Ask Lemmy

I read a lot of fantasy when I was younger but gradually fell out of love with the genre. It started to feel really trope heavy and I got tired of everything feeling like it needed to be a 3-5+ novel epic series that was so enamored with its own world-building it felt more like a history lesson. Perhaps my choices on reading material were to blame, but still. I moved onto sci-fi and fiction for a good while.

I've been trying to rekindle my passion for it with one off "weird" fiction. Standalone stories that are just interested in doing weird stuff, whatever that may entail. It's not well-defined and if anyone has any recommendations I'd be happy to hear them but so far some of my best discovies,

• The West Passage, Jared Pechaček. A palace the size of a city ruled over by giant, eldritch ladies and mired in ancient bureaucracies is threatened by a forgotten prophecy. I like it because it doesn't overexplain its world, it just throws a bunch of interesting events and scenery at you while gesturing at the architecture of the world that holds it up, leading you to speculate on the mystery of it all.
• The Starving Saints, Caitlin Starling. Claustrophobic, horrifying, vaguely sapphic. It follows the storylines of a knight, a nun, and a peasant girl trapped in a castle under siege. As supplies diminish and things are looking grim, their saints miraculously appear to save them but not all is at it appears etc. etc. Just a good read, I liked this one a lot
• Currently reading: Mad Sisters of Esi, Tashan Mehta. This one got off to a bit of an uneven start but it's an interesting mashup of myth and sci-fi where the universe is referred to as the black sea, planets are islands, and spaceship may be literally ships with sails. Not done with it yet, but enjoying it as it has strong characters and a good emotional core.

Favourites include Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, Susanna Clarke's Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings series, Ursula K Le Guin's Hainish cycle.

Currently reading Le Guins Dispossessed.

I’ve been on a scifi binge. MurderBot on audio is worth your time. After Atlas was quite good, stands out from the rest. Timothy Zahn’s Icarus series was fun.

As for fantasy it’s been a slog. We need better search parameters. It took the book people forever to separate scifi and fantasy, but there’s still work to do. Paranormal romance is there for some reason and clutters up Libby’s ability to search. That, and it feels like there’s a glut of books involving either the fae or dragons right now, and little else, not unlike the vampire thing 2 decades ago.

Favourites include Lord of the Rings, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin series, Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy.

Currently reading Bleak House.

I got back into reading through Dungeon Crawler Carl and now that I'm finished with that, I started to read The Colour of Magic because the discworld novels where recommended to me. Though I find as a non native english speaker the writing a little bit more challenging than DCC.

currently listening to the 4th book in the children of time series

i love these books

Right now I'm reading Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism by Kwame Nkrumah. It's a really good expansion of Lenin's work on Imperialism as a stage in capitalism. Nkrumah was coup'd one year after its publishing with support from the US.

As for favorites, I really love both Piranesi and Roadside Picnic! The former is just a really fun mystery with a good deal of whimsy, the latter is excellent sci-fi.

Favorite\
The 120 Days of Sodom /jk

The Silmarillion

Reading now\
The Silmarillion

The flowers of evil ( akunohana , Japanese) (manga) by Shuzo Oshimi

Picking up after having finished the above\
Les Fleurs du mal

My user name is the title of a book by my favourite author, Jonathan Carroll. He's highly underrated but also a cult favourite. I couldn't pick between his books.

Another favourite book is an old humour novel by the writer Patrick Dennis, whose most well known book was Auntie Mame. However the best of his books IMO was The Joyous Season, it was written in the 1950s and so some of the language in his books is a bit antique (like using Negro as a descriptor), but honestly there's not a funnier book in my opinion, I reread it last month, and I realized that I still routinely say lines from it in my daily life.

Finally a great book is The Speed Queen by Stewart O'Nan, it's dark and a tough topic to read about but it's so captivating. All of his books are really worth reading. Last Night At The Lobster, Snow Angels, Ocean State, Wish You Were Here, Songs For The Missing, Evensong, The Names Of The Dead, The Good Wife, The Odds, Emily Alone, are my particular favorites, all pretty gritty.

The Trial - Franz Kafka The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood Fight Club - Chuck Palahnuik Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

I do read new stuff, on occasion, but at the moment they are one and the same: the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I just picked it back up and I already noticed something new. At Bilbo's 111th birthday party, Tolkien describes the dragon firework as passing "like an express train", which struck me as an odd turn of phrase that I'd never noticed before.

I don't read books much anymore. Combo of internet and my close vision getting worse. I like piers anthony a lot as a general story teller and wheel of time although I only read the books jordan wrote and did not finish off the series. Honestly though there are tons of authors with great books.

My favorite are the Kushiel trilogy, anything by Ian McDonald, almost anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky or Michael Carey. Though it's difficult to pick.

Currently reading The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.

Among my favorites I remember: Gideon the ninth, slavery by another name, worst journey in the world, anything by Ted Chiang, blindsight/echopraxia

Recent reads: little bosses everywhere (excellent), no more tears (also excellent), get in trouble (I really like parts of it but it's classic Kelly link, super weird and abrupt)

My favorite series is Dungeon Crawler Carl . Its so good. I have ALL of the physical books, the audio books (Jeff Hays is hilarious with his takes on the different characters).

My favorite book soap is The Wandering Inn . Its a free web serial and I find it VERY good. But it can have some lulls. I call it a "book soap" because if its size . I am a prolific reader and it took me YEARS to get though around 50% of the series. I have the ebooks, audio-books, and have enjoyed my forever book. The payoff is SO good. Tears of Liscor broke me. I had to take time off of reading for a while due to what felt like a bit of trauma.

When I was a kid, I loved the ring of fire series ( 1632 and such). I dont enjoy it as much, but the older books in the series I still enjoy re-reading from time to time.

Jumping between 1984 and Inkspell when 1984 gets to bleak.

My favorite is probably The Books of the North of The Black Company series. The rest are good too but the first 3 are great.

Currently I'm reading the bakemonogatari series just finished kizu. Only started because my friend sent me a screenshot of him listening to the audio book but then he gave up cause it's too complicated to listen to in the background.

Favorites: the book version of the blog Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh and also The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Currently reading Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell and the new Penguin Classics translation of Towazugatari/A Tale Unasked by Lady Nijo, translated by Meredith McKinney.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch is one of my all time favorite fiction books and I'm re-listening to the audiobook right now.

How not to Die by Dr. Michael Gregor is one of my favourite non-fiction books, containing a great summary of our current scientific knowledge in nutritional science.

Don't know if mangas count, but I've caught up with Berserk a few months ago. Greate story and art, can't wait on the next volume thats coming out in a few months.

Currently reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams, about her time at Facebook. Only 50 pages in, but pretty interesting so far. Started with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it's just to hard to follow what is happening lol. And I've just ordered 1984.

Right now, I am reading Neuromancer by William Gibson (physical book) and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky (e-book), as well as listening to Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (audiobook).

I haven't gotten far enough into Neuromancer to form an opinion yet, but I'm enjoying the other two books. Children of Ruin is the second book in a series about future humans trying to speed up evolution on distant planets and dealing with the consequences thousands of years later. Alexander Hamilton is a biography on the US founding father from childhood until his death. It has a lot of interesting facts I never knew.

I have a hard time picking just one favorite of anything, but I think my favorite book might be World War Z by Max Brooks or Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer.

World War Z is a novel about a zombie apocalypse. It stands out from other books in the genre by having a frame narrative where a journalist is compiling a bunch of interviews with survivors telling their stories. Each chapter is its own short story with new characters from everywhere on the globe, and you get a lot of different perspectives this way. If you pick up the audiobook, each chapter is voiced by a different person, and there are some famous people lending their voices.

Annihilation is about a mysterious zone that appears in a remote wilderness. Things in the zone begin to act strangely and mutate into otherworldly objects. Over time, a government agency closes down the area and begins sending in expeditions to try to discover its secrets.