thought it might be interesting to have a thread about what people are reading. we obviously have some overlap in interests, even beyond making/GF, and i thought this could be a way to discover other authors/books/series. here’s my first contribution.
technically i caught up on the Murderbot series a few months ago, but i saw this article about how the titular character Murderbot has many parallels with autism and how well it’s handled from an autistic person’s point of view. and it made me want to share the article here.
i really enjoyed all of the books. good pace, good dialog, humorous.
I haven’t read the latest yet but, the Murderbot books are fun.
If you want something in a similar vein, Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch books are excellent. I reallly enjoyed her foray into fantasy with The Raven Tower, too. It’s exhilaratingly different.
I am eagerly awaiting release of the final book in Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy later this month. Novik is producing some of the best fantasy work of recent years.
In non-fiction, I just finished The Food Explorer, which details the life and adventures of David Fairchild, who introduced a huge number of the fruits and vegetables we know to the U.S. from the far corners of the globe. It is written in a very engaging narrative style that made it an easy read.
i’ve read everything by scalzi. even have a signed copy of old man’s war (a gift from friends who considered me an old man, even in my 30s). i’ve read all of stross’s laundry series, but not the saturn’s child univers. may take a look at that.
Scalzi is fun. I got to talk to him for a bit at a con a few years ago. He gave me (and signed) a pre-release copy of Lock In … which I still haven’t read. I think I have a general vibe issue with the premise.
In any case, I am in favor of pushing back against ageism!
other thoughts. all the wool, dust, and beacon 23 books by hugh howey.
the slow horses series by mick herron (which is now an apple tv series, very well done). a series about “outcasts” in MI6. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H3RDCR6
anything by adrian tchaikovsky, like the children of time or final architecture series.
I read The Daevabad Trilogy and really liked it! It’s on my list of series to buy. I just cleared a shelf with old textbooks to make room for more books.
Just finished Reason by Steven Pinker.
I’d recommend anything from him for a good nonfiction read with The Blank Slate being something that I think should be required reading.
Fun fact: Back in 1993ish I took a job as MIS for a human services organization in Bryan, TX. One of my predecessors in the job was Steven Gould (author of Jumper), who left the job to start writing books. I actually only met him once, but he had developed a lot of the procedures and such, and my office was full of things with his name on them, and he had configured most of the PCs in the organization with batch file menus and such because most of them weren’t running Windows yet, so it kind of felt like I knew him.
A few years later when I was leaving my next job (to move to Oregon with my then-new husband), as a developer of some of the first SQL-based dynamic websites at a little Internet startup in Bryan, they hired Martha Wells and another woman for me to train to take my place. At the time, she was working on her first novel. I later found out that Steven Gould was her mentor. Such a small world!