Though some of you might already be familiar with the Cosmere, to those who aren't I think this would be a fantastic introduction, if you like fantasy.

To give you an idea of the type of book: in the post script the author mentions that it's heavily inspired by the Princess Bride, but what if instead of assuming Wesley dead she had gone to find him?

It's also amazing is because it's from Hoid's perspective, also known as the aptly named Wit. Meaning it's really funny.

There's a lot of fantasy books I've read and loved, from short stories to epics, but I'll now compare them all to Tress.

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/478961

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

Wikipedia

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/476755

Don't panic, and bring a towel.

For seasoned galactic travelers, if you're looking for the Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which includes:

• Hitchhiker's Guide
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
• Life, the Universe, and Everything
• So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
• Young Zaphod Plays It Safe
• Mostly Harmless

... this wormhole should get you there.

Also, upon conferring with both Space and Ice Pirates, I've been persuaded to also provide their contribution here in honor of the late, great Douglas Adams.

Now could you guys please untie my cats and get them off the plank?

Novels from Canada, Ireland, the United States, and the United Kingdom that explore families, communities and a world in crisis make up the six finalists for the prestigious Booker Prize for fiction.

The Shortlist announced on Thursday for the 50,000 British pounds ($61,400) award includes Canadian author Sarah Bernstein’s absurdist allegory Study for Obedience; US writer Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, a set of interlinked stories about a Jamaican family in Miami; and Pulitzer Prize-winning US novelist Paul Harding’s historical novel This Other Eden, based on a real interracial island community in the 19th century.

Two Irish writers are on the Shortlist: Paul Lynch, for the post-democratic dystopia, Prophet Song; and Paul Murray, for the tragicomic family saga, The Bee Sting.

The finalists are rounded out by UK writer Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane, the story of a young athlete grappling with a family tragedy.

The best-known authors among the 13 semi-finalists announced last month, Ireland’s Sebastian Barry and Malaysia’s Tan Twan Eng, did not make the cut.

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/468547

David Day's A TOLKIEN BESTIARY is a scholarly, definitive and enchantingly beautiful explanation of all the imaginary beasts, monsters, races, nations,deities, fauna and flora of J.R.R- Tolkien's fantasy worlds of Middle-earth and the Undying Lands.

David Day has identified, analyzed and described 129 separate races. Each is lucidly explained in terms of its physical appearance, language, behavior and culture. A TOLKIEN BESTIARY does not retell their stories: its purpose is to make Tolkien’s own books more accessible by identifying his living creatures and explaining their roles in his epic world.

While not the most accurate of the Tolkien Bestiaries, this one was the first, and the one with the best artwork.

Downloads for the novels:

• Fellowship of the Ring

• The Two Towers

• Return of the King

• The Silmarillion

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/359206

Karel Čapek’s last major novel, War with the Newts, is a satirical dystopian masterpiece, both prescient and timeless, uniquely Czech and yet universal in appeal. Published in 1936, it remains one of the most thought-provoking novels ever written.

Wikipedia

The full novel in html, courtesy of Project Gutenberg Australia

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/452228

In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell, there once lived three lovely, and loving, sisters. Their names . . . but their real names were never used, like the best household china, which was locked away after the night of their joint tragedy in a cupboard whose location was eventually forgotten, so that the great thousand-piece service from the Gardner potteries in Tsarist Russia became a family myth in whose factuality they almost ceased to believe . . . the three sisters, I should state without further delay, bore the family name of Shakil, and were universally known (in descending order of age) as Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny.

And one day their father died...

Shame is Salman Rushdie's third novel, published in 1983. This book was written out of a desire to approach the problem of "artificial" (other-made) country divisions, their residents' complicity, and the problems of post-colonialism when Pakistan was created to separate the Muslims from the Hindus after Britain gave up control of India.

The book is written in the style of magic realism. It portrays the lives of Iskander Harappa (sometimes assumed to be Zulfikar Ali Bhutto), and General Raza Hyder (sometimes assumed to be General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq), and their relationship. The central theme of the novel is that begetting "shame" begets violence. The concepts of 'shame' and 'shamelessness' are explored through all of the characters, with the main focus being on Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Khayyám.

Wikipedia on Shame

Wikipedia on Sir Salman Rushdie

While the Satanic Verses get most of the press when talking about Rushdie, Shame is a masterwork of magical realism that deserves more attention.

i love asoiaf but it's hard to start rereading atm of course

I learned to read in grade school like pretty much everyone else I know, and I remember really enjoying reading for a very narrow portion of my younger years. When reading books became a compulsary part of school, that enjoyment just vanished, and video games ended up filling that void of "solitary passtime". I dont even really like video games all that much, eheh.

Now that im older, I dont really have authority figures threatening my future if I dont read the dryest books known to man, so I'm open to the idea of just reading again - it certainly cant be worse than just browsing lemmy posts for hours, right?

The thing is, I have absolutely no grasp on what the current book scene really looks like. I dont really know what authors are considered masters of the craft, or where to even really get a finger in the pulse on which I'd be into. If you could recommend someone who writes books you like, or just a few standouts, it would really help me get my bearings.

If it helps, I'm currently reading "A hundred years of solitude", "Berserk", and "Le fluers de mal", and am generally open to tragedies, horror, and narratives that are either experimental or just weird. If you know of any manuals or informative books that are particularly well written, im also interested in those!

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/448597

Amoebae leave no fossils. They haven’t any bones. (No teeth, no belt buckles, no wedding rings.) It is impossible, therefore, to determine how long amoebae have been on Earth.

Quite possibly they have been here since the curtain opened. Amoebae may even have dominated the stage, early in the first act. On the other hand, they may have come into existence only three years—or three days or three minutes—before they were discovered by Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1674. It can’t be proven either way.

One thing is certain, however: because amoebae reproduce by division, endlessly, passing everything on yet giving up nothing, the first amoebae that ever lived is still alive. Whether four billion years old or merely three hundred, he/she is with us today.

Where?

Well, the first amoeba may be floating on his/her back in a luxurious pool in Hollywood, California. The first amoeba may be hiding among the cattail roots and peepers in the muddy shallows of Siwash Lake. The first amoeba may recently have dripped down your leg. It is pointless to speculate.

The first amoeba, like the last and the one after that, ishere, there and everywhere, for its vehicle, its medium, its essence is water.

Water—the ace of elements. Water dives from the clouds without parachute, wings or safety net. Water runs over the steepest precipice and blinks not a lash. Water is buried and rises again; water walks on fire and fire gets the blisters. Stylishly composed in any situation—solid, gas or liquid—speaking in penetrating dialects understood by all things—animal, vegetable or mineral—water travels intrepidly through four dimensions, sustaining (Kick a lettuce in the field and it will yell “Water!”), destroying (The Dutch boy’s finger remembered the view from Ararat) and creating (It has even been said that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another, but that’s another story). Always in motion, ever-flowing (whether at steam rate or glacier speed), rhythmic, dynamic, ubiquitous, changing and working its changes, a mathematics turned wrong side out, a philosophy in reverse, the ongoing odyssey of water is virtually irresistible. And wherever water goes, amoebae go along for the ride.

Sissy Hankshaw once taught a parakeet to hitchhike. There is not much in that line she could teach an amoeba.

Wikipedia on the book

Link to the stinker of a movie adaptation of 1993 - a prime example of when a novel absolutely flops as a film. Read the book before seeing it, because you won't want to afterwards.

I know it is a known Classic but i liked Animal Farm so much i had to share. Before reading i thought that it would be similar to 1984 or Brave new world which it kind of is but its also very very different. Right from the Beginning i was hooked. I really love Orwells Books but this one is my favourite. I did not expect that. So for anyone that did not yet read it, i highly recomend it! :)

I have a specific book I've been meaning to read for awhile. I've heard that while it's a great journey, it's a dense / heavy / slow read along the way. It sounds like it'd be fun to read it together with a group of likewise interested folks.

Is there a service for pulling together reading groups around specific books, rather than the more common way of gathering a group of people and then selecting books? I'm imagining a website that has a sign-up page for ~every book and when ~10 people sign up for a book they all get an email introducing them to each other. Like if there was a bus stop for every book & when enough people had gathered, a bus appears & they depart together.

Given list of all the books, this seems like a pretty easy thing to make. Does it exist yet?

Just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. One of my top reads, let alone sci-fi reads, for the past couple of years for sure. Super well-thought out concepts, good character development, and an irresistible hook that will take you out of your comfort zone when you find out that you really don't know who you are siding with!

Has anyone read this or any of Tchaikovsky's other works??

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/429137

Shadow libraries, sometimes called pirate libraries, consist of texts aggregated outside the legal framework of copyright.

Today's pirate libraries have their roots in the work of Russian academics to digitize texts in the 1990s. Scholars in that part of the world had long had a thriving practice of passing literature and scientific information underground, in opposition to government censorship—part of the samizdat culture, in which banned documents were copied and passed hand to hand through illicit channels. Those first digital collections were passed freely around, but when their creators started running into problems with copyright, their collections “retreated from the public view," writes Balázs Bodó, a piracy researcher based at the University of Amsterdam. "The text collections were far too valuable to simply delete," he writes, and instead migrated to "closed, membership-only FTP servers."

More recently, though, those collections have moved online, where they are available to anyone who knows where to look.

The purpose of this site, then, is to have all these libraries at our fingertips when in need of a certain text or book.

As Aaron Swartz put it:

"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves."

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Read the full text of the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/443578

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades’ magical irons. “Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.” José Arcadio Buendía, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth. Melquíades, who was an honest man, warned him: “It won’t work for that.” But José Arcadio Buendía at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. Úrsula Iguarán, his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade him. “Very soon well have gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house,” her husband replied. For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea. He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquíades’ incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman’s hair around its neck...

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Spanish: Cien años de soledad, American Spanish: [sjen ˈaɲos ðe soleˈðað]) is a 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the fictitious town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.

The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement.

Since it was first published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into 46 languages and sold more than 50 million copies. The novel, considered García Márquez's magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works both in the Hispanic literary canon and in world literature.

Wikipedia

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/441958

Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament is a contemporary fantasy novel by John Crowley, published in 1981. It won the World Fantasy Award in 1982.

Harold Bloom included this work in his book The Western Canon, calling it "A neglected masterpiece. The closest achievement we have to the Alice stories of Lewis Carroll." Bloom also recorded that, based on their correspondence, poet James Merrill "loved the book."

Thomas M. Disch described Little, Big as "the best fantasy novel ever. Period." Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that Little, Big is "a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy." In Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels, David Pringle described the book as "a work of architectonic sublimity" and wrote that "the author plays with masterly skill on the emotional nerves of awe, rapture, mystery and enchantment." Paul Di Filippo said, "It is hard to imagine a more satisfying work, both on an artistic and an emotional level".

A number of readers and critics have described Little, Big as magical realism, perhaps in an attempt to defend it from being categorized as a work belonging to the sometimes maligned field of genre fiction. However, the novel fits the classic description of low fantasy. Some list it among the early works of urban fantasy or at least as a "classic" part of the movement that developed into it.

Wikipedia

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/13thFloor/t/413449

On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx), and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac, himself, as the narrator, Sal Paradise.

The idea for On the Road, Kerouac's second novel, was formed during the late 1940s, in a series of notebooks and then typed out, on a continuous reel of paper, during three weeks in April 1951. It was published by Viking Press in 1957.

The New York Times hailed the book's appearance as "the most beautifully executed, the clearest, and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac, himself, named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."In 1998, the Modern Library ranked On the Road 55th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

Wikipedia

Don't know if people know of this site or not but just in case you don't, it's pretty damn good. All they require is an email address (I used an anon one with no issues). You can follow up to 100 authors and get alerts when new stuff is announced and published.

It's also got a decent future search, showing up everything being published in the next 7 or 30 days which you can also narrow by genre.

They do use Web Beacons on their site and in their emails but uBlockOrigin will handle the website and DDG Email Protection can handle the emails.

Things found in library books.

I have a lot of time to fill with audio, but audiobooks are challenging for me because I have trouble paying attention consistently enough and processing physical descriptions fast enough to keep up with the narrator. I end up losing my place or having to rewind a lot. Slowing down playback doesn't help/introduces other problems.

I'm also easily put off by narrators that have repetitive quirks (e.g. ending every sentence like it's a question, or doing goofy voices) or that read in such a flat and consistent way that it becomes droning. So my preference, by far, is for narrators who basically act the book like they're in an audio drama or a movie. This seems more often the case for first person books.

On a similar note, audiodramas with full casts and music or sound effects are especially welcome.

I'm looking for something short because that makes it much more likely I'll finish. Long series are fine though if each book ends well, not on cliffhangers.

YA and even middle-grade are fine.

I'll also take "so bad it's good" suggestions.

Scifi and fantasy are my usual go-to's, but I'll take any genre, especially since adult fantasy and scifi usually has too much description for my audiobook tastes.

Horror would be good. Or maybe a comedy? Something gripping. Page-turners.

Basically I just really need something entertaining but snappy and very easy to follow, with a narrator who sounds like they're acting instead of like they're reading a script.

I'm already aware of actual play d&d podcasts - those are sometimes great, but I can get tired od them after a while and I'd like to find more variety/options with this post.

Thank you for any suggestions!

I would like to know what caused the Great Depression and how the world recovered from it. Do you know any good books on this subject?