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tuyop posted:The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley The Ancillary series and the Expanse series are great. Will look at Light Brigade and 2312 Hieronymous Alloy posted:Best thing in the past few years is Murderbot (start with "All Systems Red") but Murderbot is gender-indeterminate android. Female author though. Murderbot was fun as hell. Looking to get the second book soon.
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Sep 6, 2019 21:51
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I need a chunky, somewhat recent, dad-lit thriller series in the vein of Jack Reacher to marathon my way though. Any suggestions?
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Sep 6, 2019 22:01
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fadam posted:I need a chunky, somewhat recent, dad-lit thriller series in the vein of Jack Reacher to marathon my way though. Any suggestions? I can recommend Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak books (the first one is Keeper). If you don't mind supernatural elements, F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack books, starting with The Tomb, are decent for slam-bang action too.
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Sep 6, 2019 23:21
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Selachian posted:I can recommend Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak books (the first one is Keeper). Thanks!
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Sep 7, 2019 00:25
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Selachian posted:If you don't mind supernatural elements, F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack books, starting with The Tomb, are decent for slam-bang action too.
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Sep 7, 2019 09:25
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Kangxi posted:Any good fun sci-fi or military fiction with a woman protagonist? I'm travelling next week and need some light beach reading. I like Tanya Huff's series about Sgt. Torin Kerr, I think the first one is Valor's Choice. It starts off with a cliched Rorke's-Drift-in-space plot but overall pretty decent light reading.
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Sep 7, 2019 11:36
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Kangxi posted:Any good fun sci-fi or military fiction with a woman protagonist? I'm travelling next week and need some light beach reading.
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Sep 7, 2019 17:33
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Any Russian crime novelists besides Akunin any good? (Nothing supernatural TIA) E: oh and I don't read Russian.
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Sep 7, 2019 17:39
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Are there any stories that take place on a semi-realistic flat Earth? You know...as realistic as a flat Earth could be. No wizards, no dragons, etc. I'm thinking about explorers trying to climb the ice walls that surround the planet or sailors going over the edge waterfalls or astronomers trying to make sense of the whole thing.
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Sep 7, 2019 21:02
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bowser posted:Are there any stories that take place on a semi-realistic flat Earth? You know...as realistic as a flat Earth could be. No wizards, no dragons, etc. I'm thinking about explorers trying to climb the ice walls that surround the planet or sailors going over the edge waterfalls or astronomers trying to make sense of the whole thing. there was that one series where all of civilization exist vertically in cities on a giant wall...i cant remember the name now
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Sep 7, 2019 21:55
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Is Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko worth a read if I'm down with modern-day sci-fi/fantasy? I'm doing a physical book purge and found a copy that my parents must have given me 15+ years ago, but that I never actually read. I assumed it was YA pulp but I guess it's targeted for a more general audience with regards to age?
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Sep 10, 2019 05:05
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I've got bad taste and enjoy bad things, like Dungeons and Dragons novels. I just finished the Brimstone Angels series, anyone got suggestions for something similar?
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Sep 10, 2019 08:05
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MohawkSatan posted:I've got bad taste and enjoy bad things, like Dungeons and Dragons novels. I just finished the Brimstone Angels series, anyone got suggestions for something similar? If you liked DnD novels and don't mind a comedic tone go for Discworld by Terry Pratchett (unless you've already read them)
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Sep 10, 2019 15:28
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C-Euro posted:Is Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko worth a read if I'm down with modern-day sci-fi/fantasy? I'm doing a physical book purge and found a copy that my parents must have given me 15+ years ago, but that I never actually read. I assumed it was YA pulp but I guess it's targeted for a more general audience with regards to age?
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Sep 10, 2019 15:52
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MohawkSatan posted:I've got bad taste and enjoy bad things, like Dungeons and Dragons novels. I just finished the Brimstone Angels series, anyone got suggestions for something similar? There are like a million Dragonlance novels if you haven't read those; an old friend who dug the Forgotten Realms stuff liked those a lot, too. Some of the Magic: The Gathering novelizations weren't terrible, either, but would probably suck (more) if you didn't play the game.
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Sep 10, 2019 21:15
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funkybottoms posted:There are like a million Dragonlance novels if you haven't read those; an old friend who dug the Forgotten Realms stuff liked those a lot, too. Some of the Magic: The Gathering novelizations weren't terrible, either, but would probably suck (more) if you didn't play the game. While not a particularly high bar to clear, I liked Dragonlance a lot more than Forgotten Realms. Also Tracy Hickman is one of the nicest people you could ever meet.
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Sep 11, 2019 00:59
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anilEhilated posted:It's not YA, it is pulp; IMO it is not very good but trying can't hurt. I got so much poo poo to read already, but I guess I'd feel bad if I never read a book that my folks got me.
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Sep 11, 2019 02:59
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C-Euro posted:Is Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko worth a read if I'm down with modern-day sci-fi/fantasy? I'm doing a physical book purge and found a copy that my parents must have given me 15+ years ago, but that I never actually read. I assumed it was YA pulp but I guess it's targeted for a more general audience with regards to age? no it sucks pretty bad
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Sep 12, 2019 09:24
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chernobyl kinsman posted:no it sucks pretty bad I almost bought it but then I happened to see the film (or possibly the sequel) on TV and yeah nah lol.
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Sep 12, 2019 09:45
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Can anyone recommend a basic functional e-reader for Windows with a dark mode? I've used Edge for quite a while now and it was perfect, everything was spaced great by default, a quick edit button to change font sizes, and everything was themed when setting Edge and the book viewer to dark mode which just had to be done once and it was set forever. I literally can't find that in anything else. (Edit: Microsoft is apparently killing Edge's epub functionality in the next big update, which is why I'm asking) Sumatra PDF - Can mostly emulate dark mode, but can't set window background (which does go away if you go fullscreen) or the page text at the bottom of the screen. Also can't alter the margins or page spacing when viewing an ebook, despite having those settings supposedly implemented. Calibre - Clunky/slow, doesn't have a full dark mode, and comes with all the extra poo poo I don't want to see. Kindle/Freda/Icecream/basically everything else I could find - Has the built-in library functionality that you have to jump through to actually read a book and doesn't have a full dark mode theme for the window. I just want to double click a epub and see a nicely opened file with everything in a dark mode theme that I can instantly jump into and read without doing anything else. Why is that so much to ask?
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Sep 14, 2019 02:18
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Kangxi posted:Any good fun sci-fi or military fiction with a woman protagonist? I'm travelling next week and need some light beach reading. It's not completely military nor completely woman protagonist but the Nexus series by Ramez Naam was a fun sci-fi trilogy with some spy/military stuff thrown in
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Sep 15, 2019 05:07
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I'm looking for books about slavery focused more on the owners rather than the slaves or the system itself. It could be a biography or more academic, I'll take pretty much anything whethers it's based on the US or the modern world or ancient history. I'm trying to dig deeper into is how slavers viewed their 'property' and how they thought and talked about them.
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Sep 15, 2019 18:26
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Lehugo posted:I'm looking for books about slavery focused more on the owners rather than the slaves or the system itself. It could be a biography or more academic, I'll take pretty much anything whethers it's based on the US or the modern world or ancient history. I'm trying to dig deeper into is how slavers viewed their 'property' and how they thought and talked about them. You might be interested in this book about how slavery drove accounting practices on plantations. Although a bit more system focuses than thoughts and words, it does go into the original "human resources." https://www.amazon.com/Accounting-Slavery-Management-Caitlin-Rosenthal-ebook/dp/B07DGJPVLL
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Sep 16, 2019 18:39
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I'm looking for some well written detective or spy novels for an upcoming vacation. I've read and liked John le Carré, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Graham Greene. The Man Who Was Thursday was good but not really what I'm looking for atm.
Syncopated fucked around with this message at 13:11 on Sep 17, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 20:58
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Looking for a book on Gnosticism, preferably something that isn't extremely academic. If there are any books on how Gnosticism has influenced various media (e.g. Blood Meridian, Silent Hill, probably a bucket of other books and movies that I'm unaware of) I would love to hear about them as well.
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Sep 16, 2019 21:20
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Syncopated posted:I'm looking for some well written detective or ispy novels for an upcoming vacation. I've read and liked John le Carré, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Graham Greene. The Man Who Was Thursday was good but not really what I'm looking for atm. How about the classics? Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers. Len Deighton is readable, not quite as good as le Carré but has a similar vibe.
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Sep 16, 2019 21:30
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers. Or as it is known in some markets, "The Entire Contents of My Boat's Pantry - A novel about condensed milk"
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Sep 16, 2019 21:35
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Syncopated posted:I'm looking for some well written detective or ispy novels for an upcoming vacation. I've read and liked John le Carré, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Graham Greene. The Man Who Was Thursday was good but not really what I'm looking for atm. The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks The Manuel of Detection by Jedediah Berry Last Winter We Parted by Fuminori Nakamura The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno Any of Dashiell Hammet's novels, if you want something classic like Chandler. CJ Box's Joe Pickett series if you want some fun dad pulp fiction with mysteries set in the great outdoors.
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Sep 16, 2019 21:37
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Syncopated posted:I'm looking for some well written detective or ispy novels for an upcoming vacation. I've read and liked John le Carré, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Graham Greene. The Man Who Was Thursday was good but not really what I'm looking for atm. Olen Steinhauer reminds me a bit of le Carre; not full of big action set pieces, but lots of tension and a focus on the personal toll that the job takes on people, and Timothy Hallinan's Junior Bender Mysteries are a nice modern take on classic noir detective stories with a protagonist who is actually a professional thief.
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Sep 16, 2019 22:19
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Lehugo posted:I'm looking for books about slavery focused more on the owners rather than the slaves or the system itself. It could be a biography or more academic, I'll take pretty much anything whethers it's based on the US or the modern world or ancient history. I'm trying to dig deeper into is how slavers viewed their 'property' and how they thought and talked about them. Dwelling Place by Erskine Clarke is a great semi-academic history of a specific plantation in coastal Georgia. The white owners left nice diaries and letters, with the patriarch being fairly well known at the time as a religious leader, so there's lots of narrative from that side. It's especially interesting since the white family started off as (relatively!) well-inclined to their slaves, viewing the slaves as humans with souls who deserved religious attention and some respect for their personhood. Of course, that only lasted until the system was tested, and as the years progressed towards the Civil War, the family became more reactionary and explicitly pro-status quo, which is interesting to see evolve. At the same time, the author narrates the lives of the slaves on the plantation, at least as well as he can given the relative lack of documentation on that side. It really gives the readers a chance to see what parallel lives were lived over the course of decades and generations. Highly recommended!
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Sep 17, 2019 00:51
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MockingQuantum posted:Looking for a book on Gnosticism, preferably something that isn't extremely academic. If there are any books on how Gnosticism has influenced various media (e.g. Blood Meridian, Silent Hill, probably a bucket of other books and movies that I'm unaware of) I would love to hear about them as well. I enjoyed Gnosis by Kurt Rudolph. It isn't what I would call extremely academic, though it does help to come into it with some knowledge of basic Christian theology and early mainstream Christian history, to contrast with development of Gnosticism. It doesn't touch at all on impacts on modern media, but learning more about the practice itself will probably make the influences more obvious to you.
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Sep 17, 2019 00:53
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Syncopated posted:I'm looking for some well written detective or ispy novels for an upcoming vacation. I've read and liked John le Carré, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Graham Greene. The Man Who Was Thursday was good but not really what I'm looking for atm. Another one not mentioned so far is The Miernik Dossier by Charles McCarry. I didn't know anything about the author until I saw his obituary as "The American le Carre." He's like le Carre in that he was an actual operative who wrote well-informed and realistic fiction about the Cold War. This work was his first fiction, I believe, and takes the form of a series of reports that concern a possible Polish defector who might be a double agent who might be a triple agent. I enjoyed it, and apparently he wrote more novels about one of the characters from the book, although I have not read those yet and can't comment.
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Sep 17, 2019 00:56
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For spy stuff, I've recommended Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios, which is one of the foundations of the spy genre. If you like Le Carre, I think you'd also enjoy Alan Furst, who does spy novels set in pre-World War II Europe. Check out The World at Night, Dark Star, or Night Soldiers.
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Sep 17, 2019 01:16
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MockingQuantum posted:Looking for a book on Gnosticism, preferably something that isn't extremely academic. If there are any books on how Gnosticism has influenced various media (e.g. Blood Meridian, Silent Hill, probably a bucket of other books and movies that I'm unaware of) I would love to hear about them as well. There's Elaine Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels. quote:Pagels' study of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts was the basis for The Gnostic Gospels (1979), a popular introduction to the Nag Hammadi library. It was a best seller and won both the National Book Award in one-year category Religion/Inspiration[5][note 1] and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Modern Library named it one of the 100 best books of the twentieth century.[6] She follows the well-known thesis that Walter Bauer first put forth in 1934 and argues that the Christian church was founded in a society espousing contradictory viewpoints. A review of the book in the UK newspaper, The Sunday Times, led to the UK broadcaster, Channel 4, commissioning a major three-part series inspired by it, called Jesus: The Evidence. The programme triggered a national furore, and marked a significant moment in the changes that religious broadcasting was already undergoing at that time.[7] As a movement Gnosticism was not coherent and there were several areas of disagreement among the different factions. According to Pagel's interpretation of an era different from ours, Gnosticism "attracted women because it allowed female participation in sacred rites".
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Sep 17, 2019 01:35
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There's Elaine Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels. its good but i think the scholarship is wildly outdated by this point
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Sep 17, 2019 16:38
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I’m looking for non fiction apocalypse porn. I liked The Uninhabitable Earth, The Sixth Extinction and The Ends of the World. Anything similar out there? Especially if it deals with global warming predictions
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Sep 17, 2019 20:21
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Syncopated posted:I'm looking for some well written detective or spy novels for an upcoming vacation. I've read and liked John le Carré, Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Graham Greene. The Man Who Was Thursday was good but not really what I'm looking for atm. You've gotten a lot so far but I'll throw in Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels. They follow a super like-able private detective from pre-WWII Germany up through the Cold War.
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Sep 17, 2019 22:53
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:I’m looking for non fiction apocalypse porn. I liked The Uninhabitable Earth, The Sixth Extinction and The Ends of the World. Anything similar out there? Especially if it deals with global warming predictions the world without us
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Sep 18, 2019 00:02
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chernobyl kinsman posted:the world without us Yeah, this. If you haven't read Silent Spring, that's kind of a big one, and I liked Marq de Villiers' The End, too.
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Sep 18, 2019 02:04
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Thanks for all the recommendations! They had Dashiell Hammett at the library but I'll bookmark this page and get back to the rest in the future.
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Sep 18, 2019 08:05
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