Ask Lemmy

The bridge trilogy.

I'm on my 13th or so read of Blindsight. Think I've unpacked it all, finally. I feel like a fruitcake having read it and *Echopraxia" so many times, but damn they're deep.

Not a fan of all of Watt's novels, but those two feel like he packed something to think about into nearly every single sentence. Easy read if you want to go fast, or, take your time and dig in. Never read a novel(s) that could go both ways.

Fuck me. Just talking about it is getting me hype for another run.

Blindsight:

"I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.

To this day, I still don't know what went wrong.”

Echopraxia:

“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

I have all discworld books, I would definitely reread most of them. I just reread The Hail Mary Project.

Project Hail Mary was amazing. Can't wait for the movie too.

The Murderbot diaries.

This is also an awesome thread. I see a lot of books I love and a lot that I'm interested in.

Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

The philosophical strangler by Eric Flint, absolutely.

Several that others have already mentioned, and:

• The Golden Age Oecumene, by John C Wright
• The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, by Barry Hughart
• Any and all of The Culture novels
• The Hobbit, and TLotR trilogy. Used to read them every summer, for about twenty years.
• Armor, by John Steakley. Sadly, the only sci-fi novel he ever wrote, and one of only two books he ever authored, IIRC.
• The Jean le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is on my list to read again this year.
• A Wizard of Earthsea trilogy, which I'm about to read again as soon as my wife finished them.
• The Chronicles of Narnia, which I used to read frequently when younger. I'm almost afraid to pick them up again now, for fear that they won't be as good (for an adult) as I remember.

Adam Levin's The Instructions

Ecclesiastes

Philip K. Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer — actually most Dick outside of A Scanner Darkly

Neal Stephenson's... well, anything, but especially Zodiac, Anthem, and Diamond Age

Brian Daley's Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds

Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood and The Blind Assassin

Anything by Ursula LeGuin, ever

Hugh McLeod's Ignore Everybody

Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series

Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Trilogy

The Dark Tower series. All of them

Lord Of The Rings.
He Who Fights With Monsters.
Thrawn.
The Hunt For Red October.
The Cardinal of the Kremlin.

So many I will give another listen to.

Most of The Culture series

A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - Becky Chambers

Nobody has yet mentioned A Gentleman in Moscow, so I will. It's fairly recent, but I know I'll read it again in a couple of years.

Speaker for the Dead

Eisenhorn

Count of Monte Cristo

The Emperor of All Maladies

Moby Dick

Lords of Silence

All Honorable Men: History of the war in Lebanon

Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology

The Biology of Cancer (Weinberg)

Japan to 1600

History of Medieval Russia (Martin)

The Baltic: A History

On War (Clausewitz)

The Back Channel

Timbuktu (Villiers)

Sorry if this is too many, just looked at my book app for ones I keep reading.

Edit: Fuck it, I'm having fun. Here are a few more I remembered while roasting a bowl.

Dune

Amulet of Samarkand

Venice (Madden)

The Golden Compass

First and Only (Abnett) - read the first omnibus

Harrisons Manual of Medicine 18th ed

Gomorrah (Saviano)

The Gunpowder Age (Tonio)

The Money Illusion (Sumner)

Just done a reread of these and would gladly reread again.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (all 5 books in the series)

They are short enough that you could easily read all of them in a couple months at a steady pace.

Books. Multiple.

The Practice Effect by David Brin. It's an isekai (it's not anime, but it's an isekai) where things get MORE useful when you use them, reversing entropy.

Sentenced to Prism. MC is sent on a mission to a world inhabited by silicate based life forms. Shenanigans ensue. Mildly autistic coded MC.

Resurrection Inc. The dead are resurrected as mindless zombie robots. Sometimes it goes wrong and the dead regain their memories. The MC does. Hijinks ensue.

edit - more

Mistborn Chronicles - an orphan gets super powers in a very messed up world. A group recruits her for a heist.

World War Z has hit differently after major life stages: College, marriage, kids, global pandemic, etc.

Also, I keep meaning to make time to re-read some required reading books from HS: Where the Red Fern Grows, Call of the Wild, Flowers for Algernon. It's probably all going to be painfully YA, but I've thought about the stories often over my life, and they deserve a re-read.

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

I re-read it a few times already, and even though written in the 50s it holds up quite well (except for the total absence of computers). Its a brilliant read. Edit: to clarify, I meant the societal trends he projected are quite fascinating. Also the transition to a post scarcity society. It's not very prophetic obviously. :)

Too many to count. Foundation trilogy, anything by Heinlein, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke or various other classic sci fi writers, any Conan book or story, any Jeeves book or story, The Mote in God's Eye by Niven & Pournelle, Mary Lasswell's Mrs. Feeley books (pretty obscure), anything by HP Lovecraft...

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Easier to say which books I WOULDN'T read again.

The Art of War in the Middle Ages. Just interminable.

There was another book, I can't recall the name of it unfortunately. It was about ethical non-monogamy but went into such blatantly STUPID territory that I classed it as "should not be set aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force."

One of the more stupid statements was about how gangbang porn is prevalent (multiple men, one woman), but the inverse doesn't exist. I was like "Fuck off, you aren't looking very hard then..."

Edit My wife assures me it was "Sex at Dawn".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_at_Dawn

I’m not a big rereader, but at some point I’d like to read through the expanse and the locked tomb again

I should probably give The Illuminatus! Trilogy another read.

The Dispossessed

Left Hand of Darkness

I plan to reread all Clive Barker novels a second time, at some point in my life. His prose is just so unique and has an effortless beauty about it that I've yet to find in another author.

Plot can only really draw you in once... when you already know what happens in a story it doesn't have the same pull it had the first time. But prose has a lasting appeal, one that can be revisited. The indescribable quality of the way that words can make you feel is unique to the relationship between reader and writer.

Snow Crash Rendezvous with Rama Foundation (all of them) Moonwalking with Einstein (non function about memory champions)

The Sandman Slim series

https://www.goodreads.com/series/46424-sandman-slim

And

The Dresden Files series

https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=The+Dresden+Files+series