclopedia maybe?, or other reference material. Basically, a permanent bookcase whether or not I've read the material. The other two will be rotated in and out of stuff that I'm reading, have read recently or on my backlog before swapping or donating.

Anyways, what's in your "must have" bookcase? Reference, fiction/non-fiction, Calvin & Hobbes even! (Although that's more of a coffee table piece)

Kids or younger reader book. Fantasy genre.

In this book world weather can be controlled by sorcerers, and especially powerful sorcerers can summon dragons. When the sorcerers die the dragons vanish, except in the case of the most powerful sorcerers where their dragon is buried with them. The villain wanted the scales of the blue dragon that belonged to a sorcerer. There were also weather spells that were too destructive and were trapped, including the scarlet snow that made people fall asleep. The villain was holding the main character's parents hostage. The main character can summon a dragon. The main character is going to school to become a meteorologist

Other key words that may or may not be the same story -- Yeti, ball lightning, jar, lab, gardening supply shop

Not a native speaker, so I hope I phrased it correctly. Let me explain. It happened to me at least twice.

Some years ago, I picked up the "Metro 2033" book by Dmitry Glukhovsky. I read part of it until I read about the Stalker, who was a badass wearing a black coat. It was so cliche, I was unable to continue. I wrote off the book as trash.

Then, some time later I played the video game under the same title, which is an adaptation of the novel and I liked it a lot. It had that eerie atmosphere and a unique Eastern European feel to it, unlike games like Fallout. I decided to give the book another go, but this time I knew the lore and I had images from the game in my mind and everything changed. I really liked that book, it was a good mix of horror, action and sociopolitical commentary disguised as a postapo novel. It may not be great, but it's a very pleasant read. By now, I've read all three books and played all three video games (btw if you plan to play Metro Exodus I'd advise you to read "Metro 2035" first, as the game is a direct continuation of that story and both were written by the author) and I consider myself a fan of the series.

Another, more recent example is "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone". I am not a Potterhead, I never read any HP books, I even despised them for the most part. By the time J.K. Rowling's stories were published in my country I was already 20 or so. I was familiar with Jordan, Tolkien, Sapkowski, Williams and many more authors writing fantasy. I was into the tolkienesque depiction of wizards, so something like Hogwart with robed men and children riding brooms and waving wands is both weird and strongly off-putting to me. Also, I considered myself already too old for what I saw as children's books.

I'm 42 now and those words of C.S. Lewis resonate with me ever so more:

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

So I decided to give Harry Potter a chance. I first tried watching the first movie. I didn't like it much and dropped it somewhere in the middle. Then a couple moths ago I loaded a free sample of the first book from Kobo Store and it was... alright. I dropped it as well. I thought it was well written, but was definitely a kids book for which I was too old.

I started playing Hogwart's Legacy a week ago or so. I'm now positively hooked on that game, it's beautiful, it has characters I like, it has a good combat system and it's been my doorway to Hogwarts. So when I couldn't play, I was thinking about it and picked up that book which I dropped earlier. But this time I had a better understanding of the lore, had images of certain places in my mind and it clicked! I am still an old fart and it is still a kids book, but I have found new appreciation for it. I think it's well written on the literary level, it has a lot of situational and verbal humor (I think it has a distinct British flavor to it, like a very toned down version of Pratchett) -- I actually often chuckle when reading it. I bought the whole set (books 1-7) and maybe I'll even read them. Here's hoping that they mature with the readers, that's what I've been told. I'm sure that if I were 12 when reading them for the first time, I'd love them.

As you can see, in my case it's usually that good video games drive me to give another chance to some books that I initially didn't like and because of the great experience with video game adaptations, I start liking the source material. Do you have similar experiences?

(btw this is my first post on Tildes)

What are you reading and what's next on your list? Are you enjoying it or just trying to get to the next book you want to read?

I'm almost finished with Columbine by Dave Cullen. It's an in depth look into what led up to the massacre, the aftermath, and how it could have been avoided. It's a well written book and sadly still very relevant today. I would recommend it to any true crime enthusiast.

Next up is either Mindhunter by John Douglas & Mark Olshaker or Children of Dune by Frank Herbert. I've been in a true crime phase for the last year, but I'm also trying to finish the entire (original) Dune series.

Several users expressed interest in reading Roadside Picnic after I recommended it in another (now deleted) topic about the movie it inspired, Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, which in turn inspired the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. videogame series. So I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to create a Pop-up Book Club event about it to encourage others to join us in reading it, so that we can all discuss it afterwards.

My description of the book from a previous comment that enticed the others to read it:

The basic premise was really unique and interesting, too. Without giving too much away, it's a story of Alien "invasion" only when the Aliens visited Earth, instead of doing any of the standard scifi trope stuff, the event was basically like that of a Roadside Picnic to them. That is to say, they showed up, barely noticed the humans who were tantamount to ants to them, did whatever Alien travelers with incomprehensibly advanced technology do when taking a quick pitstop on another world, and left a bunch of trash behind when they left. The story is about "stalkers" that venture into the exceptionally dangerous wasteland left behind by the Aliens in order to recover their trash (also usually exceptionally dangerous, but also exceptionally powerful) in order to sell it on the black market.

IMO, it's a very good classic scifi novel, and also a relatively short one too (only 224 pages) which makes it ideal summer reading, and ideal for this sort of thing since it’s not a huge commitment. I think this could be fun, so if you feel like joining in, please feel free to. I will also be rereading the book to refresh my memory of it, and roughly a month from now I will make a follow-up topic so we can have the discussion.

The book is available on paperback at Amazon for $15, or on Kindle for $10, but your own local retailer or library might also have a copy. The Strugatsky brothers are both long dead though, so you can always pirate it relatively guilt free if you can't find it elsewhere.

p.s. If there is a decent level of interest, and this goes well, maybe we can even make this a regular thing. :)

Edit: For all the latecomers, don't worry if you don't read the book in time for the Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

Let me know if you're interested by leaving a comment and I will ping you when the Discussion topic gets posted.

eBooks and eBook readers feel a little stagnant at the moment. No significant increases in tech, the storefronts are stagnant and locked down with DRM, and it just isn't really an exciting field.

That said, I love my Kindle Paperwhite because it lets me get English books for cheaper (I live in Japan) and it lets me carry them around.

Do you use an eBook reader? Do you read eBooks on a standard tablet or phone? Or are you married to paper?

Preface: I usually post my book reviews on /r/Fantasy. With reddit's future being uncertain right now I figured I'd experiment with posting on here, let me know if you're interested in future reviews. I should add that this probably isn't my most interesting book review ever, it just happens to be my latest read.
Please feel free to let me know if you'd like to see more fantasy book reviews in the future, I am new to Tildes.

Recommended if you like: ottoman empire inspired setting, royalty/bodyguard romance, MC with anxiety, queernorm setting, low-magic setting, m/m romance, homoerotically washing each others' hair, royal palace slice of life, fake-dating (sort of), gay yearning

Blurb

Kadou, the shy prince of Arasht, finds himself at odds with one of the most powerful ambassadors at court—the body-father of the queen's new child—in an altercation which results in his humiliation.

To prove his loyalty to the queen, his sister, Kadou takes responsibility for the investigation of a break-in at one of their guilds, with the help of his newly appointed bodyguard, the coldly handsome Evemer, who seems to tolerate him at best. In Arasht, where princes can touch-taste precious metals with their fingers and myth runs side by side with history, counterfeiting is heresy, and the conspiracy they discover could cripple the kingdom’s financial standing and bring about its ruin.

Review

• This book starts out by throwing you in the middle of a handful of political machinations already underway - the inciting incidents have basically already happened off-screen beforehand. That is fine, but don't expect massive developments on these plots or new plot points to really matter. The book basically goes "this is the political background for this story" and then takes its time for the rest of the book to focus on the romance.
• I should find this book too fluffy and romancey for my taste but I couldn't help but loving it. Some of it is really dumb, it's transparently obvious that the narrative only exists to facilitate a lot of gay yearning, but I also found myself very much enjoying all that gay yearning.
• I feel like I logically shouldn't have enjoyed this so much, because the worldbuilding is negligible, the magic (touch-tasting, i.e. sensing the origins or compositions of metals) is an afterthought for most of the time, and the plot constantly takes breaks for everyone to talk about their feelings a lot. But somehow, I was totally here for all that and was sad when it was over.
• There were various aspects I found a bit grating, from some very obviously contrived setups to make the two leads have to get closer (or make drastic choices that bind them together) to some of the side characters sounding rather anachronistically sassy, to just how often the plot takes a break for people to talk about their feelings. I can list a ton of things this book does "wrong", but none of them actually managed to tip the scale away from me being into it, don't ask me why. Maybe I was just in the right mood for it.
• The setting is very queernormative and progressive in other ways, while maintaining a historical veneer in terms of technology and (for the most part) style. The use of neopronouns for some side characters caught me a bit off guard in the audio narration, but it's done with such a complete nonchalance that I assume many queer readers will find refreshing.
• The main character has anxiety and panic attacks (without quite having the language to articulate what he suffers from, and equating it with cowardice), and I thought that topic was treated pretty well. Then again, everyone that matters is super supportive and understanding the whole time, so it doesn't really serve as a source of conflict for longer.
• I've said that action often takes a backseat to the romance, but I found the action that was there pretty good.

Discussion

In conclusion: I really liked this, but I completely understand anyone who didn't. The only previous Rowland book I'd read is A Conspiracy of Truths (link to my review), where I had the opposite experience: I found it well crafted but didn't enjoy it all that much. This one just happened to vibe more with me.

Title, basically. The A Song of Ice and Fire subreddit has seemingly gone indefinitely private, so I was wondering if any other ASOIAF fans migrated here during or after the blackout. I definitely miss all the crazy theories we could read on there (I cannot believe D+D=T, the most legendary ASOIAF theory, may become lost forever if the subreddit never opens again, truly a loss of a masterpiece.)

Since it was still pretty active despite the book series being rather dormant, I wondered if any other fans came over here and wanted to chat about it. Just crazy theories, favourite characters, that sort of thing.

Parents of young kids: Who are your favorite authors for reading to your young kids? I have a soon-to-be 4 year old who loves books and I'm always looking for new ideas. I'll start off with a few of her favorite authors, with a good title from each (not in rank order).

Alice and Martin Provensen - Our Animal Friends on Maple Hill Farm
Julia Donaldson - Room on the Broom
Kaya Doi - Chirri and Chirra
Margaret Mahy - Dashing Dog
Anne Hunter - Possum's Harvest Moon
Paul Goble - The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses

I'll single out the Chirri and Chirra books with an explanation because they're very different from the others. They are translated from Japanese, and despite having super simple plot lines, the drawings are a lot of fun and a wonderful complement to the text.

Here are a few of my favorite examples:

1. "Long had he believed that a gentleman should turn to a mirror with a sense of distrust. For rather than being tools of self-discovery, mirrors tended to be tools of self-deceit." p. 36

2. "For if a room that exists under the governance, authority, and intent of others seems smaller than it is, then a room that exists in secret can, regardless of its dimensions, seem as vast as one cares to imagine." p. 64

3. "After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we've just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration - and our unwavering determination to withhold opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour." pg. 120-121

I read "Legends and Lattes" recently and liked the premise of the entire book. Does anyone know any other books that have a laid back and chill adventure story with little to no violence, gore, and stuff like that?

Thanks in advance.

I'm always looking recommendations for my next read. I haven't read many "pure" horror books this year, but I would like to recommend The Raw Shark Texts and The Library at Mt. Char. The former especially leads to some great discussions between readers.

I’m always looking for a good new book or, on lesser occasions, a good documentary. I love reading about “how stuff works”, astrophysics (space and its sheer size are insane to me), and oddly, random fantasy stuff like wizarding worlds, etc.
Judgements aside I like reading Harry Potter and some of the books by Neil Degrasse Tyson as well as watching Cosmos (Carl and Neil both).

What hidden gems do you have?

Any fans of this series over here? I was planning a series reread before book 5 comes out. It was going to be hosted on the bobiverse subreddit, but... well, ya know.

If enough people want to do one here I'd be happy to host it, probably starting in about 4 weeks and doing one book every 2 weeks.

I'm big on audiobooks and trying to move away from the Audible monopoly starting with the book "Chokepoint Capitalism" (which is about monopolies like that).

Unfortunately, the smaller library is hampered even more by the dodgy search (I just finished two books in a trilogy, why are you showing me the spanish translations of the author's other books?) and I'm struggling to fill my wishlist which has never been a problem on Audible.

So far I'm really liking Chokepoint Capitalism but looking for any suggestions once that's done. I've read a decent amount of mainstream fantasy (Stormlight archive, Wheel of Time, Robin Hobb, Tolkien), some popular scifi (Aasimov, w40k stuff, recently enjoyed "Armor" by Steakly), a lot of light nonfiction about finance, history and pop psychology ("The Big Short" or anything by Michael Lewis, "Debt: The first 5000 years", "Girt", "The man who mistook his wife for a hat") and have recently been on a big Ken Follett kick (historical fantasy?)

Any good listens that I should give a go?

PS. sorry for sounding like a shill post for audiobooks.com. I swear I'm not trying to drive clicks that's just the name of the company and recent Brandon Sanderson drama has made me aware of how much power Amazon has over the only way I consume literature nowadays

What were your highlights for the year? What were the best things you read? What surprised you? What let you down?

Reflect back on the year and talk about anything and everything related to the books you read in 2022. You do NOT have to limit it to 2022 releases -- anything you read this year counts.

I currently have a hankering for diving into a really long book series, so was hoping to get some recommendations from fellow Tildes users.

The genres I enjoy most are scifi and fantasy, especially darkly themed ones with deep lore, but I'm open to trying anything. The only caveat is that I have absolutely no interest in starting to read a series that hasn't actually finished yet, since at this point I am honestly quite sick of waiting for the next ASOIAF and Kingkiller.

I was considering listing all the longest series I have already read in order to avoid them getting recommended to me again, but I decided against doing that so other people can use this as a resource in case they're also looking for similar recommendations.

p.s. Malazan Book of the Fallen would be my biggest recommendation, BTW. It's by far my favorite dark fantasy series, is a whopping ~3M words, ~11k pages, with hundreds of unique/memorable characters, and an insanely deep lore spanning thousands of years.

Hello! I do a fair bit of my reading via Libby (I have memberships at the NYPL and Brooklyn Public Library) but I like to pick up some physical copies as well. I've spent some time in a couple of NYC bookstores but I'm curious about online portals folks here use to buy books. I've switched to bookshop.org for new books but what's the go to for used books?

Thanks!

So I'm reading Asimov's short-story anthology The Complete Robot, which contains stories written between 1939 and 1977, and I'm fascinated by several instances in which Asimov tries to predict the future of robotics.

When he gets it right is just as interesting as when he gets it wrong, as even when he's wrong, he's wrong in very interesting ways.

For example, it's very interesting how Asimov seems to think that everything must have a positronic brain (which often produces something either identical or very close consciousness), when in reality we now have numerous useful robots that have nothing of the sort.

So this made me thinking, I think I'd like to write a story that was just like that, an exploration of universal themes that is facilitated by simplified technology. A form of retrofuturism. And since I had the idea, obviously someone else had it before. I wanna read it! More recent stories, especially those with old-school robots and artificial intelligence. Any suggestions?

Also open to other medias, but books would be particularly helpful.