Good idea! I'm gonna start checking around

oh thats a good idea, I am going to do that. I also have a library on campus I think I will check out as well!

That isn't cognitive dissonance.

A bit different from others here, but I really love the used book stores in London. Oxfam is my goto, but there are a few others as well. Here’s a list:

Skoob books

Halcyon books

Southbank book display on weekends

The Bookshop of the Heath

they're all pretty good

a good series to recommend to someone just starting to read serious literature

Check if your local library has book sales. Ours has them monthly. The last day of the sale is a bag day where you can get as many books as you can fit in a bag for $10. The kids love it.

Great idea.

Public library book sales. They often have like-new books that people have donated, but that didn't fit on their shelves; or books retired from the shelves. Prices are generally reasonable because the primary goal is to get the books moved and raise donations for the library.

Where I live so many people have Little Free Libraries set up. Check the LittleFreeLibrary.org site to see if there’s any near you. If you find a book in one that you don’t think you’ll read again, make sure to “throw it back” for someone else. Also, you might check out bookcrossing.com. Some members of that are willing to share books and I believe the site also has a listing of where people have set up bookcrossing release spots.

There's a funny example of an almost reverse-publishing, which is William Gibson's Agrippa, (A Book of the Dead). The book ink is designed to vanish when light hits it, so as you read it disappears until you have a blank book. There was a digital version on a floppy disk or something like that which was encoded to wipe itself after a viewing.

Really? Man, that book left off at such an intriguing place and I thought a sequel would be a few years away, not this long.

You might like the documentary "Chicken People," if you haven't seen it yet.

Just finished this book and really enjoyed it. So many prosaic passages and well formed sentences.

What stuck with me was Dorian’s attempt at a good deed towards the end of the book. It did nothing to change the portrait and he wonders to himself if he really only did it out of self-preservation/to make himself feel better about his past transgressions.

This book asks some great questions.

There are plenty of Alien novels (though none as good as the movie). One even has a lost episode of Ripley waking up between going to sleep and being found by deep space salvagers. There's also a William Gibson treatment of a script for the 3rd movie that was re-published maybe last year. Other than that I would recommend the closest thing being cosmic horror (Annihilation, Lovecraft), and space opera (Iain M. Banks Culture series).

Can confirm, the library at my junior high had a volume of his adult stories and I was very much not prepared.

We have a pretty good thrift store that we go to, I've found some good stuff there for sure.

thrift stores. I often find some unusual and very old books there.

The Way of Kings was the book that got me back into reading after a long hiatus. Even though the world feels massive, there are a ton of plot points that are being set up and characters are being introduced, I thought that the book flowed really well. It felt like a much easier read than The Silmarillion, which was the last book I had read prior to The Way of Kings.

Funnily enough, I got into Stormlight because I was looking for free writing courses on Youtube and Sanderson's lectures were the top result. I thought the lectures were really good so I decided to check out some of his works and then I was completely hooked into the series, can't wait to see the conclusion in two decades or so!

I intentionally read a wide variety of genres and one thing I've learned is there are boring and poorly written books in all genres and great stories and characters I fall in love with in all genres. However, some genres are harder for me to find gems in.

When I was in school, horror especially the occult was my favorite genre and that continued into my young adult life. Work then required a lot of nonfiction reading on topics of health, psychology, mindset, and business building. I retired a few years ago and I'm actively exploring a wide variety of genres and authors from around the world. I don't research much about the books I read I prefer to go in without expectations and for the most part, I've been pleasantly surprised by the books I've read.

I will say, last year when I was in a book club that had a "genre of the month challenge" romance was the month with the most poorly written books, I did find a few that were written well and had a good story line.

I read A Twist in the Tale. Every story had a twist at the end. Unfortunately I couldn’t understand what many of them were. I’d read the end over and over and I was just stumped.

They're a vegan and so view the keeping of livestock of any sort, regardless of standard of care, as immoral.

Yes. And this is great in business relationships etc. ... but with my friends I don't have to consider these things because they know I'm not trying to antagonize them.

god i love arguing

Emily Gilmore would hate how good these questions are

I'll just leave this here:

In the Ruins

by Roald Dahl

IN THE RUINS

>!Somewhere among the bricks and stones, I came across a man sitting on the ground in his underpants, sawing off his left leg. There was a black bag beside him, and the bag was open, and I could see a hypodermic needle lying there among all the rest of the stuff.!<

>!“Do you want some?” he asked, looking up.!<

>!“Yes, please,” I said. I was going crazy with hunger.!<

>!“I don’t mind giving you a bit so long as you will promise to produce the next meal. I am quite uncontaminated.”!<

>!“All right,” I said. “Yes.”!<

>!“Caudal injection,” he said. “Base of the spine. You don’t feel a thing.”!<

>!I found a few bits of wood, and I made a fire in the ruins, and started roasting a piece of the meat. The doctor sat on the ground doing things to the stump of his leg.!<

>!A child came up, a girl of about four years old. She had probably seen the smoke from the fire or smelled the smell of cooking, I don’t know which. She was very unsteady on her feet.!<

>!“Do you want some, too?” the doctor asked.!<

>!She nodded.!<

>!“You’ll have to pay it back later,” the doctor said.!<

>!The child stood there looking at the piece of meat that I was holding over the fire on the end of a bent curtain rod.!<

>!“You know something,” the doctor said, “with all three of us here, we ought to be able to survive for quite a long time.”!<

>!“I want my mummy,” the child said, starting to cry.!<

>!“Sit down,” the doctor told her. “I’ll take care of you.”!<