This should probably be general advice for any book, but the problem with hype is that it breeds more hype and overenthusiastic fans tend to exaggerate how good a book is and push it on everyone.

I see so many people either promoting the series as the best thing ever or loudly complaining it must be bad because THEY didn’t personally enjoy it. Along with posts from people who clearly believe than fantasy can only be good if it has fancy, elaborate prose and anyone who reads a book series like DCC must be an idiot who never reads.

There’s also the claim that only gamer dudes will enjoy it, or teen boys (seriously, don’t gift this series to kids, it’s a dark series meant for adults). You don’t need to be a gamer, or even a guy to like this. But I’d say there’s a few other things you might need to enjoy to figure out if Dungeon Crawler Carl is for you:

• Liking absurdist, dark and often crude humor
• Having a fondness for cats
• Being okay with a game-style setting that includes lots …

Here’s part two, where she shares 40 more books.

I’ve listened to the whole video, and my TBR has expanded again. I really liked her pitch for all the books and have already added them to my TBR.

Edit: Thank you, Mournelithe, for adding the books in the comment.
I, too, have added the books mentioned in the two videos, but it would be good to hear her pitch for each book. She said she has many more books she would like to recommend and will be making one more video about them in the near future.

Part - 1

VOYAGER IN NIGHT by C. J. Cherryh
THE FACE IN THE FROST by John Bellairs
THE COLDFIRE TRILOGY by C. S. Friedman
RIDER AT THE GATE by C. J. Cherryh
DISCOVERY by J.A.J. Minton
THE ARMAGEDDON RAG by George R. R. Martin
SON OF AVONAR by Carol Berg
SONG OF THE BEAST by Carol Berg
THE QUEEN’S THIEF SERIES by Megan Whalen Turner
THE SHARING KNIFE by Lois McMaster Bujold
HEART’S BLOOD by Juliet Marilliet
THE SCORPIO RACES by Maggie Stiefvater
ARS MAGICA by Judith …

Most fantasy politics I read comes down to who has the bigger army or the older bloodline. Law tends to show up as decoration, a charter someone waves around, or a court scene that exists so somebody can get sentenced.

The thing I keep hunting for is a rule a king does not want to follow and follows anyway, because breaking it would cost him more than obeying it. His conscience has nothing to do with it. Something in the world makes the rule expensive to ignore.

Closest I have found: KJ Parker, where the paperwork is the weapon and everybody in the room knows it. Guy Gavriel Kay, where custom carries a lot of load without ever being called law. Pratchett gets there with the Watch eventually, though it takes a while before Vetinari is bound by anything except his own preference.

Where does law actually have teeth in something you have read, and what gives it the teeth?

I’m in the middle of royal assassin and no series has made me cry… no book has made me cry… until now! I’ve felt goosebumps and cried 3 times so far. I feel so attached to every character for different reasons. Hobb is changing my perception of reading fantasy and books in general. I’ve never been so sure I’m committing to an expansive series before.

For me it has to be The Empire series with Mara of the Acoma by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts

Female protagonist. Lots of action and political intrigue. Some fairly spicy romance. It’s almost Game of Thrones-ish but in a different setting.

If Wheel of Time could get adapted, it’s a bit surprising Mara hasn’t been brought life yet.

Or even been optioned AFAIK

I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of the same book suggestions and I’m searching for books, new and old, that aren’t on any of the thousands of book lists that list the same titles constantly. What’s some rare gems of books that you love and can recommend?

I recently ordered all three volumes of Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance from Thriftbooks. All three of them arrived as cheap, pulpy, print-on-demand editions from Lightning Source LLC, the bane of my book-collecting existence. Even worse, Volumes I and II are printed on acid-free paper, so they‘re pure white, while Volume III is not, so its pages are bronze.

Since these were published by Duke University Press, I assumed they had legit printings. And since they were only available new, they were $25 each. I paid $75 for books that won’t hold together for one reading, let alone a lifetime of ownership. In my view, these POD editions are no different than bootleg rips of CDs or DVDs, and they should not be sold without some kind of disclaimer.

The Arikei in Embassytown by China Mieville follow linguistic determinism. For them, words are physical states and not symbolic abstraction like it is for humans. Their words are directly linked to their reality. As human language is perceived to be disconnected from their immediate physical reality, they can’t comprehend humans directly. 

The octopuses from Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky have mini-brains across their bodies. They communicate through a shifting array of pigments and textures on their skin. 

The ocean from Solaris by Stanislaw Lem touches at the dangers of trying to understand “god-like” consciousness. The entire project of trying to decipher any pattern or meaning behind the actions of the ocean falls flat as it is simply too beyond our understanding. 

Stevland from Semiosis by Sue Burke experiences reality through root networks, nutrients, and evolutionary strategies. All animals and humans to him are a passing phenomenon that he humours and tends to.

I just ran across this news story about hi-tech companies digitizing and then destroying books. It reminded me of Vernor Vinge’s 2006 book Rainbow’s End which won the 2007 Hugo Award.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o

When court documents were unsealed last month it also emerged books were being destroyed in the process of training Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude.

They insisted sourcing books for training was a widely used approach across the AI industry.

Read the book it’s really awesome. Very accessible to read and great story

So it turns out that I not only started with what is often cited as Iain Banks’s most difficult SF novel (Feersum Endjinn), I made my second read what is perhaps his most difficult novel full stop. Iain Banks’s imagination once again impresses. This is a complex, labyrinthine novel that I do think is better than Feersum Endjinn; more ambitious, which seems strange given that The Bridge occurs entirely in the mind of one man. This man is introduced to us as ‘John Orr’, who wakes up in a huge megastructure taking the form of a great iron bridge redolent of the Forth Bridge. He has no memory of how he got there or what happened to him, only aware that he was fished from the water and is a patient of a Dr. Joyce, to whom Orr explains his dreams in a hope of piecing together what happened to him.

Orr meets the alluring Abberlaine Arrol, daughter of one of the bridge’s engineers, and this ‘main’ plot is interwoven with chapters following a barbarian who speaks in Scots dialect and whose …

My favorite would probably have to be the Spin series where the answer to the paradox is actually kind of depressing but unique.

Looking for books with other interesting propositions to the answer of where everyone is?

Please mind the spoiler tags in the thread folks.

I keep coming back to books where somebody follows a rule long after everyone who understood it is dead. Canticle for Leibowitz is the one everybody names, monks copying a circuit diagram as scripture. Asimov does a colder version in Foundation, where technicians run reactors as a priesthood and the ritual is the operating manual with the reasoning filed off.

Both of those are about knowledge being lost. The case I have trouble finding is the one where the procedure still works. Nobody on the page can say why, it reads as superstition from the outside, and it is the only thing keeping the lights on.

Anything come to mind? I would especially take books where you watch the reason come apart across the timeline instead of being told it already did.

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> NEW YORK—Calling the current rate of theatrical releases starring the actress “unsustainable,” top analysts warned Wednesday that the U.S. economy was becoming overly dependent on Anne Hathaway. “Between Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey, The End Of Oak Street, and the upcoming Verity, not to mention the whole other slate of projects she has in preproduction, we estimate that Anne Hathaway films currently account for a staggering 63% of all U.S. exports,” said Jason Nadu, head of leading-lady analytics at Bloomberg, who urged industry leaders to begin diversifying into other mid-career actresses immediately to prevent the nation from collapsing into an economic depression.

> While it’s great we’re experiencing a boom, we need to prepare for the eventual bust. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend a Devil Wears Prada 3 or Interstellar 2 is coming. Like it or not, Anne Hathaway will not be around forever. And then what?” Nadu went on to …