I’m happy to answer questions about writing, the new book or any of my other books

edit: i thought about deleting this post bc people are mostly just using it to insult one another and vent their frustrations, but i’ll leave it up for those still commenting thoughtful stuff.

of course there is nothing wrong with YA and people should read what they want. that is obvious.

i only made this post bc (as a not-very-online reddit/tiktok user) i’ve recently bought multiple “tiktok books”— popular adult novels praised by adult content creators as the new “paragons of the adult fantasy subgenre” (im quoting a comment)— and was simply surprised by how young they felt.

examples of this include the poppy war, babel, song of achilles, red rising, the will of the many, etc — books that weren’t necessarily advertised as YA, but felt like it to me.

This is not to say those books are all awful and nobody should read them and you’re stupid if you enjoy them. I just found them UNEXPECTEDLY young, ESPECIALLY regarding PROSE. Personally this in turn made the darker / more mature, …

Let’s discuss some of the names in fantasy that you couldn’t make heads nor tails of in terms of pronunciation. And I’m not talking intentionally comical ones that are long and complex on purpose, but ones that the author intended to be read, yet that are ironically nearly unreadable.

For me it’s Seaine from The Wheel of Time. Is it “Sheen?” “Seen?” “See-ayn?” “Say-ai-nuh?” I honestly have no idea. And for some reason my copies of the books never give her name’s pronunciation in the glossary.

What are some others?

I feel like I haven’t rated a fantasy book 5 stars in so long. Everything I’ve read recently has been a mediocre 3 or 3.5 stars. Please tell me what your last 5 star read was in the fantasy genre, so I can look into it and hopefully love it just as much!

I want the last book that blew you away, that you loved so much you still think about it, and gave you the worst book hangover you’ve ever experienced lmao

(I would PREFER the genre to be fantasy with some romance in there - I am not picky about the amount of romance however in my books so they do not need to be romance focused at all, subplots work fine!)

My top 3 thus far:

Six of Crows

Shadow of the Fox

An Ember in the Ashes

The above are all considered to be Young Adult (I read them all in my early twenties, I am now thirty) however I read Adult too and everything in between, it just so happens these three series really made an impact on me and have remained my favourites for years.

Thank you in advance!

I basically looked at the Storygraph community review stats of a 100 popular books from this subreddit (I only used 1 book per series) and worked out a top 10 for each stat. Hopefully these lists can help someone pick what book they want to read next. Keep in mind, these lists aren’t gospel and there are a number external factors like book popularity and average reader age that could have skewed some of the numbers.

Here is the Link to the data table if you’re interested, If you see any mistakes or if you have any ideas of something else I can do with the data please tell me:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nZXzC9gHpw-HASdqSGjR4JWvD6OKjcZIisQ-uy63z8g/edit?usp=sharing

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Dark % Top 10:

1-3. Prince of Thorns; Between Two Fires; Berserk Vol. 1 - 97

1. The Darkness that Comes Before - 95

5-7. Worm; The Library at Mount Char; Black Company - 91

1. Perdido Street Station - 90

2. Frankenstein - 89

10-11. The Blade Itself; The Parable of the Sower - 86

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Adventurous % …

I’m really over grim and edgy, and it was almost shocking how refreshing it was to see a superhero movie that wasn’t overly flippant OR desperate to be ‘realistic’, but dared to be sincere and hopeful, while also acknowledging that it can be hard.

What does fantasy offer in a similar vein?

The Polari Prize and the Polari First Book Prize are known as the sole prizes recognizing queer authors in the UK.

This is a wonderful read. I love this sentence that is a very short summary of the article:

You are not memorizing, you are metabolizing.

I was looking at my bookshelf today and counted around 1700 books, each one a piece of my life’s journey. I’m still relatively young but it made me wonder will they be passed down to someone who values them as much as I do, donated to a library or simply scattered and forgotten? This question really disturbs me because how can I be sure that those who get these books will preserve and love them like I do? Do they really care about reading? Well, no one lives forever but as a book lover who has been collecting books since a very young age I don’t like the idea of the impermanence of ownership. The idea that they could end up gathering dust in a storage box or sold without a second thought makes me uneasy. Do you have a plan for your book collection when you grow old and are no longer here?

So I finished my reread of The Hunger Games trilogy a couple weeks ago (⁵⁄₅ as always, loved it), and chapter 18 in particular suddenly had me thinking of and making comparisons to Fourth Wing, which I read several months back and decidely did not enjoy as much, because of the stark contrast in the military training programs and overall competence of the people running of them. This is a snippet from when Katniss undergoes training in District 13 to prepare for the invasion on the Capitol:

“The instructor breaks us into squads of eight and we attempt to carry out missions – gaining a position, destroying a target, searching a home – as if we were really fighting our way through the Capitol. The thing’s rigged so that everything that can go wrong will go wrong for you does. A false step triggers a land mine, a sniper appears on a rooftop, your gun jams, a crying child leads you into an ambush, your squadron leader… gets hit by a mortar and you have …

I’m reading Galactic North (Alastair Reynolds) and I just came to a part where a (space) pirate died and we find out that they had requested their dead body be fired ahead of the ship once it is almost touching light speed. When asked about the reasons, we are told:

“It’s an old pirate tradition. Burial at C”

I think that’s the funniest SF joke/pun I’ve read in a SF book, now I’m wondering what else might be hidden out there!

I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction since the sixties and I just read Earth Abides by George R. Stewart for the first time. Wow! It’s now in my top 10 of all time.

It’s a post apocalyptic novel published in 1949. So it was written at a time before the interstate highway system and before television was widespread. Apparently it was the inspiration for The Stand but it doesn’t have any of the paranormal or religious stuff.

It is realistic, thought provoking, very human, and moving. Absolutely loved it.

I finally cracked Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson last night, thinking “Man, I’ve been hearing people talk about this book for decades”, how it’s a quintessential read if you’re into cyberpunk and SF in general. I thought I was opening one of the holy grails of cyberpunk literature on the level of Neuromancer.

Then I read the first ten pages or so. It’s a character on the level of Napoleon Dynamite’s “Uncle Rico” talking about how awesome and badass he is in the third person (narrator of course, but c’mon, it’s Hiro).

Now I’m on Reddit looking it up again to see if this is just the way the beginning works and it’s going to get into some real, actual story at some point and as I dig deeper into the subs I hear people talking about it as a “parody” and “a bit silly, but on purpose”.

I mean, hey, I enjoyed Discworld, and absolutely agree that there’s a place for parody, satire, and …

My favorite SF/F podcast is The Coode Street Podcast and this week they published a new episode where they have quite an insightful conversation with Mieville about Perdido Street Station in honor of the 25th anniversary of the book, highly recommended. You can find them on Spotify and bunch of other podcast places

Also, if you have any other (serious) SF podcast suggestion I’d be happy to hear those!

I am currently reading Becoming Alien by Rebecca Ore, which features sapient aliens that look like Earth animals (bats, bears, birds…), and have a human-like psychology. I find that trope lazy, and annoying. I also found it in Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, in Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, and many other science fiction novels. Some authors manage to put an interesting twist on it, such as Vernor Vinge in his A Fire upon the Deep with sapient-level hive-mind dog packs, or Orson Scott Card in Speaker for the Dead, with piggies that have really weird life cycle and psychology. Rare are the books with really alien aliens, such as Peter Watts’s Blindsight.

Can you recommend me other titles? Especially, “hard science fiction” titles with far-out yet scientifically believable alien biology and psychology?

I used to read avidly in my early teen years; mostly Rick Riordan’s series and Enid Blyton amongst others. Came across Children of Time as a suggestion on a subReddit and picked it up to be in awe of SF as a whole. I am a manga and anime fan. So that speaks volumes into everything I’d consider as a valid read. I’m new here and to SF. What are some other ‘classics’ of SF, that deserve a shot?

For further context: Thaddeus Stevens was asked by Abraham Lincoln and his abolitionist allies to tone down his words in order to gain votes from conservative Republicans, leaning Democrats, and win the general public.

He needed to declare that the passing of the 13th Amendment was not for racial equality but for equality before the law. Establishing it as a matter of racial equality might have lost support, as it was considered too radical at the time.

Source for the title: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-studio-executive-wanted-julia-roberts-to-play-harriet-tubman-biopic-screenwriter-says/

The Harriet Tubman biopic has been more than 25 years in the making. In the historical drama released earlier this month, Cynthia Erivo plays the legendary abolitionist — but one Hollywood executive initially thought the role should go to Julia Roberts.

Gregory Allen Howard, the screenwriter and producer of “Harriet,” recently revealed in multiple interviews that Roberts was suggested to play the lead role during a meeting with a studio president in 1994.

“The climate in Hollywood… was very different back then,” Howard said. “I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, ‘This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.’”

Howard said that a black person in the meeting said casting Roberts would be impossible because she is white.

“That was so long ago. No …