That’s disappointing. I wonder what happened.

TL;DR: “A Sorceress Comes to Call” by T. Kingfisher is an excellent Regency comedy of manners urban fantasy by way of Death Note. Highly recommend.

Cordelia is an unfortunate girl. She lives alone with her mother, in a sort of genteel poverty. Her mother permits no disobedience and allows no privacy, to the extent of mandating all doors inside their house remain open. And when Cordelia disobeys, she is made obedient, becoming a mere puppet of her mother’s will.

Because her mother is a Sorceress. Not one of the frauds who can barely glamour hair color or make a lame horse look healthy, but the kind out of old fairy tales, the kind no one believes in these modern days.

And she is cruel. The only character I can really compare her cruel, narcissistic vanity to is Regal from the Farseer trilogy. But unlike Regal, she’s also cunning. Cunning enough to decide that, when her current ‘ahem’ patron tires of her, to aim for marriage with some lightly landed …

Out of all of the reading that you have done in your life what is hands down the best book and storytelling that you’ve ever come across? Now obviously I understand most answers are going to be fantasy but if there’s a book outside of fantasy that you think answers this question and was excellent please do mention it. I’m interested to see what you regard as the best of the best.

At the time im’ writing this, the book is sitting at a wooping 4.33 in goodreads, with a lot of comments hamming in how it is not a children’s book; the own author has a review stating multiple times it’s not a book for kids… Well, it is.

Despite being marketed as an adult and mature vampire story, if you took the book, ran a text filter to delete the profanity and cut the explicit sex, it would instantly become a standard book for 14-year-olds. I learned this in the hard way, which was reading it until the end.

To it’s credit, Kristoff’s fight scenes look good and well coreographed, but that’s the only good thing i’ve noticed reading the book.

There’s a terrible voice inconsistency between narration and dialogue in a first-person frame. In third-person omniscient stories, the split between the voice narrating and the protagonist’s voice is completely normal and often good — the narrator’s descriptive voice can be lush and …

It was fairly understood when I was a kid (I’m over 40 now) that “smut” was pornographic romance novels. But in the many books threads I follow, I’ve seen more and more readers decrying books as smut even if there’s a mention of nudity or a single sexual scene. I’m wondering if the meaning is being shifted, which words do now and then, or if I’m just running into people who didn’t know the older definition. I think there should be a big separation between “sexual content” and “smut.”

I define smut the old way. It’s porn. And I think it’s very odd to call something smut because there’s a genital mentioned in there. And there are a ton of fantastic books out there that newer readers might miss just because some character fucks and the book is thrown out for a half of a page worth of content.

Though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised with how intimacy-averse young folks are becoming to sexual …

TL;DR: it’s due to a 20 year nostalgia cycle about dragon books, at least according to him.

I started with Rebecca and felt like it was pretty straightforward as it wasn’t really that difficult to read and I read this pretty quickly and loved it. I wanted to continue reading classics as I wanted to be more well read and find more books that scratched a similar itch Rebecca did. I figured a good second one to try was Jane Eyre and oh boy am I struggling. I thought her childhood and Lowood was pretty straightforward and easy to get through but now I’m at the part where her and Mr Rochester are having conversations and getting to know each other and I’m really starting to struggle.

The dialogue is so so dense, Mr. Rochester makes me feel like an idiot because I can barely understand what he’s saying, I have been able to pick apart the gist most of the time but it’s hard to keep up. I’m also at the point where it’s getting a bit hard to find myself wanting to keep reading as the dense Victorian dialogue is getting to me. I don’t want to give up reading this but if my brain keeps …

You can get 26 Tanith Lee titles for a very good price on Humble Bundle right now.

Lee is one of the classic dark fantasy writers, though not as well known as she ought to be.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/tanith-lee-collection-daw-books-books?mcID=102:6a4c2d791ec9bee40108862d:ot:58f97f44c0bdae8c14061094:1&linkID=6a4c2f2d5bc915e94b00f49c&utm_source=Humble+Bundle+Newsletter&utm_content=cta_button&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tanithleecollectiondawbooks_bookbundle

I am looking for other books like Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is probably my favorite book of all time. I have reread it a few times, and may reread it again depending on how the book search goes…

What I like about Anathem and what I am looking for (this contains spoilers for Anathem):

I like that Anathem is a fictional book but it contains real, in depth, philosophical and mathematical principles. I feel like I am learning something while reading fiction. In fact, I feel like I learn more because the narrative helps reinforce the concepts. When I read Origen or Philo it is harder immerse myself into what is being discussed.

Magic as science. I love how Anathem ends! It is a long book for the payoff, but I love that the quasi-arcane philosophies of that mundane world has resulted in something akin to magic.

Those are the two primary things I am looking for in a novel: real philosophy, math, and/or hermeticism; and magic/manipulation of the real world because of the concepts …

I’m in the mood for science fiction where the main character isn’t the chosen one, the captain, the genius who invents everything, or the person who accidentally becomes the most important human in history.

I’d love stories where the protagonist is an engineer, maintenance tech, mechanic, cargo handler, station operator, repair specialist, or someone in a similar role who’s just trying to do their actual job. The stakes can still be huge, but I’d like to see them from the perspective of someone who normally wouldn’t be the focus of the story.

Bonus points if the technical work actually matters and isn’t just background flavour. I really enjoy competent characters solving practical problems without suddenly turning into action heroes.

I’ve already read Project Hail Mary, The Martian, and most of Becky Chambers’ work.

Any recommendations?

Just finished Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut the other day and wow what a story. Still felt very relevant in 2026. Random thoughts and spoilers ahead.

Salo describes a university on Tralfamadore without buildings where there’s a cloud that does the heavy thinking for everybody and it sounds like the internet and cloud computing. I’m amazed Vonnegut actually used the word “cloud”. Wikipedia says the concept of cloud computing dates to the 1960s and the term cloud was coined in 1994. The book was written in 1959. He was so prescient.

There were warnings about technology. On Tralfamadore the legend said beings made machines to serve higher purposes. That reminds me of people using to AI generate art now instead of making it themselves. Those machines end up controlling humanity on Earth to unwittingly do their bidding. With how much AI is susceptible to misinformation and hallucinating facts, I wonder how using it will influence what we know and what we do. The Martian army was …