Only listing the absolutely excellent stuff I’ve been reading recently:
N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy
Ta-Nehishi Coates - The Water Dancer
Sam Bowring - Scarlette Doesn’t Matter and Goes Time Travelling
Becky Chambers - To be Taught, If Fortunate
Sue Burke’s Semiosis duology
Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series
Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series
Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti & Akata series
All speculative fiction, mostly sci-fi, some with fantasy elements, a little magic realism. All highly recommended!
I’ve been reading 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson. For some reason it has taken me ages to finish. Usually when a book is really good it grabs me by the lapels and pulls me in and after a couple of days I come out of the book with a foaming mouth telling everybody how great it was.
This one is basically very good and interesting (about the earth and mankind 300 years to the future after global warming has made earth a really tough place to live in and mankind has made it’s way to the closest heavenly bodies and somehow survived.) It’s more Carl Sagan than Steven Spielberg and ATM I feel like I need perhaps a little less realism and a little more fantasy. Under 100 pages to go. Then I can start something a bit lighter. Maybe a Reynolds or Banks space opera or something similar.
In the meantime I’ve also bought a bunch of classics from my teenage years into my bookshelf. The first six Mars novels by E.R. Burroughs and such. I’m yearning to read something simple and cheesy like that.
In that case I highly recommend either Scarlette Doesn’t Matter and Goes Time Travelling if you want something really funny or Murderbot if you just want some relatively light, interesting, and fun adventure.
I’m on a classic fantasy kick at the moment. Just finished re-reading the original Earthsea trilogy and am now getting into Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight. I have owned copies of the first three ‘Pern’ books for decades, but for some reason have never really gotten hooked into them until now.
No. He’s been on my list for a little while and just started diving in. Looking forward to reading more of his work. I’ll definitely be coming back to the series again. Stuff like this always deserves multiple reads.
Here’s a few I’ve read recently, just non fiction books for me.
BBC Brainwashing Britain - David Sedgwick.
Tell the truth and shame the Devil - Gerard Menuhin
The Real Lolita - Sarah Weinman
The Cogwheel Brain - Doron Swade
Dreamland - Bob Lazar
Hammer of the Gods - David Luhrssen
America’s Jack the Ripper - Soren Roest Korsgaard
Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion is one of the greatest works of literature I’ve read in recent years. I am so head-over-heels in LOVE with this work and it’s a shame it’s not at the top of many Great American Novel lists.
The prose is unbelievably pretty and real. The structure is challenging but comprehensible. The narrator will change in the middle of a paragraph (sentence, even!) and keeping up with it is like a fun game. One paragraph will have the points of view of three different narrators and how it aids in the telling of the story is just mind-boggling.
) has been on my “next” list for a while.