I like Oryx and Crake, just re-read it myself -- but I also really enjoyed One Hundred Years of Solitude in high school. I really enjoyed the magical realism, and the fact that it's an epic family saga covering several generations. Be warned though, at least one character marries a child, which I found weird even at the time and looking back as an adult, was super gross. However I would still read the book again. It's a deep world to get lost in.

Instead of memorizing music reviews, today’s Bateman might just memorize ChatGPT essays. Similarly hollow.

The entire audiobook series is available free on Internet Archive if you’d like to scrub through for quotes

Adaptation, by Malinda Lo. Has a sequel called Inheritance. It's a really interesting approach to first contact, and it doesn't just devolve into a war. You don't see or even know about the aliens for a while though, it's more of a mystery at first where it's not clear what's going on. It's YA, with a bit of a love triangle element.

Please post 'Should I read X book''What do I need to know before I read X' questions, in our Weekly Recommendation Thread.

Have you read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? It follows a girl from a poor immigrant family from her childhood to her coming of age. Set in Brooklyn in the early 20th century. I loved it growing up -- Francie is a wonderful and well-drawn character.

No, I'm looking for book recommendations. Thanks for your advice! And for the last thing you said then I may consider using audiobook and physical copy at the same time :D (if I can get the audiobook of course)

This is how I read Pratchett books when I was learning English all that time ago. Basically, if I didn't understand something, I assumed it was a cultural reference I didn't know or a pune or play on words.

I read a lot of history books now and I still have the same approach when it comes to names. If someone is important, the name will be repeated a few times and I know I should actually remember who they are.

I re-read the entire Mitchell canon in 2021 after reading Utopia Avenue. There really is a coherence among all of them and I kept notes about which characters reoccurred and in which books. It was totally worth it. He' such a great storyteller and it's amazing how his vision of a particular universe has remained consistent.

Websites like thrift books often have old versions available.

Are you looking for title recommendations or something else?

My tip would be not to worry too much about the words you don't know. If you can still understand the sentence, just keep reading. Sure, your knowledge will increase by "this word means something like this" for a while and you can always look it up when it turns out it doesn't mean what you thought... but the best way to learn is through volume and repetition.

If there is something cultural you don't know, you can look it up on wikipedia after you are done reading. But the idea is to have as little interruption as possie during the reading time.

Plus also you'll become one of those people who mispronounced words because you only ever read them, never heard them, like "blackguard"

Thanks, works for me on mobile /shrug

I love David Mitchell. He’s like a more accessible, better-written and less misogynist murakami (I do also really like murakami despite all that). Definitely read thousand autumns then utopia avenue

Wow I never knew that! I will check that out. Thank you!

I've got a bone to pick with a certain mouthy English major!

Shoutouts to successful female authors being shit on aggressively

Also

> things start getting weird when I mention that I like some Coho books. They just go off and call me a fake and uneducated reader who "needs to read another book".

Seriously, who are these people that you've found yourself near? I cannot for the life of me imagine insulting or discrediting anyone for their taste in books in such a poisonous way. What's the motivation for them doing this? Damn.

The entire book by Woolf made me feel that way

I want that on my tombstone.

Publishing companies have needed to do that in order for them and the authors to survive. Obviously the e-book should be much, much cheaper, but there’s also a point below which they can’t go and still pay the people who work at the publishing house and the author. It might be worth looking for books that are out of copyright? Standardebooks is a great site.

Another really good option is getting a library card for a library in the US and checking out e-books— NYC Public Library allows you to do this without being a resident of New York. If it’s a popular e-book, you might end up being on hold for it, but it’s free!

Thank you! Also, I wouldn't call it bad but to each his own, I don't really understand the downvotes, it's reasonable to have a negative opinion about any writer.

I hope you don’t mind me saying that I have the opposite experience. Reading in my second language, French, which I learned in high school, remains really satisfying to me – I know that it’s a chance to read something that would never be the same in translation, and I also am a little bit proud of myself for reading in another language 😏 It’s definitely a different experience than reading in my native language— but different, not worse. For me.

I read it when it came out and at first I was bewildered, "Where is all the big magic and high fantasy?" But I was so impressed at how she wrote so beautifully, such a compelling take. Even quiet, nothing is happening scenes, such as cleaning, had a lyrical beauty I could not deny. I dropped my expectation bias then, when this epiphany hit me about half way, and decided it might not be my favorite book by her, but it was definitely the most beautifully written of all of them. Here was a master of her craft coming into her own. Confident, unworried, with breathtaking skill.

Not really while reading a book, but playing through the twist ending of MGS2 for the first time as a kid left me with a sense of disorientation afterwards. I felt like someone had just turned everything upside down because out of nowhere the familiar gaming experience had radically transformed from the familiar to the surreal. Whatever I thought the medium (games, books, etc.) was capable of, apparently there's more to it than I could have ever imagined at the time. It was an experience so unique because it was so hard for me to fathom personally, but it's also an experience shared by other people too. Gravity's Rainbow was a complete reimagining of what I thought a story in literature could live up to. Reading can sometimes feel like a private sharing of knowledge because it's a solitary activity and oftentimes the people you know in real life haven't read the book, so it can feel like you possess your own inside knowledge about something, but Gravity's Rainbow is so discombobulating that the experience is almost wholly unique for each reader. You can get 4 people together to discuss the book, and come away with 4 different perspectives from having read it. It's both disorienting for the individual, but also disorienting for everyone who's read it, and the result is that everyone comes away with their own private interaction with Pynchon, having only seen their own sliver of it, and all the individual perspectives never entirely adding up to anything conclusive. It's a rare genius to have written something that remains so personal for the reader, and yet so elusive for those who have read it.

I agree that David Weber have some flaws as a writer, and certainely suffer from the lack of a strong editor on his latest books ( much should have been cut from them ).

Honor is often too good on too many things, but not everything Honor wants to or is about to do is perfect or right.

On the second book for exemple >!her choice to send the heaviest ship away on a patrol because their captains are women turned out to be a mistake leading to the one sided destruction of a fleet and the death of a dear friend. She is also later on the verge of executing prisonners of war, war criminals, rapists, disguting scums who will be shot for their crime anyway, but she was about to kill them on the spot without trial until one of her officiers stopped her.!<

As for Honor or Merlin's lack of introspection, i fully disagree, >!Honor tortures herself with her feelings with the Admiral for 3 ( 4? ) whole books before she is invited into the marriage by his wife. Merlin often wonder whether what he has done was the right thing, and later SPOILER !< >!pick the opportunity of not including those recent memories into the his "copy", thus saving her from suffreing the very same dilemnas .!<

Many of the characters in both the Honorverse and Safehold are indeed too "black or white", on both the friendly and the ennemy sides. Skipping the chapters on their points of view is not an unreasonnable way to improve reading experience, especially for the church official for Safehold where the systematic retelling of events prevents any loss of information anyway.

I've read every book Stephenson has written....EXCEPT for the Baroque cycle. I've tried 3 different times and just can't get into them. I'll probably try again one day, but for now, there are so many other books on my to-do list, that I'd rather not beat my head against this series once again.