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It is a crapshoot. I’m fortunate in that my mother is a prolific reader. I am too, but she makes me look illiterate. She consumes a ridiculous number of books a
by cgriswald 7y ago
It is a crapshoot. I’m fortunate in that my mother is a prolific reader. I am too, but she makes me look illiterate. She consumes a ridiculous number of books a year. Lots of it is crap. Some isn’t, and she’s always recommended those ones to me, keeping in mind my own interests.
Over the years I’ve met a few others who I trust to recommend books. But most people, even professional reviewers, just don’t work for me.
That said, I’ve only read a handful of books that I’ve finished and thought, “I wish I hadn’t read that.” I can usually get something out of it, whether it’s a classic, pulp, overrated, whatever. It took me many attempts to make it through Dune by Frank Herbert. Part of it I attribute to being a child for my first attempts, but part of it is the style. It’s dry, slow, and political. It’s now one my short list of favorite books. On the other hand, William Gibson’s Neuromancer has gotten about as many attempts from me, but that one I’ve never finished.
Interestingly (to me anyway), I generally find the books recommended by random HN posters worthy reads, both fiction and non-fiction.
- ericol 7y agoI've devoured everything William Gibson's... up to a point. I really, really liked the first trilogy. The second one was also entertaining, although not as _*punk_ as the first one. I kind of enjoyed "Pattern Recognition" (mostly because it was the first in the "almost viable" trilogy. But "Spook Country" was, for me, unreadable. I don't think I made it past the 2nd chapter. Can't quite put my finger on it; but I think it is that his style changed to what I'd call hyper-realism: He would go on taking 3 pages to describe a room. Seriously, for me the book unbearable boring.
- mirimir 7y agoAfter a while, in my opinion, he just wrote the ~same novel, again and again. There's always the tough young woman. And the wimpy guy, typically a druggie. And often, the Case equivalent. But I still like them well enough.
- detritus 7y agoI had this sad realisation with the last Iain M Banks book I read - Hydrogen Sonata. It was a good book, but I felt like I'd seen its skeleton at least three or four times before.
- mercutio2 7y agoI thought the Hydrogen Sonata was probably Banks’s weakest Culture novel. “Sometimes civilizations decide to Sublime! Other folks take their stuff. One ship takes it upon itself to help a younger race not get boxed out of the spoils, fails, and gets depressed. The end” Most of his other Culture books had more stuff going combined with characters I cared about.
- mirimir 7y agoIt's pretty common for creators -- authors, artists, bands, etc -- to become formulaic. To some extent, it's just pandering to their estimated audience. Also, they've typically been working on their first few works for years. And then, if they become popular, they're under pressure to produce more and more, faster and faster. In my opinion, it works best to just write series. You can just use mostly the same characters. Matthew Stover did that well with the Caine series. I gather that he'd been working on it for at least a few years, and had been told that it was unpublishable. So he cut out a first book, and focused on action. Then another, when it sold well enough. And then, years later, after his Star Wars gig, he published the last two. They're basically a metaplot, and collection of back stories, that probably look a lot like the initial project.
- Filligree 7y agoYou should try Greg Egan's books, if you like SF at all. I think a good introduction would be Schild's Ladder or Axiomatic, but my personal favorite is the Clockwork Rocket trilogy and Dichromatic. The latter two are conceptually related. If you know about metric signatures, you'll be able to tell how. If not, well, you will.
- gjm11 7y agoCorrection: Dichronauts, not Dichromatic. (DuckDuckGo is smart enough to find the right book; Google kinda-sorta is -- it's the first image search result but doesn't otherwise appear in the first page of results, at least for me; Amazon's search isn't.)
- Filligree 7y agoRight, of course. I blame gboard.
- AgentME 7y agoSeconding Greg Egan. I'd highly recommend Permutation City and Diaspora by him. The books explore mind uploading from lots of interesting angles.
- cgriswald 7y agoThanks for the suggestion. Very appreciated!