^There are tons of Drizzt books and apparently he's still writing them so you shouldn't run out soon unless you're up to speed. But probably stuff like Dragonlance would be closest to that style of 90's fantasy. Is there anything specific about his style or books that you're looking for? Might be easier to rec stuff that way.

Anyway, currently I'm reading Andrzej Sapkowski's Blood of Elves and really enjoying it. Have been meaning to check out his stuff for years and finally got my hands on a couple books.

I can't wait to read the DemonWars Saga. When I was nine years old, I did read most of the Demon Awakens.

A few things of late:

* Fierce patriot: the tangled lives of William Tecumseh Sherman. Mad as a cut snake but an interesting character
* Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler & Stalin....Jeez, this is just horrific. Like god pointed the finger at that part of the world and said "fuck those guys in particular". Between the famine, cannibalism, mass murder and war it's about as grim a book as you'd hope to ever read. Special mention to the tale of Vasily Blokhin who personally shot more than ten thousand people as chief executioner of the Cheka/NKVD
* Louder than hell: an oral history of Heavy Metal. Complete bollocks, avoid.

I've been eying Bloodlands ever since it came out.

Just to wonder, does anyone ever read some Jules Verne content? If not I could advise you some of his books if you're into sci-fi and you want to know how was steampunk at the time of steampunk.

^ Promoting content of my own city... God I should be ashamed. Well, whatever I would argue this is one of the most famous French writers. And actually my favourite one. ^

Finished Night Work, a very unique psychological/horror novel by Thomas Glavinic. The concept of a post-apocalyptic world with no living soul except for the protagonist seems to have been explored a lot, like in 28 Days Later, but this particular novel is much, much more interesting. It follows the main character's extremely relatable thought processes (wondering how non-living objects experience their existence, etc.) throughout the story, and is more focused on the psychoanalytic aspect of his experience in the book, rather than on wondering what the hell actually happened. There are some Lynchian flairs to the book as well. I noticed even some mysterious words in the book that resemble Croatian, even, which I understand and make the mystery all the more interesting. Not well-known at all, but thoroughly absorbing, and I strongly recommend it for those who liked novels like The Day of the Triffids (although I imagine The Day of the Triffids is still not as good as Night Work.

Since my last post I finished both The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, both of which were quite good. I really enjoyed the contrasts and tensions between the varying political forces in each novel, and the characterization was strong in both. Darkness had perhaps slightly better characterization, but it was also told in the first person rather than the third, so everything felt more immediate. I thought Dispossessed had a disappointingly sudden ending but it was not an unfitting conclusion; if you've already read Darkness (which takes place after Dispossessed) the ending is actually a bit more revealing than it seems. I was surprised at the amount of nuance in the book too; it is a bit preachy on the anarchism thing but it's not slavish apologia. I enjoyed it, and I'm pretty much an archist.

I had planned on reading Gene Wolfe's Peace next but after reading Dispossessed I think it would only be fitting to read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. For the contrast. Also, I've never read Heinlein and I know a lot of people like that one the most of his lot. And yes, I've mentally prepared myself for overly preachy writing.

Finished The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, my first Heinlein novel. I enjoyed it overall. There were times where I had trouble visualizing what was going on and I spent a good chunk of the novel wishing I knew Russian, but those were my only two major gripes (not understanding the slang is probably why I couldn't visualize some parts). Very interesting characters, several unexpected turns, and the lunar society was pretty convincing. Earth was less convincing, but also a much smaller part of the story.

From a political standpoint, I found it amusing that the book is usually described as a libertarian manifesto. The plot was remarkably Leninist in its execution, the Professor's ideology could be fairly called incoherent (Malthusian anarcho-Jeffersonian libertarianism? what), and the idea of a near-perfect sentient machine trying to perfectly engineer policy outcomes is rather a bit Soviet. The political considerations here were very inconsistent, and not because of nuance like in The Dispossessed.



Up next, I already have Peace out by my reading chair. Feels exciting to put my mind into Gene Wolfe's hands once again.

I liked it overall, especially the main characters and the weird society he comes up with, but the political ramblings are clearly the weakest part of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Also, every political problem he sets up for his society to tackle is a total softball - for example the impromptu trial of that one guy who flirts with the girl, which "works" because he's proven not guilty, but could just as easily have resulted in his pointless murder given slightly different circumstances. And what about situations which require forensics to solve? Is every citizen supposed to be trained in taking and analyzing fingerprints or some shit? It makes zero sense if you posit even basic problems like that.

I get that his idea is that the threat of extreme violence in retaliation to any slight is a big deterrent to any crime, as in prison, but at the same time that leaves little room for mistakes, accidents, crimes of passion, etc., not to mention feuding.

Other than that, I don't really get how you get such a strong Leninist vibe from it - yeah there's the central planning AI, but it's only there to get things set up and then gets written out (or perhaps bows out of its own accord). The families own their own farms and the economy is completely free-market. However you're absolutely right that politically it's all over the place, which is appropriate considering Heinlein was all over the place. This was a man who within the span of two years wrote Starship Troopers, which positively proposes a violent military state in which only veterans are allowed to vote and run for office, and Stranger In a Strange Land, which proposes a peaceful quasi-Buddhist society in which there's no violence at all. I think he was more interested in tinkering with various political ideologies and throwing problems at them than actually promoting anything in particular. Even his much-vaunted self-reliant "generalist" manly-man who is good at everything and bucks all governmental control (perhaps most clearly seen in the father from Have Spacesuit, Will Travel) is completely turned around in Starship Troopers - the reasoning given for its veteran-based political system is that only veterans truly understand putting the needs of the group above the needs of the self, and of course being the military, they promote a high degree of specialization as well as taking orders and reliance on others.

Anyway Peace is much better than anything Heinlein ever wrote and a strong contender for best Wolfe standalone. Be prepared though, it's also one of his most opaque books.

I'm reading the Culture novel Player of Games. It's kinda slow going, or maybe that's just where I'm at right now, but I am enjoying it enough to keep me interested.

Anyone know any good Star Trek novels?

What I meant by the plot being Leninist was the actual revolutionary conspiracy the characters devised, not the book's plot.


Peace has already made me read closely and I'm only one chapter in. Granted it's a 50-page chapter, but still. Talk about an unreliable narrator...

Oh alright I gotcha. Yeah, the way they basically sit around and hash out political theory before moving forward, the "party meetings", the organized cells, it's clear Heinlein deliberately based the methods on communist methods, which makes sense given when it was written. For all that Heinlein likes the symbolism of the American Revolution (and that in the book, Luna declares independence on its 300th anniversary), wealthy aristocrats declaring independence from other wealthy aristocrats isn't really in keeping with his philosophy, however fragmented it may be.

So, Peace...man. I've got about 100 pages left. It's amazing how Wolfe just continuously builds on this feeling that something is very, very off with the main character; to such an extent that I feel like I would be uncomfortable meeting the narrator in real life.

Was that really an accident?; was it really a stroke?; is there really a ghost in that house?; WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING.

Dog he IS the ghost

Started reading Samuel R Delaney's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Really interesting stuff, enjoying his style.

Digging it quite a bit more than The Player of Games. I want to like Culture, and this book certainly isn't bad, but it never really grabbed me (about half-way through).

Finished Peace. Damn you, Gene Wolfe. I thought I had figured out half or more of it until that last chapter. Right now I'm about equal parts entertained, awed, and confused.

Now I have to decide whether to re-read it right away or come back to it later after I've read some other stories.

I haven't read that one, but with each successive book I read by Delany he climbs even higher in my esteem. Dhalgren, Nova, and The Einstein Intersection were all top-level excellent, and all totally different from one another.



Yeah I need to read it again myself. I don't know if anyone (except Gene Wolfe) really, actually has a solid grasp on what REALLY, ACTUALLY happened in the book, much less why. Educated guesses, sure, but that's about it.

It's funny because I was loving the prologue, but then it ended and totally new characters and even a relatively new writing style emerged. What about the prologue?!?!

After sleeping on it, I've decided I'll come back to Peace later, and do it properly---with a pen and a notebook, or sticky notes. Way too much going on there to try to keep it in order in my head, and right now I just don't feel like flipping back-and-forth within 80-page chapters to sort everything out. Alden makes Severian look like the apotheosis of objectivity.

I've done a half-dozen fiction books in a row, time for some non-fiction.

Delany had this white-hot period of intense creativity in his late teens/early 20s that to my knowledge is basically unmatched in sci-fi in terms of speed and quality. He published nine novels in the 60s and won back-to-back Nebula awards. One of those winners was The Einstein Intersection, which is an excellent novel in its own right but also features some weird interstitial journal entries from Delany himself about what he was doing while writing the novel, and it paints an interesting portrait of a brilliant young man who despite being young (and gay and black) seemed to be utterly fearless in his writing. He reminds me of how every young early 20-something artist feels - incredibly ambitious and utterly unaware of their own limitations as artists, except Delany somehow pulls off all of his grand plans and all of the ridiculous self-indulgent experimentation actually works. Unfortunately, he somewhat burned out on sci-fi after the 60s, began writing at a much slower pace, and rarely returned to the genre.

Every time I go to my local Barnes & Noble they either don't have any Delany or they don't have Dhalgren, which is the only one I've ever read anything about.

Can I get a suggestion for a philosophical novel or novella? Something that is an easy read. Thank You.

I've only read a handful of philosophical or philosophical-ish novels, all short and plainly written, all well-known - and (although you might already be familiar) I'll include some remarks from around the Web, to give you some idea of what they're about - and the ones that come to mind are:

- Albert Camus, The Stranger



- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five



- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Yo I hear they sell books on the internet now and they're much cheaper than in stores

I've read the Destiny and Cold Equations books by David Mack which mostly focus on the TNG cast of characters, and I thought they were great, though more action packed than the average episode, which may not be your cup of tea if you want something more representative of the philosophical or thought provoking parts of the show. Having said that, the books weren't devoid of anything thoughtful, it's just the balance was different from the average TNG episode.

"Dawn" by Octavia Butler and "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula K. LeGuin are a couple of cool sci-fi novels with heavy philosophical overtones.

You've intrigued me enough to buy this book and I've already ordered it.

I'm also very intimidated considering you feel the need to re-read the book with sticky notes.

I just finished reading R.A. Salvatore's The Bear. The Bear is probably the weakest of Saga of the First King.

try stanislaw lem - dialogues. not sure about its english title, but I wholeheartedly recommend this to all of you. basically consists of socratic dialogues between philonous and hylas, wonderfully crafted and all. great introduction into lem's works.

Thank you all so much for the recs!

I'm interested in this book but I can only find German editions. Are there any English editions?

For the philosophical novel, I'll second the Camus book and add Candide by Voltaire, which is probably the best novel by a philosopher I've read so far.


Finally got around to finishing this. Mixed feelings on it. A worthwhile book but I do have some problems with it. He tells American history from the perspective of the marginalized, which is something very worth doing, but it does seem at times that he sees the world in black and white and I feels that he tries to beat it into the readers head that what the government does is evil, but in any 100 level history class they'll tell you that you should keep an objective tone and adhere by the "show not tell" principle. I found the middle third of the book all but impossible to get through. It's basically "these workers in this city went on strike and the cops and/or military responded with brutality" for 200 pages. It's like yeah I agree that was wrong but I definitely more than got the point after 50 pages. Also thought his treatment of the Roosevelts was so unabashedly biased and one-sided that I couldn't really take Zinn seriously. Basically painted them as cartoon villains while ignoring all the positive things (and there's a lot of them) they did for the country. Overall it's worth reading, but keep in mind it's heavily biased and one-sided.

Also read Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche and I dunno, Nietzsche isn't really as cool as I assumed he'd be. Nietzsche is an asshole of Bukowski proportions, but at least Bukowski was funny. Nietzsche's unabashed elitism kind of rubbed me the wrong way, the dude's pretty goddamn sexist (even for his time) and only believes in education for a special elite. For all it's been exploited and misunderstood, the overman is an interesting idea but let's be honest - Zarathustra is a pretty goddamn doofy overman. While written in novel form, this is essentially a philosophical treatise obfuscated with superfluous symbolism and metaphor with a vague outline of a plot that isn't that interesting in the first place. Definitely has cool imagery and some cool ideas (eternal return is a mindfuck) but overall found this to be a minor disappointment.

Anyone read any of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels? Detective fiction isn't usually my thing, but as something of a 3rdReich scholar these are really great. They follow the protagonist from the 30s to the 60s dealing with the lead up, the war and the division/occupation of Germany. Despite the best intentions poorBernie goes from being a police inspector to a multiple murder, fugitive from justice and depending on how you see it a war criminal. Of the 4 I've read the post war ones are actually better as they go into the murky world of early cold-war counter intelligence really well.

Worked/working my way through the following:

Zizek- First as Tragedy, then as Farce

Not entirely that into this, most of it was pretty dense and most of what I got out of was stating the obvious with a lot of Hegel references. However, he does an excellent job at making you extremely mad (extremely mad) about the 2008 bailout and the way we're still completely screwing over Africa. That said we're talking like 6 pages out of 300 or something. Those six pages are great but I'm not sold on all the others.

Zizek- Violence

This was a lot better and I'm definitely going to reread this. I was kinda super exhausted after work so it didn't sink in as much as I'd like, but it's a neat old framework for looking at violence and what it means, for how ideology shapes how we react to it (ie in a way that is exactly what the ruling class want), how language gets into it etc. Slightly less Hegel references.

Kropotkin- Conquest of Bread & Mutual Aid

Now these books are fucken rad and I'd highly recommend Conquest of Bread for anyone and everyone. It's essentially the ancom version of the Communist Manifesto, ie sums up what it's all about, is extremely easy to read, makes you mad, but it's written in a far more charming way than Marx's good but still a bit dense manifesto. Essentially, "Private property is stupid. C'mon guys every human ever has worked together to create the world we live in, so private ownership of capital is really dumb. Enough of letting the top few percent dictate, own and control everything".. and then he talks about bread for ages- apparently, I haven't finished it yet. Gave it to the wife and now she won't put the thing down. It's been cool watching her abruptly change from a fairly centrist conservative christian to a hard out leftist in a week or so. It's certainly a bit dated, but I'd say his calls of "making machines do all the work" is far more valid now, and he has a real charming, really readable writing style.

Mutual Aid is basically a long and complete rebuttal of the "but muh HUMAN NATURE" argument people use against communism. Just a few billion examples of how most animals are far more inclined towards cooperation than competition, and then (I'm not up to this part yet) a few more examples throughout human history. It's also quite readable, at this point it comes across as a nature documentary. I feel like both of these books are best read together as they compliment each other real well.

Marx- Capital

Well jeez, I'm about 60 pages in and I'm well and truly sick of hearing about how 20 metres of linen and 1 coat. Apparently you just gotta get past the first three chapters then it's a whole lot better.. Certainly hope so. I'm reading it in conjunction with the David Harvey lectures about it, and they're excellent, but it's honestly pretty boring so far. Again, like Zizek I've probably got to stop reading when I've finished work and find a few days when I'm on break and a lot more refreshed to get my teeth into it a bit.

Oxford World Classics does have a 500-page abridgement of Capital, if that'd be preferable. That's where I'll be starting...eventually.

I read Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology for class recently, it was pretty good. I've heard people say he tends to sorta write the same book over and over, but Sublime is his opus. Haven't read anything else by him. Helps to have a basic understanding of Lacan and Hegel I think.

I've wanted to read anarchist lit for a while now, was thinking about starting with David Graeber. Kropotkin comes highly recommended from a friend of mine who's into anarchism (as well as philosophy and punk/metal). Emma Goldman's autobio is excellent.

Kropotkin is really good my man, highly recommend him. Extremely easy to get into.

regarding zizek writing the same book- well, the themes aren't that different and they reference each other somewhat but the two I've read I feel are both rather different nonetheless. I'll use an analogy close to my heart and say that it's like how RTL and MOP are both somewhat similar but clearly distinct bits of music, so it is with zizek.

I went on a bit of a binge of the Old Man's War series by John Scalzi recently. He has the ability to inject real 'humanity' into his characters; they have conversations that don't sound like the speaking of puppets or cartoon characters, which is an affliction sci-fi suffers from intensely. On that note, I cannot get into anything by Kim Stanley Robinson for that very reason; Red Mars was a cool tale with utterly wooden characterisation. Scalzi is not a perfect writer; his books tend to start really well and sort of peter out at the end, but he is amusing and creates plausible scenarios for his characters. I also read The Collapsing Empire which I heartily recommend.

Besides that, I'm reading Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan just because he was a great writer and genius thinker. Most of the information I have already encountered but he packages things well and comprehensively.

a quick search told me that it hasn't been translated into english completely, so I guess only bits and pieces. which makes me feel sorry for you guys, you're missing out on something truly great here.