What books do you recommend for someone looking for positive vibes or casual amusement or escape
This was inspired by a conversation in the What are your reading thread. I found myself wanting a larger discussion, so I'm asking here.
This was inspired by a conversation in the What are your reading thread. I found myself wanting a larger discussion, so I'm asking here.
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).
Whatever the case: what’s a book where opinion has flipped, and why do you think people’s opinions changed?
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.
“Your area” is intentionally vague and could be:
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 have a sudden unexplainable urge to learn about how people got through it, and I don't really mind what century or location.
I'm talking about people who couldn't be heroes, who couldn't just leave, and just had to do what they could to survive.
Does anybody know any books that touch on this subject matter?
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.
Watership Down was an early favorite of mine. I also learned a lot from Klemperer's diary of surviving under the nazis.
Next week we will be discussing the City We Became. Our next book discussion after that will be at the end of January.
I've organized this schedule so that longer books are followed by shorter ones. I look forward to reading with you.
Last week in January : Kim Stanley Robinson Ministry for the Future,
Last week in February: Trevor Noah Born a Crime,
Last week in March: Dan Simmons Hyperion,
Last week in April: Adrian Tchaikovsky Elder Race,
Last week in May: Victor LaValle a People's Future of the United States,
Last week in June: T Kingfisher A House with Good Bones,
Last week in July: James McBride the Heaven and Earth grocery Store,
Last week in August: Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Last week in September: Ted Chiang Stories of Your Life and Others
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.
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!
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.
Agent Frank looked up from Saxon’s tablet. “Your file says you’re half Black, half white. Your father’s people can be traced to sale at a South Carolina auction—wow, in 1619!” She looked at Saxon. “Is that correct?”
Saxon nodded. “Our records say he’s descended from the first slaves to set foot in this country. His father’s people have been here longer than most American families.”
Frank smiled. “You’re really lucky that those slaves had a kind master who kept good notes on his inventory.”
Bailey didn’t let his TV persona slip one notch. He had always been calm in the face of racist bait. He met Frank’s eyes and simply nodded; his father’s genealogy was not news to him. After the president signed the Heritage Law, all people of color had scrambled to do genealogical research to justify their place in a country their ancestors built but was suddenly not theirs. They needed proof of at least three generations of forebears in America, preferably descended from slaves.
The sponsors of the Heritage Law presented it as a step toward thanking slaves for building the country. America would thusly reward the slaves’ descendants with citizenship and the right to stay. What the sponsors failed to point out is that millions of other people of color would be deported.
The Heritage Law meant the first-generation Haitian family across the street from Bailey’s parents had been deported just last week. His parents were still trying to clean out their neighbors’ home and put their things in storage before the government claimed the house and everything inside.
It was with relief, not pride or gratitude, that his parents found the information about his many-great grandmother and her sale in Charleston, South Carolina.
“Yes, I’m a legal citizen of America,” Bailey said. His voice was slurred as his swollen lips rallied their troops to muster forth a communication.
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?
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.
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.
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:
@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).
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.
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.
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!
This was partially inspired by kwyfre... (damnit)... @kfwyre's thread on 2024's reading retrospective, partially by talking to @cfabbro and @DefinitelyNotaFae about 2024 being much grimmer than post-scarcity sci-fi, and partially because a lot of my reading is re-reading my favourites.
Whenever I get down about the state of the world, I re-read Iain M. Banks' Culture series, with my favourite reading order. My job can be quite high stress and deal with a lot of casualties, so it is comforting reading stories about hyper-smart machines working with humans to provide a utopia for the vast majority, and intervening to stop barbarism where they can.
For the last couple of years, I've been re-reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, which I think a Tildes user recommended to me. It feels very cozy and happy to me, which I don't often find in sci-fi.
I've found that some people online look down on re-reading as kinda lazy, but I figure it's like finding something great on a menu at your favourite restaurant - you're not being a coward for not trying something new every time.
I used to think my parents were crazy for rewatching old episodes of formulaic detective dramas when they knew the outcome, but as I get older I realise there's a big comfort in knowing what's coming. It's way easier to wind down when you know things are going to be okay (or not, but, you know - at least no depressing surprises).
What are your favourite comfort re-reads?
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.
Tell us about what books you read and, most importantly, why you liked them. The books do NOT have to have been released in 2024. If you read them this year, they still count.
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:
The list of past discussions can be found here:
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.
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.