This may be a futile plea, but I feel like it’s such a small, easy piece of etiquette to follow, and yet often isn’t. So many times, I see posts talking about a book (often effusively), without ever actually mentioning the author’s name. It’s such an easy thing to do, makes it easier for people to look up the book you’re talking about, and eliminates any ambiguity!

I feel like people need to remember that, while they know what they’re talking about, it might not be immediately obvious! There are 4 books called Fire and Ice, nevermind if someone does in fact mean A Song of Ice and Fire; there multiple books called Palimpsest and The Alchemist. Even if someone talking about Assassin’s Apprentice is probably referring to the Robin Hobb book, there are multiple books titled that, as well as series with the same name.

There are plenty of times where I’ve seen someone talking about a book which I don’t recognize, and the title is just …

I’ve been reading fantasy for about three years now—Tolkien, Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Robin Hobb… And in most of their works there are hardly any sexual or sensual scenes at all. I don’t think it’s just a matter of the authors, because when there is even a hint of one, like in The Wise Man’s Fear by Pat Rothfuss, all I see are criticisms, labeling them as “scenes for teenagers,” when I really don’t think that’s the case at all.

I’m a big fan of Ken Follett’s storytelling and narratives, and I don’t consider his books to be young adult at all. Anyway, I’d love to know your opinion on this.

I kinda accidentally fell into reading litrpg because I didn’t know the market had changed toward them. Much like Isekai in anime, though, the whole fantasy of, “I got the hax ability that trivializes all the conflict in the story,” has never worked for me. And what works less is reading/hearing a character stare at stat menus and grind for several chapters at a time.

It’s literally why I don’t like playing MMORPGs, and though I get that this is the exact flavor people are looking for, I have never been so done with a genre that fast.

Some people somewhere on this site suggested DCC when I mentioned this feeling before. I was reticent, between the genre and the slant toward comedy, but despite my doubts, Dungeon Crawler Carl actually works.

It feels like the first time when the gaming system isn’t just for the minmaxxers, but sort of like how magic systems work in other stories. We’re not pausing to stack our levels, they’re going up …

My baby brother used to read fantasy when he was a kid, but hasn’t been reading a lot lately. Frankly he’s been on social media a lot and I think it’s been a bit toxic for him and I’d like to encourage his reading again and just came up with the idea to get him a small set to get him into something different that will take his attention away from that a bit. So something preferably really addicting/immersive from the start. I haven’t read it yet but, I was thinking A Wheel of Time? Any better ideas?

The other day I went to add a new book on Goodreads and realized, quite by chance, that it was the 1600th book I’d logged as read on the platform. As 2025 is also my 10th year on Goodreads, it felt appropriate to make a post to celebrate the occasion. So, without further ado, here is a list of the top 5 SFF books I have read in each of the past 10 years, some bonus non-SFF books for certain years, and general musings about my reading journey.

(Note that I haven’t actually read 160 books a year for 10 years; when I joined Goodreads I backfilled books I read prior to joining).

(Also note that I am limiting myself to one book per series because otherwise this would be a very boring list).

2015

The year I joined Goodreads, I read 34 books total. Thinking about 2014 and earlier, I think I probably read 10 books or fewer a year. I went through a journey very similar to a lot of folks I’ve seen on Reddit where I read voraciously as a kid, and then by the time I was in …

I’ve been a fantasy reader forever, and I always used to roll my eyes at the whole “separate art from artist” debate because it felt like internet noise. Lately though I keep running into the same situation: I’m halfway through a series, I’m invested, then I stumble on a real scandal about the author. Not just “they were kind of rude in an interview” but stuff that makes your stomach drop. And then I sit there with the book open and I feel weirdly guilty for even enjoying it. I know the usual arguments. Buying the book can fund the person, but also it funds editors, cover artists, narrators, bookstores, etc. Libraries exist, used copies exist, borrowing exists. At the same time, seeing the name on the spine starts to feel like I’m quietly cosigning them, even if I know that’s not logically true. I’ve tried the “just focus on the story” approach and sometimes it works, other times I can’t stop thinking about it and the magic just drains …

I was reading a post about the lack “mean girl” female main characters in romance novels and one of the users quite insightfully pointed out that the audience for romance novels are women and women who read romance novels aren’t usually women who were or identified with “mean girls”.

So they’re not at all interested in reading about the women that bullied them high school finding love lol. They’re interested in the sweet, quirky, (sometimes virginal) girl who falls in love with the brooding, grumpy, sexy male romantic interest who sweeps them — meaning both the character and the reader — of their feet.

This leads me to ask, what would the male version of a romance novel look like? Yes I know there’s a small minority of men that read them but they’re guests. They’re not the targeted demographic.

I know it’s about an abusive lesbian relationship. And I am a cis bisexual man. But reading about an abusive relationship with an unexpected, non traditional type of abuser really got me thinking. And the more I read this book the more I have “uh huh been through that… uh huh this happened” until finally now at about half way through I just realized “holy shit my gf abused me.”

This book has impacted me so so so much. I never really realized how much I trained myself to just think about the pain I went through as weakness and not abuse. Just wanted to tell someone. And I highly recommend this book. I’ll probably read a lot more by Carmen Maria Machado in the near future.

The past year has been rough. As it comes to an end, I found myself reflecting, replaying so many failures, and thinking about purpose and meaning. So I asked a few people what they’d recommend if someone wanted to read a book about the meaning of life, fiction or nonfiction.

The suggestions were predictable…and weren’t: Man’s Search for Meaning, The Alchemist, The Stranger, The Midnight Library, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Happiness Trap, and other philosophical and spiritual books by authors like Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, Marcus Aurelius and other Stoics, and so on.

Of the ones I read, a short one was quite interesting and I like to mention it because it has stayed with me, or the main ideas have. I’m talking about Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus begins from the premise that life has no inherent meaning, and this fact creates what he famously calls “the absurd.” The absurd isn’t that that life is meaningless (that’s what …

I’m reading jane eyre atm, and im on the last 100 pages, and I have to admit it has been a bit of a slog, in parts. It’s old, it’s dense, and while I love gothic fiction, romance is not a genre I gravitate to. Having said that, I’ve found reading it an incredibly rewarding experience. This has happened to me with a lot of books, especially classics or well-regarded but difficult books. I wouldn’t say I’ve always enjoyed the experience, but more often than not, by the end of a well-regarded book I’ve at least been able to understand why it has such praise.

Now I went on r/books to see a discussion about jane eyre and saw so many people say If you’re not enjoying it, stop reading.” And I found myself getting a little frustrated. Like, is art just for enjoyment? If all we did was read page turners full of subject matter we gravitate towards, how many excellent books would be missed? The same goes for films. I feel like with difficult …

Anyone here interested in reading more literary sci-fi? Meaning it’s not action or plot driven, but more contemplative. Slow burn where you immerse yourself in the world and debating or philosophizing on the price of progress etc.

Space elevator

He’s been on my to-read list forever so over the past few weeks I read the Children of Time books. Seriously great stuff. He does a really good job with world-building and focusing on characters as well as plot. Stephen Baxter’s Evolution was what got me into hard sci-fi in the first place, and CoT in some ways felt like that. Really looking forward to Children of Strife. Which book of his should I read next?

Some of the novels and collection I’ve read by Heinlein so far has been some of his earlier stuff and also a couple of his mid-period novels “Starship Troopers” and “Stranger in a Strange Land”. So naturally going into that top spot also is another of his mid-period books is “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”.

The novels he did during are mixed but there are some really nice gems also, and this one from 1966 is one such gem. A story about a group of colonists on the moon who start a revolution with the help of a self aware super computer. This is where the phrase “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, or TANSTAAFL, appears.

Really love this one, it is both serious and funny at the same time, with some pretty great characters like the narrator Manuel (who sounds kind of like a Russian) and the super computer Mike. A common theme that Heinlein always returns to in his books is usually about personal responsibility and …

Read this a few years ago, but that could have been any time in the last 6-8 years. I think the book was published around that time, but am not sure. It’s not long, probably no more than 300 or so pages, possibly shorter.

What I remember of the story and setting:

There is an ongoing battle over contested space and the fighting is done by relatively small ships, kind of pill or hockey-puck shaped if I recall correctly. They try to stay hidden in hyperspace/underspace/XYZSpace as long as they can to ambush other ships when they emerge in real space, but in this ‘underspace’ they can’t dump heat, so the heat is stored in large internal heatsinks. This limits how long they can stay in their hunting mode, and the have to come into real space to vent heat, and have to stay for long enough to vent enough to allow them to get back into the ‘underspace’. While they to this they’re vulnerable and mortality of crews and ships is incredibly high. …

“I think it’s a tonic - a slower form of storytelling. It’s a plus in a world of very fast-paced editing and TikTok videos that are only a minute long. If the whole world were to move at that pace, that TikTok pace of storytelling, that would be very sad to me. I think there is a certain percentage of the viewership - I like to think it’s large enough to sustain shows like this - that is ready for a slower pace. It’s fast food versus home cooking. I like a slower pace of storytelling, because to me that is one of the great tools you have when you’re endeavouring to inject a certain amount of showmanship into your storytelling.”

• Vince Gilligan

So well said!

Might be the worst idea for an advertisement I have ever seen.

My first exposure to Taylor Sheridan was 2015’s *Sicario*. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, *Sicario* is a bleak story about the ultimate collapse of jurisdiction, legality, and morality around the War on Drugs as national elements and interests slowly degrade into pure power politics. It has been called the *Apocalypse Now* of the War on Drugs, and while I don’t think *Sicario* is quite a film of that caliber I do think the comparison stands as legitimate.

The year after *Sicario* was released, 2016, saw the release of a crime tragedy set in West Texas titled *Hell or High Water*, directed by David Mackenzie. *Hell or High Water* is a great films, as all of the performances, settings, and dialogue create a sincere and disturbing look at rural poverty in America. The film, ostensibly a heist film, features characters fully formed from the land which reared them. The cars they drive, the way they talk, and clothes they wear all appear to the audience as sincere to the setting …