The book was The Name of the Wind

GNU Sir Terry, who would have been 77 today.

It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is indeed true - it’s called Life.

I recently made a post asking for people’s recent DNF’d books. That post got around 600 replies and in those replies some books were more common than others. I thought it would be interesting to see which books were the most common to DNF so I went through the comments and replies and did some counting.

These are only the books that were DNF’d. Many people had series they stopped reading after reading one or two books, but this is only based on books that were dropped in the middle of reading.

Considering I did this manually based on reddit comments, please take it with a grain of salt, but I thought it would be fun.

The Locked Tomb 6

Gideon the Ninth 5

Harrow the Ninth 1

The Green Bone Saga 7

Jade City 3

Jade Legacy 3

Jade War 1

Farseer Trilogy 8

Assassin’s Apprentice 5

Royal Assassin 3

Malazan Book of the Fallen 10

Gardens of the Moon 2

Deadhouse Gates 5

Memories of Ice 1

Toll the Hounds 1

Dust of Dreams 1

The Empyrean 10

Fourth Wing 8 …

Hi everyone! I’m Brian McClellan. I’ve written books, novellas, short stories, and an RPG. I’ve hosted a podcast. I play too many videogames, love to smoke wings for game night, and am currently teaching myself how to make miniature cheesecakes. You probably know me from my flintlock fantasy Powder Mage books.

I’ve got a new novella over on Kickstarter called Swords, Cider, and Other Distractions. This expands the Glass Immortals series, taking place just after the traumatic prologue of In the Shadow of Lightning and following the shattered young political savant Demir Grappo out into the provinces as he flees his responsibilities. I’m hoping you’ll give the new novella a shot, or dive into the whole universe if you haven’t yet!

The new novella has nine days left on Kickstarter. You can find my other work on my website, Amazon, and at your favorite bookstore. There are pictures of my cheesecakes on Instagram, or the occasional media recommendation on Bluesky.

In the meantime let’s …

Poorly written or well written, all answers are welcome.

For example: I hate with my heart and soul Thomas Covenant. Fuck that guy

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/29/recipetin-eats-founder-accuses-brooki-bakehouse-of-plagiarising-recipes-in-popular-cookbook

Nagi is a cookery icon in Australia, beloved for her wonderful (and freely available) recipes on her site, and her cookbooks. Most people I know absolutely love her recipes which are straightforward and written in a clear easy to understand way. Nagi also runs and finances a community kitchen that provides meals for the needy. She has spent years, as she documents online, testing and perfecting each recipe.

I’m not sure how well this will go for the social media influencer Brooki (who married into the billionaire Bellamy family). Another day, another influencer stealing material from a hard working POC creator.

Brooki started out as a travel blogger before pivoting to this latest grift during Covid. According to Nagi’s post it seems this woman also stole recipes from other big name chefs and cooks for her book.

From the article: “Cochrane responded to criticism of both actors’ ages and Elordi’s ethnicity by saying there was “no need to be accurate” as the source material is “just a book”, Deadline reported.”

What do folks think about this?

Are there any books that you find truly amazing because the author invested a great deal of time and effort into researching the story? I’m always impressed by novels where the details feel so real that you can tell the writer has deep knowledge of the subject. I just read The Martian by Andy Weir and I was amazed by how he tried to incorporate scientific accuracy into the plot. That must have been really time consuming and required a lot of effort to do the research before writing the novel. The way he described science, physics, botany, chemistry and space science was really impressive and detailed.

I’d like to talk about a frustrating trend that I have been seeing a lot on online book communities recently: the rise of “the Vibes Defence”.

Over the last few months I have read a number of books based on recommendations from Reddit that I have ended up disappointed with. More often than not, the reason for these disappointments is that the books have great settings/ideas but fail to stick the landing from a thematic/plotting perspective. Whenever this happens, I inevitably go to reddit to to see if others felt similarly. Almost always, I find a number of posts titled something like “Disappointed with [Book]” where the POST is interesting and engaging, but then I get to the comments…

Invariably, the comments are filled with dozens of comments made up of some variation of the same thought: “The book isn’t for everyone, I just loved the vibe of the book”. Or “I guess it just wasn’t for you. This book wasn’t …

Looking for some sci-fi books where halfway through, or by the end, the whole idea, structure, or even the shape of the universe completely changes. I love stories that flip your understanding of the world as you go. For example, I really liked Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang, the movie Dark City, and Diaspora by Greg Egan. I also recently read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke — even though most people call it fantasy, I feel like it still fits what I’m looking for. Basically, I want sci-fi that makes me see the world in a totally different way by the time I’m done reading.

Hey guys, I recently got into SciFi horrors. I got recommended here some books. But they are not scary enough. I want such a scary book so that I’ll have to run to the toilet in the night instead of walking.

Anyway, here are the books I read and what I think about them:

Blindsight: Not very spooky, but interesting ideas.

Ship of fools: A bit chilling sometimes, but not so much of a horror.

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem: I loved the book! It came very close to what I wanted.

Dead Silence: I really loved the whole setting. But it was ruined by the writing and plot for me. I wish there was more unknown stuff.

Annihilation trilogy: I loved it! The last two books were less of a horror though.

Expanse: Currently listening to this, awesome book. Not really a horror (so far at least).

From all of the books Solaris and Dead Silence were the scariest.

What was the scariest SciFi you read and can recommend?

Marking this as a spoiler because you can never be too sure these days.

Hello all. I decided to read The Expanse series for the first time, after I rediscovered my live for sci-fi, and I just wanted to share the Bulgarian edition as I cannot stop looking at it. I only have the first two, but they are an absolute gem (I will include the others from the publishers website).

Honestly, I am only a hundred pages in and I can’t put the book down. Can’t wait to go through the whole story.

I understand this is a beloved series and I only blame myself for not reading it earlier. I have promised myself that I will make sure to finish the nine books, even if it’s the last series I’d ever read lol

Can you recommend some classics old books that still feels mostly like written today? (I’m doing exception for things like social norms etc.). With a message that is still actual.

Some of my picks would be:

• Solaris

• Roadside Picnic

• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Thanks

Edit:

Books mentioned in this thread (will try to keep it updated): 1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)

1. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974) and many others by Ursula K. Le Guin

2. Solaris (1961), His Master’s Voice (1968) and others by Stanisław Lem

3. Last and First Men (1930), and Starmaker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon

4. Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley

5. Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart

6. The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester

7. The War of the Worlds (1897), The Time Machine (1895) and otherss by Wells

8. The Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury

9. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966) and other works by Robert A. Heinlein

10. A Canticle …

There’s a concept called a “weirdness budget” which is sometimes applied to programming languages. When someone invents a new language, they have to do some things differently from all the existing languages, or what is the point? But if they do everything differently, people find the language incomprehensible and won’t use it. For example if ‘+’ in your language means multiplication, you wasted your budget on useless weirdness. Weirdness is defined by difference not from the real world, but from the standard expectations of the genre - if you have dragons in a fantasy novel it doesn’t strain the budget at all.

It occurs to me that this applies to Fantasy and SF novels as well. In Fantasy why is it that this other world beyond the portal has horses, crows, chickens, money made of pieces of gold, and so on? It’s tempting to call this lack of imagination, but a better explanation is that otherwise the author would blow her weirdness budget …

I’m on a long mission to read every Hugo Award winner ever and it’s been incredibly rewarding and I have found some of my favorite books ever this way. I keep the long list in my phone notes and I have a personal rule that whenever I come across a book on my list that I don’t own or haven’t read (and I have the means in the moment) then I have to buy it.

Anyone else reading through or have read through the Hugo books?

What’s your favorite?

An (relatively) underrated gem?

I used to join specific tv show subreddits while I was watching a specific show to participate in discussions after each episode but the popular show subreddits have gotten seriously weird in the last I would say 10 years or so.

People seem to form bizarre parasocial relationships with not just the show characters but also the actors. They get super aggressive when you criticise either and it makes objective discussion about a show impossible.

It’s very strange, maybe people who are permanently online nowadays and are starting to lose a grip on the difference between real life and fiction?

For me it’s the uninspiring use of popular songs from the 70s, 80s, 90s, but preferably nirvana. It has to be nirvana if possible. Take the hook, slow it down and drown it in a heavy reverb effects and you just created a masterpiece of cinematical background music because the young audience will think the song is cool and the older ones will like it because it’s nostalgic.