Mostly non-fiction books. I am one of the few people in my circles who reads primarily fiction books.
Anyone else read mostly fiction?
Anyone else read mostly fiction?
I reread the tripod trilogy by John Christopher: The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire. Hadn't read them for a while but enjoyed them as always.
Heaven's River by Dennis Taylor is the forth in the Bobiverse series.
Three Laws Lethal by David Walton.
The House of Styx by Derek Künsken took me a while to get into, but then enjoyed it.
The Oppenheimer Alternative by Robert Sawyer. Don't usually like historical fiction but will make an exception for this one.
And for something different, if you want to try rural Australian fiction find anything by Jane Harper, but in particular The Dry and The Lost Man.
I'm currently on book 9 of 12 in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. Also enjoying everything by Brandon Sanderson who I believe to be greatest living fantasy writer, perhaps one of the greatest of all time.
- Rithmatist is my favorite, but is only one book. - Steelheart is a very fun fresh take on super powers. - Skyward is like Dragon's Blood meets Space Invaders - it's great. The third book should be finished this year.
Finally, he does have one middlegrade series which most people seem to overlook: Alcatraz vs The Evil Librarians. It is just awesome, especially for anyone who loves trope busting.
On the other hand, Sanderson's Stormlight Archives made me actually like the genre again.
If you enjoy somewhat grittier fiction, I would suggest Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy.
Agree - I really enjoyed this. I particularly liked that many of the characters who would traditionally be the bad guys are treated sympathetically, and their 'badness' is motivated by their personal circumstance and experience. This is in contrast to the somewhat cliched representation in many stories (fantasy or otherwise) of the bad guys who are evil just because the plot demands it.
I am a huge Rothfuss fan, but dudes taking his sweet time with book 3 of king killer.
(That is, there's no reason why his recommendations would be any worse than anyone else's, but I see no real reason I'd trust his fiction recommendations more than anyone else's -- being in tech doesn't mean we'd have the same taste in fiction.)
He’s claimed to have read a fairly large number of books in 2020. So not on the basis of his writing swift, rather his taste as a reader.
My biggest complaint with non-fiction is that it often starts with a person with a story, who may not be the best writer. Thus, despite the content of the material, the prose can be rather drab. Additionally, no - fiction also falls into the trappings of 'why not just read the synopsis?'.
The non-fiction I love tends to often just be compellingly written textbooks. Eg: DesignOfDesign or Indian after Gandhi OR Blogs (Derek Lowe, Sinocism, SSC)
Fiction simply has a LOT more freedom to experiment with ideas and lets the author disto ideas in a way that non-fiction never can, due to its constraints.
I am good at suspending disbelief, so the emotional attachment for both mediums is pretty equal for me. I know many friends who can't read fiction, because they simply can't get invested in a 'not-real' story.
The whole series is amazing. I doubt though that Bernie would appreciate to be said to "end up in the SS" :)
tldr; looking for recommendations from more recent German novelists translated into English because this American has a hard time finding them.
Not recent at all, but as you mentioned Goethe, the comparatively lower class playwright Friedrich Schiller was considered to be his intellectual equal and rival.
(fiction): A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine, 2020 Hugo Winner. It could be loosely described as a SF political thriller and contains some great characters, good ideas and genuine suspense. The future context of the story is based on the author's Ph.D research into the imperial tension between the intensely sophisticated Byzantine empire and its smaller neighbours in the 11th century.
(non-fiction): Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins. This is the autobiography of the astronaut who stayed in orbit around the Moon while Armstrong and Collins gained the kudos of the first lunar landing. I've read several accounts of the Apollo programme over the years, and this was by far and away the best written. Collin's account of his Gemini 10 mission is also gripping. This involved him spacewalking to an undocked Agena Target Vehicle while John Young was manually formation flying the Gemini spacecraft. Collins had to make sure he wasn't over any of the manoeuvring thrusters that Young might have needed to use to avoid a collision with the Target.
The evolution of my career has been (nonfiction) writer, then (nonfiction) editor, then lawyer, and finally cognitive scientist. Almost all of my adult life has been either writing and reading for study, or writing and reading for work.
Reading is still the #1 thing I do on my own time despite it also being the #1 thing I do for work, but, please, make it pretend. :)
Probably the best books I read in 2020 are Norwegian Wood (Murakami) and Warlight: A Novel (Ondaatje).
> [A Man Lies Dreaming] supposes that the National Socialists lost their bid for Germany in 1933, after which the country fell into the hands of Jewish Communists in an event known as the Fall. Now it's 1939 and an underworld of ex-Nazis has taken root in London, where they are essentially an oppressed minority.
It’s on my list now too. Thanks.
If anyone else has recommendations along these lines of memoirist or novelists with excellent command of beautiful, but very simple English I'd love to hear.
Still not sure I’ll ever read another Western, but this book was a gem. I believe it has been made into films twice, although I did not watch them.
"Piranesi" by Susanna Clarke was great. Minimalist and eerie, with a satisfying science-fantasy plot. Very different in size, scope and theme from Clarke's previous novel, "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell".
"The invisible life of Addie La Rue" by V.E. Schwab. A good character and a good story, but with a couple of tropey elements here and there. I had fun with it, but since I can't remember its end just a couple of months after reading it, suggests that it (the end) might be a little underwhelming.
Gideon the Ninth, & Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.
Delta V by Daniel Suarez (space mining!!!)
Battle Grounds, & Peace Talks (Dresden Files) by Jim Butcher
Bobiverse 1,2 & 3 by Dennis E. Taylor
This was really just nostalgia. But I figured why not, it's 2020.
They're not so good though, I think the series will be better with both books.
We are legion - D. Taylor. A four book series, haven't read the rest of the books.
Children of time - A. Tchaikovsky
The Unicorn Project - G. Kim. This would be especially interesting for the HN crowd. It's not sf per se, rather more than contemporary fiction, but the main theme is about programming and politics in a big corporation. Quite original and a lot of fun.
Agency - W. Gibson
The space between worlds - M. Johnson
To sleep in a sea of stars - C. Paolini
The algebraist - I. Banks
Hope you'll find something to your liking. Happy new year.
I enjoy the occasional history-focused narrative non-fiction, but like to use reading as escapism, so prefer stories.
Exposed or actually read? If you read on average 1 book per month and are aged 50, that's at most 600 books you've read.
There are thousands upon thousands of books that have received awards and are worthwhile (obviously that is subjective but even if you consider 10% to be "worthwhile", there is still a huge corpus), so to say you've been exposed to all the good fiction is unlikely.
I think you need more influences if you are out of ideas. Or you're not trying hard enough.
As for worthwhile, I don't find awards to be strongly correlated with my enjoyment, or reviews for that matter. Actually the best resource I've found in a while is the bestsciencefictionbooks.com website.
In any case, I constantly look for new things to read, and read many things that are just ok, but I just don't have as many strong positives anymore.
Try finding interviews of - or reviews/letters written by - the authors you admire. They'll usually reference some influential authors you can expand into. If a publisher/editor is sufficiently focused, you can recurse in that direction, too.
You can recursively apply this algorithm, adjusting priority by how much you enjoy the authors you've found so far.
This requires a little bit more up-front work, and you have to be willing to tolerate/toss out the occasional dud. But it's worked well for me so far.
The same trick works for movies, and art more generally.
---
For example, see this interview of Karl Ove Knausgaard [1]. From there, you see some names you might recognize (Rene Girard, Rilke, Ibsen, Proust, Borges, Ferrante).
But you also find Paul Celan [2], Sigrid Undset [3], Knut Hamsun [4], Peter Handke [5]
[1]: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/karl-ove-knausga...
[2]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/paul-celan
[3]: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sigrid-Undset
[4]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32587.On_Overgrown_Paths
Try something from a Pulitzer Prize winner, Booker Prize for Fiction , Nobel Prize for Literature, or National Book Award.
For example, John Steinbeck has some amazing novels that are often overlooked. Hemingway. There are many such authors.
Then a few months ago, I read an interesting quote here on HN -- I traced it back to Steinbeck's East of Eden, so I decided to give it a try.
I really truly deeply enjoyed the book. I hesitate to add books to a "favorites of all time" list until at least several months after reading, but it's a definite contender.
As for the different experiences between GoW and EoE, I have to assume that the inconsistency of the reader has a lot to do with it.
So, +1 on the Steinbeck recommendation. And gratitude to the lost-attribution commenter who quoted him!
Hemingway waits patiently on my TODO list.
I need my bolter porn though.