My 10 year old daughter is reading The Hobbit and is devouring it!

She was just grilling me about Gollum.

It’s just fun to have a new fantasy fan in the house… Oh the adventures that await her!

Let me start with a solemn confession that I was not planning on reading The Devils or, as a matter of fact, any book by Joe Abercrombie. I was, let’s say, influenced to read the book because of the positive buzz it created and the fact that the book will be adapted into a James Cameron movie and that I will be able to brag to my non-reader friends that I know the plot when the movie comes out and so on and thought it would be more of a one-time read with not much depth or substance. But Oh Boy!, was I seriously mistaken and enjoyed the book to bits that I now feel sad that the book is over.

1. A fantasy suicide squad set out on a Holy Mission in Europe during the Crusade Era, with subtle references to the Hussite wars like The Great Schism or General Zizka to set the overall tone and world.

2. The real strength of this book is in its contrasting vivid characters and the innovative action sequences, which have frankly shocked and surprised me.

3. Among the Devils, I liked Balthazar as …

So I first read Shadow of What Was Lost a year or two ago, and while I enjoyed the book, I had been hearing so much hype behind it, and so much about how its plot was twisty. Knowing this, when I predicted a major twist at the end of the first book, I ended up feeling largely disappointed, and bailed on the trilogy.

Years later I’ve been hearing much of the same praise about Will of the Many by the same author, James Islington, so I decided to give him another shot and ended up loving it. This led to me picking up Licanius again, starting from the beginning, and I was instantly fascinating and absorbed, and went through the whole trilogy.

It’s straight up a masterpiece.

The trilogy involves a government under strict control of its magic users, known as Gifted and Augers, the latter of whom are executed on discovery following a brutal war to remove them from power. It does a great job of setting up the horrors of this current reality while genuinely giving it some real …

I have total aphantasia, which if you don’t know, means I can’t see images in my head. I can imagine “normally”, but I can’t actually see what I’m imagining. Because of this, I’m very picky with the books I read, specially with their prose and style. I don’t look for high quality prose per se, but some authors just give me a lot of trouble. Strangely, Sanderson is one of those authors. Although his style is simple, he’s way too technical (not sure if this is the right word) when describing things. He can write some cool and easy to understand fight scenes, but when he tried to describe more complex scenery or one of the fantasy animals in Way of Kings, my head just got confused. The more details he tried to give me, the harder it became, to the point where I just couldn’t imagine them at all. But I recently finished Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe and had the opposite experience. Yes, the book is much more complex and …

Which magic system do you think has the most severe or punishing side effects for the user?

Maybe some can relate and some don’t but…

What is a series that you just are too stubborn to give up on? A series where something about it makes you really want to like it, and you try again and again, but it just never clicks for you personally. And still you keep trying, and trying.

For example, mine is Discworld. Gods do I want to like Discworld. I really do see the genius behind it. But after reading the first twelve books in the series, coming back again and again because people tell me so often that I just haven’t found the “one” that clicks with me, I just have never loved it. Most of the books begin strong, and I do get an occasional light chuckle (in-sewer-ants…), but by the midway point I often just find myself bored and have to grind to finish these, thankfully short, books. And even saying this, I’m sure that given a few months I’ll be diving back in to give another one a go….

Anyway, what is your …

So in response to Stephen King’s comments about Charlie Kirk, a bookstore retailer in the UK called Belfast Books has decided not to restock Stephen King’s books. What do we all think about this?

King has since apologized for his remarks about Charlie Kirk, but that hasn’t stopped the retailer from pulling his books off the shelves.

Is this ethical and the right thing to do? Should bookstores pull books from people they don’t like?

EDIT: The owner of Belfast Books sent me a message regarding the Neil Gaiman topic. Here is the message in full as follows:

“I notice that there was a convo about our decision to take Stephen Kings books off our http://www.belfastbooks.co.uk website.

Totally fine with whatever anyone wanted to say but I just want to share that we removed Neil Gaiman’s books from the website when we saw one of the Redditors posting they were there. Gaiman’s had horrific allegations against him and we’d never knowingly be apologists for someone who may well have …

I never read WH in school but decided to give it a read with the new movie coming out. I thought I was just going to finally know what the book was about beyond basic knowledge, but I feel like this unlocked an understanding of all the angsty teen girls in my youth that I did not have before.

Heathcliff is the king of the emos. If that man was born in the 90s, he would have worn skinny jeans and had swoopy hair that covers one eye and known the overly long names of every Minus the Bear song.

Catherine Earnshaw would have had a super emo Tumblr page with “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” as those sparkly quote gifs embedded on the page. She would have taken lots of duck face selfies from the extreme above angle and the caption on all of them would be some overly emo song lyric with ~rawr XD~ at the end.

All the other characters would’ve been stereotypical emo kids too except for Nellie Dean who would’ve been the confused mom that didn’t understand but was …

Ok, weird question. I’m pretty sure it’s just a coincidence, but I wanted to ask this subreddit to make sure it isn’t a common trope in science fiction novels.

Last month, I read The Sparrow and its protagonist is a Jesuit priest. I recently finished Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, and both of the priest characters are Jesuits. I just watched a video recommending Jack McDevitt’s The Hercules Text, in which a priest/scientist is also a Jesuit.

Is this a recurring theme in other science fiction novels, or was it just a coincidence?

Edit: the first replies are already pointing to an obvious answer, so I’ll also ask: Do you know of any other science fiction novels that have Jesuits among the main characters?

Knowing Reynolds’ cadence (and the publisher cadence), I would not expect to see this until the end of 2026 to mid-2027. “Halcyon Years” is expected Jan 27, 2026 and I think he delivered that to the publisher ~2 years prior to that.

Anyway, the book is not about Merlin the magician, but about the character Merlin from some novellas he wrote. Very much in the scifi/space opera genre.

From his blog:

A few hours ago I hit send on my next book, provisionally entitled MERLIN’S WAY. It’s the one I’ve been talking about for some time, a gathering-up of the four “Merlin” novellas I wrote over about twenty years. But, it’s ended up being something more than that. My original plan had been to stitch together the stories with a bit of linking material, and maybe rejig the chronologically-final piece a little to smooth over some bumps in point of view. The more I worked on the project, though, the more I realised that nothing about it was …

What. a. trip.

Easily in the top 10 books I’ve ever read. I just finished it. The 3rd act was completely different than the film adaptation. The book is very dark and very technical, and it honestly feels like the movie did it a disservice.

The Tyrannosaur river chase scene, the Aviary, the Raptors vs Grant scene in the nursery, etc. It was wild. What a wild trip. Especially with the final few chapters for Ian Malcolm and Dr Hammond.

Dr Hammond is a true villain.

Man, what a wild read. I haven’t seen the movie since 2013, and before that since 2007, so it was pretty fresh, and it was wildly different than the film, anyhow.

I started State of Fear (2004) earlier this week, but the prose and quality of writing is way worse than JP. I’ve downloaded Andromeda Strain (1969) and The Lost World (1995). So we’ll see how those hold up next. I’m probably going to DNF State of Fear.

I started reading the Books when I saw that Owlcat Games cooking the game in the Expanse universe and I got curious. So after the 9 books( yeah I know that there are short stories, I would read them later) I can say with 100% certainty that this is one of my favorite pieces of media of all time. And absolutely my top 1 sci-fi books series, not that I’d read many of the but still. Does any other sci-fi series come close to the Expanse in terms of characters and stories?

Unlike scifi, I find fantasy to be less fun as I get older (35 currently) though I was never the ardent fantasy fan compared to SF. Curious if you have the same experience? I just can’t get into arbitrary fantastical events in books and these consistently turn me off, majorly because magic/power ups etc just feel deus ex machina like even if there’s a good amount of buildup for it so justify it. Scifi in comparison tends to stick with the set of rules it starts out with.

Aside, I don’t think I am reading bad fantasy. Been reading Stormlight archive up until book 3 now, and have read mistborn series as well.

I plan to stick with scifi but wonder if I am alone in this feeling

Edit: Thanks for the responses! Lessons so far: 1. Sanderson is for YA, which makes sense. 2. I should read some Abercrombie, Zelazny, and other authors who are more adult friendly.

I’ve noticed a lot of new apocalyptic books being published. What are the best ones worth reading?

#Source

She’s also a very vocal supporter of workers rights and has already criticized Disney’s CEO on that subject.

Doesn’t matter if she played She-Hulk or if this will put in jeopardy a potential return of her character. I guess she’s just doing what it takes to stand up for what is right.

Full text of the WGA statement…

“The right to speak our minds and to disagree with each other - to disturb, even - is at the very heart of what it means to be a free people. It is not to be denied. Not by violence, not by the abuse of governmental power, nor by acts of corporate cowardice.

As a Guild, we stand united in opposition to anyone who uses their power and influence to silence the voices of writers, or anyone who speaks in dissent. If free speech applied only to ideas we like, we needn’t have bothered to write it into the Constitution. What we have signed on to - painful as it may be at times - is the freeing agreement to disagree.

Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth. As for our employers, our words have made you rich. Silencing us impoverishes the whole world.

The WGA stands with Jimmy Kimmel and his writers.”

Late night funny man pokes fun at authoritative head of state.

Authoritative head of state has funny man disappeared.

It’s as if Donald Trump watched the film on his flight to the United Kingdom, and only finished half of it, got some ideas, phoned his buddy at the FCC, but didn’t see how it ends. Hopefully he sees how it the movie ends.