I've decided to try fantasy bingo this year. The most obviously challenging category for me on the reddit list is the challenge to find a book I will enjoy featuring fiber or fabric crafting or artistry.

Does anyone have suggestions?

I have read and enjoyed Surrender None by Elizabeth Moon which fits but I want to read something new and save rereads for the end of the year if I get stuck. Surrender None fits at least two bingo categories as it is also a story about disrupting systems.

Hello, not sure if this belongs in books? Because I am looking for all forms of story telling (with an emphasis on folk tale, however).

Are there any other stories out there similar to: Sisyphus, "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly", and the Herculean task of slaying the hyrda?

For me the theme is, if you don't deal with the root problem, you're screwed/can't win.

Doesn't have to be English based, but I'll need a translation if it's not.

Thank you in advance!

User and book club ping recipient Maevens said that it would help them if the book and questions were posted to Storygraph, so I created a basic book club template, but I haven't done anything with it yet.

What do you all think? Options include simply posting the book title each month, posting the book title and the discussion questions each month or posting and including a link to the Tildes book club discussion. I'm going to do something minimal regardless, to honor Maevens' request but I want to know what you all think and whether there are things you specifically don't want me to do.

Bottom line, the two book clubs could run in parallel with crossover and links, or they could be essentially separate. Please advise.

Don't think of "rules" in the question as necessarily a hard-and-fast thing (though it certainly can be if you work that way!). It can be interpreted as "guidelines" or "parameters" or "workflow" or whatnot.

I'm interested in learning about what guides your reading habits and choices. Stuff like:

• How do you choose what to read next?
• Do you read one book at a time or jump between multiple titles?
• How/why do you choose between physical/ebook/audiobook for a given title?
• How do you decide to stop reading a book you don't like (if at all)?
• Do you have a specific "spot" for reading?
• Do you have any particular reading rituals?
• When do you decide whether a book is worth a re-read?
• Do you track/rate your books?
• How much do you learn about a book before you read it?
• How do you manage your "TBR" (to be read) list (if at all)?
• etc.

Don't think of this as a survey where you have to answer each question, but more that those questions are all trying to get at the idea that I want to hear about the decisions you make about reading itself. Anything and everything you feel is relevant is fair game!

Hi tildizens, the NYC subway often has posters with a poem and artwork on them which provide some relief from the ads that decorate the trains. On my commute today, I found this poem by Srikanth Reddy quite tantalizing.

Everything

by Srikanth Reddy

She was watching the solar eclipse
through a piece of broken bottle

when he left home.
He found a blue kite in the forest

on the day she lay down
with a sailor. When his name changed,

she stitched a cloud to a quilt
made of rags. They did not meet,

so they never could be parted.
So she finished her prayer,

& he folded his map of the sea.

Unfortunately, the single piece of related online discourse I can find is a two-line comment on a 2008 blog post of the poem. So tell me: do you like this poem? What do you make of it? Is it about a couple that splits up due to infidelity (as Google's gemini ai told me) or people that are connected despite having never met (as Mistral's le chat claims)? What of the kite? Why is it blue? Why might his name have changed? To me, it seems he must be a sailor (but different than the one she lays with?) and she relatively poor. We're reading a lament of a missed connection, perhaps.

I'm about 5 percent into the book Hyperion and I am already noticing that the author is drawing on a rich context of cultural background knowledge from a wide variety of sources and disciplines.

This thread is a place to collect observations about culturally laden content within the book that might enhance understanding. It is not a place to spoil the plot.

No obligation, but feel free to contribute what you see.

(Inspired by some discussion over at the The New Lifetime Reading Plan topic)

Which authors or texts do you feel deserve a place in the literary canon, but don't currently have one?

There is, of course, not one singular, well-defined "canon" -- so interpret "the canon" as "the classics" or "required reading" or "most important works of literature" or however else you care to define it.

In particular, consider areas that the canon tends to overlook: female authors, eastern perspectives, plays (besides Shakespeare's works), etc.

This is the eleventh of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Born a Crime by Trever Noah. Our next book will be Hyperion by Dan Simmons at the end of March.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Thirteen is a difficult age for most. It's a time of transition from childhood into early adulthood.
I'm keen for book recommendations you think a 13-year-old should read. Specific topics I'm keen to be covered, either directly or through metaphor, are:

• Confidence
• Development
• Fitness / Nutrition / Physical Health
• Mental Health
• Finance
• Ethics

But really, anything you think one could tackle at that age and benefit from having read the content.

I've specified boy, because it is a boy who I wish to pass these recommendations on to, and I think that perhaps the advice would be different for a girl.

I’m jumping off of the controversy about the release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman mentioned here.

Regarding the question: it means that something stood in the way of that particular book “getting out” but, for better or for worse, it did. This could be the author’s direct wishes, government or publisher censorship, it being found or leaked, etc.

• What are some of those books?
• Are they worth looking into?
• Does the fact that we weren’t “supposed” to read them change how we understand or appreciate them?
• If the author themself didn’t want their works published (such as Kafka), what do we have to take into account when deciding to go against those wishes?
• What do we gain/lose by respecting/ignoring those wishes?

Also, I’m open to answers that involve parts of books rather than the whole books themselves, since I know there are many books out there that were partially censored or edited and have since been restored.

The flip can be from widely liked to widely disliked, or it can go the opposite direction.

Also, it doesn’t have to be based solely on the book itself (though it certainly can be).

• Maybe the actions of the author changed the perception of the book.
• Maybe a bad sequel tanked the esteem of the original story in hindsight.
• Maybe cultural changes now cast the book in a different light.
• etc.

Whatever the case: what’s a book where opinion has flipped, and why do you think people’s opinions changed?

I'm looking for a book I read in middle school where people are factory farmed for their parts before they hit puberty by organic mech of some sort, but the protagonist escapes and is hunted but is able to hide in an abandoned (ship?) with some others and starts to fight back? For the life of me, my search skills are failing.

I haven’t read many books that explore unreliable narrators. I would love some recommendations.

I'm looking for your short stories, novelettes and novellas, and to a lesser extent novels too, that directly speak to the politics and social realities of today.

https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/rabbit-test/ was a short story I shared here about 18 months ago that directly dealt with abortion restrictions and the future created from them.

Another user shared Better Living through Algorithms for a more optimistic sort of take on "AI"

And recently I was reminded of Mur Lafferty's The Ophelia Network, a novella which features a dystopian society where one of the changes from today was the Heritage Law. People of color needed to prove ancestory at least three generations, "preferably" descended from slaves. This plot point runs mostly in the background through the story but pops up occasionally.

I can think of a bunch of novels that say big things. The Handmaids Tale, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 etc. But I find shorter works tend to be more responsive to current events and often more cutting for their shorter length. I'd also suggest trying to avoid really common novel recs and focus on niche novels or shorter (also typically more niche I guess) works. But I'm not the boss of you.

Share your recs? Link them here if they're free to read online?

The time loop topic has a few entries of media where the time loop is a twist/spoiler, and made me think of how hard it is to recommend books/media where the reveal is part of what makes it impactful.

Two I can think of off the top of my head are

• The Girl with all the Gifts by Mike Carey

• We are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Very different genres and topics and I can't at all think of how to describe either one without spoiling it.

“Your area” is intentionally vague and could be:

• Your community
• Your town/city
• Your region
• Your state
• Your country
• Your area of the world
• Your career
• Your area of study
• Your expertise
• Your interest
• Your hobby
• Your generation
• Your identity
• Your language
• etc.

Basically, it’s something that is specific to you, but that you think still would be interesting to people outside of “your area.”

Both fiction and nonfiction alike are valid. Also, be sure to explain why you think the book has appeal beyond its range.

I’m in between books now, and would like to ask for some suggestions for new books to look at. I use a Kindle and the Kindle app for books usually, so it shouldn’t be difficult to find most books on Amazon.

I’m very close to finishing the Stormilight Archives by Brandon Sanderson and well into The Harrowing by James Aitcheson where i really enjoy both a lot. So if you’ve either read The Harrowing or any of the Sanderson books I’d love some recommendations on books who are in the same vein as these.

Thank you in advance!

This is the tenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Our next book will be Born a Crime by Trevor Noah at the end of February.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

My wife and I are planning on reading the Odyssey this year and we have to pick an translation. I've always struggled to read in translation, mostly because I get paralyzed choosing — it feels like a big choice, and if I end up not liking the book I can never tell if it was inherent to the story or because of the translation.

Can anyone help me out here? I don't mind if it is prose vs poetry, but we are doing this for fun, so I would prioritize readability over faithfulness to the Greek. I don't want anything that sounds too modern, but I also don't want to have very modern language take me out of the epic setting. I am currently leaning the Wilson translation, based on some excerpts I have read, but I am open to being convinced otherwise. Thanks!

EDIT:

Thank you to all who recommended some translations. I am narrowed down to between Fagles and Wilson, and intend to do some side by side comparisons to choose a final one before diving in!

Happy New Year friends and fellow readers. In approximately two weeks we will be discussing Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

How's it going? I got started just after Christmas and it was such a tense fast paced book that I finished within a week.

Ok so I'm enjoying the hard SF thread but what I really enjoy about SF is the sociology, anthropology and psychology more than the tech and whether or not the wormhole is sciency enough.

Here's a wiki article on "social science fiction" for more context. There's definitely some overlap with both hard and soft SF, but I'm not looking for a rec just because it happens to be more space opera. I'm interested because of the themes of the work. Ursula Le Guin, Sherri Tepper, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood are some of the key classic authors I've read in this arena but I'm looking for who I've overlooked. Plenty of YA work fits here especially post Hunger Games but I'd mostly request adult works unless it's a very strong YA novel (Hunger Games itself holds up very well IMO actually). I'd say Becky Chambers - who's also put into the solar punk/hope punk subgenres - is a good example of more anthropological feeling modern work.

Some things don't age well - I really enjoy Tepper's Gate to Women's Country for its exploration of a post apocalyptic world where most men live outside the city in barracks, women live inside the city with the few men that choose to return to their mothers' homes, and only during festivals do the men and women get together with a chance for procreating. But it's an anti-sex worker world and one where homosexuality was "fixed" with a wave of a historical genetic hand.

I'd love to know your recs and maybe what perspectives it gave you or that it exemplifies well. If there's stuff that doesn't age well due to science changing or cultural values changing maybe just note that, sometimes they're still quite good reads with that context.

Hello! Could you please recommend some hard science fiction books? I am struggling to find a good one. My favorites are Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts, but I have failed to find anything similar.

I also enjoyed The Martian by Andy Weir and The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, though in my opinion, these aren't quite what I would call hard science fiction.

Additionally, I enjoyed books that blend fiction and non-fiction, like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

What are your favorite hard science fiction books?

This question is inspired by two things:

1. @carsonc’s comment in the hard sci-fi topic about Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars starting off in 2026 (which is right around the corner).

2. I started reading Ministry for the Future (coincidentally also by Kim Stanley Robinson) for the Tildes Book Club, and the titular organization starts in, of all times, January 2025 (as in, right now! The book was a perfect pick for this month).

It got me thinking about how a lot of science and speculative fiction books from the past imagined a future ahead of themselves, and how the passage of time has brought us to or even past those imagined futures.

So I’m interested in specific date milestones from fiction that we have met or passed already. They do not have to specifically be from science/speculative fiction, though I imagine most will be.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby celebrates its 100th anniversary this month.

It got me thinking: what are the books from our time that you think might be widely read/taught a century from now? What do you think will give them that kind of staying power?

No hard limits on what counts as “contemporary” by the way. An easy cutoff would be anything released in 2000 and on, but if there are books from before then that you have strong feelings about, by all means share them!

I've been thinking about this question lately. We have so many options for consuming literature these days - checking something out from the library, listening to it on your platform of choice, etc. Many options don't require spending money specifically on that item (for example, if you use the library, Kindle Unlimited, or other options where you might pay for a subscription but not for a particular item).

For me, because of this abundance of choice in consumption for free, I've started to feel a bit paralyzed by decision fatigue when trying to decide if I want to purchase a book - either physical or digital. Digital is easier to make a final call on - I'll check the library. If they don't have it, I may or may not buy it in digital form, depending on how compelled I am by reviews or peer pressure. Recently, I've been snagging anything interesting-looking that is available for free on Kindle, so my digital purchasing might increase in the future, or I might subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.

But physical? Recently, physical books have come to mean a couple of things to me: first, clutter. I am less likely to accept even a free book because we don't have room to hang onto something I'm not actively invested in. We have two bookshelves and they're both full. Second, owning (and keeping) a physical book says that it's special to me in some manner - I either really like it or wanted to support the author or both. When I do buy a physical book, I try to buy from a local bookstore (though I'm not amazing at this yet). I just preordered two books after maybe a month of debating and comparing purchasing avenues. (Meanwhile, I purchased a set of 8 children's books at 6 am yesterday because I dreamed about a character from them... so my decisions aren't always rational!)

What are your criteria for buying books? Feel free to share how you make your decisions for any format - and also anything about your personal setup that might make decisions for you!

This is the ninth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing The City We Became by N K Jemisin. Our next book will be Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson at the end of January.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Hey folks,

Since we're not reading a book this month, I thought it might be nice to have a short retrospective of the last year instead.

As some of you may know, the book club originally started back in 2023 with a "pop-up event" hosted by @cfabbro. We read Roadside Picnic after a few users expressed interest in the title. The discussion had some great comments, and that helped lay the groundwork for making the book club a regular feature.

A few months later, @boxer_dogs_dance kicked the book club off proper in January 2024 with the first nomination thread. Cloud Atlas was selected based on voter interest and ideal library wait times. Despite being a difficult first book, participation was still high and has remained so for each month thereafter.

Boxer has since organized numerous nomination and voting threads, helped establish our format and rules, and has created many discussion prompts for each book. Huge thanks to you for the efforts, @boxer_dogs_dance!

Onto some stats for 2024:

• Books Read: 9
• Total Pages: 3,277 (average of 364 per book)
• Unique Contributors: 59 (or 140 total, when counting returning participants)
• Total Comments: 476 (across 121 top-level threads)
• Nominations Submitted: 102
• Votes Cast: 508
• Repeat Nominations: 11 titles were nominated twice, and 6 were eventually chosen. Perseverance pays off!

The list of past discussions can be found here:

• March: Cloud Atlas
• April: Piranesi
• May: The Dispossessed
• June: Project Hail Mary
• July: Ocean at the End of the Lane
• Aug: Small Gods
• Sep: This is How You Lose the Time War
• Oct: Kindred
• Nov: The City We Became

A big thank you to all who have participated, helped organize, commented, or quietly read along! You folks are what make the Tildes community so great.

So just to be clear, this isn't a nomination thread or an official post. I just thought it might be nice to look back, recap our progress, and maybe touch on some of the best picks from the last year.

What were your favourite reads from this past year? What are you looking forward to most in 2025?

See you all in January when we kick off 2025 with Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future!

This is the fourth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Project Hail Mary. Our next book will be Ocean at the End of the Lane around the end of July.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Hello Tildes! I often find myself intimidated by authors of great sagas, trilogies upon trilogies, and dozens of standalone novels. How do I know which book (or series) to read first?

I've been recommended Terry Pratchett and Brandon Sanderson recently. I've read zero novels by either author. I've also been warned that there is a definitive best place in the canon to start, "and it's this one!" But then someone else interjects and says, "no, it's this one!" followed by passionate reasoning. Okay. If it is really worth starting somewhere in particular, where should I begin?

I'm unlikely to read an author's entire corpus. I just have too many books to read and not enough time. But I'm not opposed to reading longer series if they're really fun. I'd appreciate any input about these authors in particular and this problem in general. Thanks!

This will be the final topic in the series. (Sorry about the confusion!)

This one is about short books that have more heft than you would think from their size alone.

As before, there are no hard requirements on what counts as “short.”

We just looked at long and short series -- now it's time to do the same for individual books!

What's a long book that's worth its long page count?

Like before, I'm leaving length entirely open to interpretation.

I recently finished The Bonehunters, the 6th book in Malazan Book of the Fallen and taking the advice of @DynamoSunshirt I decided to post this to see the thoughts and opinions of everyone here on this book in the series, and by extension how it builds upon the previous books.

I've felt like each book in the series has drawn me further in, and this was no exception. One thing that I've found in reading large scale series with multiple POVs is that there are often ones that I'm not interested in or find less appealing than others while reading it and look forward to getting back to my favorite characters. There wasn't a single character in this volume, and so far in Malazan, that I wasn't interested in following.

I'm wrapping up my work day and don't have a lot of time to write out all my thoughts on the book but wanted to get this posted while it was on my mind and then add in more later.

I loved seeing so many potlines from the previous books start coming together.

The siege of Y'Ghatan was completely unexpected and was riveting to read, it being one of the longer chapters in the book kept me up late one night because I had to see how it wrapped up!

The end of the book felt like we were witnessing a pivotal moment and what seemed like a rapid fall of the empire. So many injustices with the Wican Pogrom and how the Chain of Dogs was being treated. I was honestly rooting for Tavore to usurp Laseen.

Heboric's potline feels like it is not completed and that the Jade Statue and all of those souls will have an impact on the storyline later on. I'm also left wondering what Hood wanted from Ganoes as part of the deal to let Heboric out of Hood's realm.

Karsa Orlong continues to be awesome and has become of my favorite characters. His self-assurance and introspection along with the seeming threat to civilization he represents is fantastic. I also saw a reference towards the end of the book about certain Tobalki possessing warrens of their own. I'm curious if he has reached that point and how exactly that works with all the other mysteries of the magic in this world.

I have a friend who has already read all 10 books, and I've been bouncing ideas/predictions off of him which has been great.

I am currently starting book 7 and would appreciate if any spoilers for the following books, or other books in the Malazan setting, are avoided.

Sibling topic: What long book series is worth its page count?

What short series does such a good job that it feels long and substantial? What short series punches above its page count?

Just like last time, I won’t put a qualifier on “short” and leave that open to interpretation.