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.

I'm interested to know what are some series you think are worth reading all the way through -- especially if someone is less likely to start them because of how long they are in the first place.

I'm going to leave series length completely up to interpretation and not set a specific minimum number of books/pages/words. If you think it's long but worth a read all the way through, then it's worth sharing here!

I'm looking for something new to read, so I'm just selfishly posting this in the hopes that it works.

Doesn't have to be your all-time favourite I guess, if you can't decide. Feel free to do multiple books too, or maybe just whichever is on your mind a lot recently.

I’m looking for a book recommendation. I loved the name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss, but I have accepted he is unlikely to ever write the third book. My favourite part of the story is the university bits. I also enjoyed Harry Potter and the Arcane Ascension series for similar reasons.
Does anyone have any suggestions for something similar? Thanks!

This thread is an opportunity to vote between a couple of options I see for our spring schedule based on the votes received in the two voting threads.

Please vote for one of them by upvoting. If anyone wants to propose an alternative reasonable set of books based on the numbers in the voting thread, for the consideration of the group, please feel free.

Our next discussion will be the City We Became and we will be discussing in early December.

It is time to vote for our minority and disadvantaged perspective books for the next book list.

Please vote for only two books this time after Deimos adds the books as comments.

Thanks for reading with us. I look forward to discovering some great books with you this year.

This is a first attempt at a nomination thread for books targeting this group's stated desire to read books representing minority, or diverse or disadvantaged perspectives and experiences.

I'm drawing the boundaries of the category as broadly as I can and feel free to include a book (within the length limit of 600 pages) that you think fits within these parameters. Also, diverse or minority or disadvantaged can apply to either or both of author or main character.

Here is my attempt to find examples of what we might choose. This is not meant to be a set of hard boundaries, just a descriptive exploration.

Books that qualify include but are not limited to: being from a poor or formerly colonized country, being an immigrant or refugee, being a political/ethnic minority such as basque, tibetan, romani or catalan or kurdish, being indigenous, being poor or ethnic minority in a dominant country, being a sexual/gender minority, being disabled etc.

$14 USD for new novels. $10 for novels from the 1970s, riddled with OCR errors.

Yes, I know you aren't paying for the "paper", you are paying for the content.

Yes, I know authors and people who work for publishers need to pay rent. I know servers cost money. Those costs and reasonable profits are more than covered several times over in eBook prices.

I recently switched over my reading platform from Kobo to BookFusion. BookFusion lets you upload your own ebook files and sync them between devices, so I spent a lot of time de-DRMing my Kobo library and porting it over, as well as adding in some old de-DRMed books from my old Kindle.

For "traditional" titles I plan on still buying them on Kobo and then just stripping the DRM and transferring them over, but I also know there's an entire internet out there full of non-traditional publishing:

• Authors who sell their ebooks directly to consumers (e.g. Cory Doctorow)
• Publishers who sell ebooks directly to consumers (e.g. Boss Fight Books, Topatoco)
• Ebook bundle sites (e.g. StoryBundle)
• Public domain works (e.g. Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks)
• Assorted other stuff that doesn't really fit a simple category (e.g. this Planescape: Torment novelization)

I'm interested in adding some of these to my library, given that it feels like the "spirit" of BookFusion is to bring your own organic grassfed files, rather than glom them off of a DRMed service like I have been doing.

The hard part is that discoverability for stuff like this is really tough, since they're sort of just scattered across the internet. Furthermore, when I do tend to find stuff, I tend to find entire catalogs rather than individual titles. It's hard to know what's worth diving into from entire collections. That's why I'm hoping people can help me out by pointing me in the direction of specific stuff that they've loved!

With regards to recommendations, I want to leave the topic open to anything and everything. I don't want to limit this topic to just my tastes, in case other people find it useful.

If people do want to tailor some recommendations to me though, I tend to love sci-fi, nonfiction, LGBTQ stuff, videogame-related books, and comics/graphic novels (but only if the series are completed).

Important note: I am NOT looking for pirated books. I'm happy to pay for books I'm interested in, especially if they're supporting independent authors/publishers or online hobbyists.

This is the eighth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Kindred by Octavia Butler. Our next book will be The City We Became by Jemisen the first week of December.

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, I'm trying to pull back a bit from the present news cycle, so I'm looking for some alternatives. My brain often is looking for some stimulation that isn't something huge and meaty, so I figured short stories and novellas could be helpful in particular. If you have something long that's great, feel free to toss that in as well.

I like short stories that depict interesting and different worlds, though they don't need to be particularly detailed. Stories with positive (or at least not miserable) endings would probably be better for my mood. For some examples, I liked the I, Robot stories, particularly the first one with Grace and Robbie, They're Made out of Meat, Flatland, The Year Without Sunshine. I'm realizing that is kind of Sci fi heavy, but that might just be because there are more Sci fi short stories I've bumped into, a lot from links elsewhere on the internet.

For some examples of novels and series that I've liked, Cradle by Will Wight, Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, Scholomance by Naomi Novik, Ender's Game. Recently, I liked Tomorrow and Tommorow and Tomorrow, and Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin, but I don't know if I could handle that level of sad right now. For historical fiction,the only examplez I can think of right now are A Woman of Independent Means, and a Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but I used to read a lot of it when I was younger.

Books I didn't like, but loved aspects of are Babel (I absolutely loved the setting, the book itself felt like it was beating you up with a cudgel), The School for Good mothers (I enjoyed the exploration of what Good motherhood is, and how mothers are judged by society, I disliked how disjointed the actual plot was).

I tend not to like stories where most or all characters are hard to have empathy for -- I hated A Catcher in the Rye, and loathed the Arthur Miller plays I had to read in school. I can get impatient with stories that keep the world vague for a very long time, like Never Let Me Go.

So, any recommendations?

I read thinking in systems a primer by Donella Meadows and really found it interesting. I have been struggling to find a follow up book about systems aimed at a reader with intermediate but non specialist Knowledge of systems thinking. They are all either to basic, too advanced, or so dry it’s impossible to concentrate. Has anyone found a good follow on book for this book?
I appreciate this might be a bit of a niche topic!

It's time to vote. This thread is for voting on the next set of books for book club. Voting will close end of day Sunday.

If you would like to read with us, please upvote as many as five titles. We will select at least four, probably more if there are books with solid support. I look forward to reading and discussing with you all.

There are a few people who voted before the thread was complete so books with authors earlier in the alphabet got a slight statistical advantage. I will take lessons for next time to avoid this.

So I have been reflecting on the statements of many members of this book reading group that they want to include books from diverse perspectives. Talking about next year and looking at our current voting results, I see three options and I would like us to vote on which the group prefers.

First, we could accept a very long list from this voting thread and cut off choices just after Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. That would delay new nominations for over a year.

Second, we could elevate Heaven and Earth Grocery Store and possibly Demon Copperhead to the top of the list in a sort of affirmative action.

Third, we could agree that our next nomination thread (for a smaller list of books) would exclusively be taken from groups that are disadvantaged in some way. An incomplete list of such disadvantage would include being from a poor or formerly colonized country, being an immigrant or refugee, being a political/ethnic minority such as basque, romani or catalan or kurdish, being indigenous, being poor or ethnic minority in a dominant country, being a sexual/gender minority, being disabled etc.

This is the third nominations thread for Tildes book club.

If you think you might be interested to read with us, please name between one and five books you find intriguing and think others might enjoy. We will later have a voting thread so that each nomination gets an equal shot to win votes with no early nomination advantage. After we finish discussing Kindred this month and the City We Became at the end of November, we will move on to read the new titles.

Please feel free to nominate both fiction and nonfiction and consider nominating a diverse selection of books and authors. Books should be 600 pages or shorter. The first books in series are fair game for nominations if they tell a complete story.

Howdy,

Just this morning I got a wild hair and started thinking about replacing my older Kindle Paperwhite, mostly because something with a a USB-C port would be nice to have. I'm still not sure I'll actually do this, as my Kindle works just fine, occasionally needing a reboot is about the extent of it, as well as the reading time can get janky here and there.

Based on what I'm reading about Kobo, it seems like it offers a bunch of features I'll never use or be interested in. I do not care about customization. I don't borrow from the library. I don't mind buying from Amazon. I rarely read books more than once, so I almost never go back through my collection to see what I have. I don't like ads (I have a PiHole, for example), but the ads on Kindle don't bother me, my brain skips over them, never even noticing. And by casual reader, I mean I read maybe 5-10 books a year, so my Kindle often just sits by my bedside, gathering dust for a spell.

Basically all I do is pick up my Kindle, unlock it and get back to reading whatever I had been, then close the case and set it aside. I like that I can read on the Kindle app on my phone if I've forgotten my Kindle at home. I do read lots of samples on it.

Kobo seems nice and I like an excuse to migrate away from a major corporation, but it's more expensive than a Kindle (I've bought both my Kindles I've owned, used for $40) and seems to offer little that I care about over the Kindle. I'm well aware I can transfer my purchases over, but I'm not sure I care or want to bother with the hassle, so I'm wondering if a Kobo would be at all the right choice and am looking for opinions.

Thanks!

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.

I used the Kindle ecosystem for a while before souring on Amazon. Now I’m bought into the Kobo ecosystem, which is great in some ways but frustrating in others.

I’m curious if there’s a sort of DIY book cloud platform out there. I’ve come across a few, but they all seem to lack what, to me, is the killer feature of the Kobo/Kindle platforms:

Cross-syncing between mobile (iOS), ereader, and web reader

Most of the ones I’ve found can do this with some of those devices, but not all three.

I ask because I regularly hop between reading on different devices to the point that I avoid reading books that I can’t do this with (e.g. all my DRM free books, physical books, etc.). I’ve even re-bought books I already own in other formats just so I can have them inside the “sync loop” because it’s so much easier for me. I’d rather not have to do that though.

Are there any independent options out there that cover this use case? I primarily want to use it for DRM free books I got from bundles, as well as books that I de-DRMed from my Kindle. I would also happily buy a different ereader device that supports this (currently I use a Kobo Forma).

Meta note: wasn’t sure if this topic was better in ~books or ~tech — feel free to move it if needed!