Comment by socalgal2
8 days ago
Recommendations? What are you reading?
I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
8 days ago
Recommendations? What are you reading?
I recently enjoyed a few books of the "We are Legion, We are Bob" series
LotR is an oldie but goodie! I finally dug it out and read it this past month and it was quite enjoyable. I had tried back in high school but was kind of bored with the frilly language and songs and gave up. But this time around in my 40s, having read lots more books since then and developed a stronger vocabulary and reading stamina (e.g. I've read and enjoyed Stormlight Archive twice, which is 4x the length), it was actually pretty quick and easy, and I regret not having done it earlier. I paid a lot of attention to the journey and all the cardinal directions and feel like my sense of direction improved actually. And I'd always liked the movies but the books are so much better! It feels like a book from a strange almost-on-the-spectrum nerd who also spend time on the front lines in World War 1. I think these days the nerdy authors I like and the people who are grunts in the military are almost distinct circles, so maybe unlikely to get quite the same book in terms of the lore but also the realistic emotional punches.
Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).
Here are our top ~500 English picture books from Open Library that my kids liked enough that we've read at least twice.
The quality of the scans are usually poor and occasionally pages are missing and many have been removed. It's been great for us.
https://openlibrary.org/people/duiznwudidj/books/want-to-rea...
Really loved The Hyperion Cantos and The Forever War.
For a shorter classic I found Robur the Conqueror highly entertaining.
The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons is great. It may also be nice to recommend books that have movie or streaming series to them. Books are most of the time better than the movie as your own fantasy and imagination just makes it so. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is a good example.
Presently surprised by the lack of /lit/ meme recommendations like “infinite jest” or “gravities rainbow”.
I’ll throw a fun one in. Anything by De Sade.
I’m always fascinated by the idea that we should push kids to read as much as possible as fast as possible. Reading is a deeply subversive activity. Give the kid a copy of something like “the pedogogy of the oppressed” and soon enough you (the teacher) may find your back being put against the wall by the very same kids.
I think people would rather kids don’t read and stay tik tok addicts rather than the school system try to teach 14 year olds about literature through the book Lolita (and yes this does happen in public high schools all across the USA).
This is something i actually found chatgpt useful for. I gave it a list of books ive read and why i liked them, it gave me a list, some minimal summaries. I went and did some searches, read the back, told chatgpt my thoughts and it refined the list once more.
It was able to turn me to an author of a number of scifi books that really piqued my interest. One of them it prefaced with "dont read tue summaries" which i thought strange, but i listend, and ultimately bought the book just from reading a single line summary of it.
Same, mainstream book sites are a bit broken when it comes to surfacing anything outside the one size fits all notion of "best sellers". I rarely care about best sellers. Bland thrillers, chick lit, etc. Not my thing. And the whole all recommendations converge on Harry Potter as the best thing ever is a bit lame at this point.
LLMs can be much better at recommendations. Honestly, Amazon needs to spank their recommendation teams into doing something productive with this. They clearly have the ability to run LLMs at scale. But their in house recommendation teams seem to be stuck in the pre LLM era and there hasn't been any material change in their very broken and underwhelming recommendations in well over a decade.
I actually dumped the list of books I've bought on Amazon over the last 15 years as a text file at some point and dumped that in ChatGPT. Quite interesting to see it pick up on my tastes. What works really well is taking a few books that you enjoy and asking it to find similar books. You need to set a few guard rails. Recommend new authors, don't recommend stuff I already have read, etc. But that's not a huge amount of context. Amazon seems incapable of doing this. It always funnels me to the same tired list of recommendations of shit I've declined to buy from them for years.
In high school I was at a friend’s house. Half of the bookshelf was filled with books I loved and the other half with books I’d never heard of! I felt like a prospector striking gold :) Cool to think that we have something similar on demand now!
Oh and the best author from that discovery was hands down Garth Nix. I love the Abhorsen series!
What was the 'don't read the summaries' book?
Eversion by Alistair Reynolds
This is a good sub for discussing sci-fi and finding recs. https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/
I read the Wheel of Time series. It's all I read. It took about 18 months. It's great, though. I'm sad it's over, and I'm going to miss the characters.
Kings of the Wyld is a lot of fun. Plus it’s always refreshing to have a middle-aged protagonist instead of a teen or young adult.
Just did the bobiverse series after furiously consuming all the dungeon crawler carl and now I am starting Red Rising.
I love history and biography. Robert Caro' biography of LBJ. I also loved Don Quixote. The Iliad.
Legacy Fleet Trilogy
Fun easy read, Sourdough / 24 hr library (Robin Sloan)
Ubik is one of my faves
Another idea for you - search for "booktube" on youtube. Plenty of recommendations!