Hello everyone! You posted your list of top 10 favorite books or series and we have (finally) completed the list. This list includes all entries with 5 or more votes.
This year had nearly 941 individual votes with nearly 9000 total votes. That’s about twice as many votes as we had in 2019! There are about 1100 series on the full list.
Special thanks to the other mods for helping out, especially u/Dianthaa, u/cubansombrero, and u/Cassandra_Sanguine as I could not have finished this without them.
|No.|Series|Votes|Author|Rank Change| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |1|The Stormlight Archive|420|Brandon Sanderson|0| |2|Middle-Earth Universe |373|J.R.R. Tolkien|0| |3|Mistborn|304|Brandon Sanderson|2| |4|The Wheel of Time|296|Robert Jordan|0| |5|A Song of Ice and Fire|275|George R.R. Martin|-2| |6|First Law World|271|Joe Abercrombie|1| |7|Discworld|214|Terry Pratchett|3| |8| …
It’s a pretty astounding fact that Professor Tolkien created (approximately) 54,960 years of history between the creation of Arda and the destruction of the One Ring, and yet his fictional chronology is about as clear and compelling as our own 5000 years of real world history. It’s astounding that Tolkien created dozens of races to live in hundreds of locations over thousands of years, and yet it all fits together (for the most part) into one credible, consistent, and compatible Legendarium. It feels like Tolkien created a million pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and over the course of his lifetime, he put these pieces together and constructed one vast picture. However, not every piece of this puzzle fits. Peppered throughout the Legendarium there are a small number of enigmas, which add their own unique, yet utterly mysterious flavour, to Tolkien’s world. So let’s delve into the most enigmatic enigma of them all – Tom Bombadil.
Now the first thing to say about Tom, is that he’s …
Hi everyone! I’m Arkady Martine. My first novel, A Memory Called Empire, a space opera with a political thriller and a pretty obsessive look at assimilation and imperialism hidden inside it, came out in 2019 and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2020, which is still a remarkable phrase to type. The sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, came out in March of this year. It has more aliens, more space combat, and more kissing, as well as just as much political intrigue and people arguing about poetic allusion. I also write many short stories – I love short fiction as an art form. And I just finished a novella called ROSE/HOUSE, which will be out from Subterranean Press in 2022 (that’s the locked-room mystery with AIs, Le Corbusier, dead men with rose petals in their mouths, and a truly egregious Shirley Jackson reference that I was working on last time I was here on r/Fantasy).
Next project is a novel called Prescribed Burn, which is about water wars, arson, drought, …
There are quite a few talented female authors that the denizens of this sub know well. But I know there are some that write in relative obscurity who also deserve our love!
Who is your favorite female author that we don’t know about?
I want to say THANK YOU so much to this sub for recommending The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. I just finished the audiobook (amazing!), and will be reading the paperback ASAP. I love this book so, so much. Can we please just have a little Goblin Emperor love fest? It was exactly what I needed. The characters, the gentle plot, the development. Everything about it was like a warm hug, and I was so sad to finish it.
I’m looking forward to reading the other book set in the same world, Witness for the Dead. But I do wish that the author would reconsider, and give us a sequel to Maia’s story.
This took like 30-40 hours of mind-numbing grunt work, so I really hope some of you enjoy it. It’s a really rather interesting list, and it’s always fascinated me how despite 4chan’s reputation, whenever their book lists come out each year they are always relatively respected and spark meaningful discussion. There are definitely biases here, and I’ll touch on some of those, but for now here’s the list:
CORRECTED VERSION, UNCOMPRESSED
Corrected version, imgur, compressed
Original ones I posted with 7* errors:
Notes:
- They’ve only released 8 lists thus far, starting in 2014 and ending in 2020, with one year having two “official” list releases. I put this data together months ago, so I’m a bit hazy on the reason, but one of those two lists seemed to make far more sense to me at the time as the true list, so I just chose that one and disregarded the alternate list.
- I hope the …
I just finished reading it and the book was pretty fine imo. Yes the narrator is a bit annoying at times and can come off as arrogant. But even if you say that Holden Caulfield is your favorite main character I don’t see how that’s a problem. He really exemplified the type of character he was playing. It’s not my favorite book yet but it’s a great coming of age book and I don’t think liking it necessarily means you’re like Holden Caulfield…
Every time I find myself reading a hardcover book that has a dust cover/jacket, I always take it off until I’m done with the book. On most, if not all, hardcover books, the addition of a dust jacket just seems pointless.
Sure, they can be used as a built in bookmark, and contain the blurb that’s usually on the back of a paperback. But if they sit on a shelf then the bottom of jacket splays outward and it looks awful. If you use the inside flaps as a bookmark then the jacket never fits the same way again. Wouldn’t it be easier to print a hardcover in the same way as a paperback?
It’s the one thing about hardcover books that has always annoyed me. Even if the cover art is phenomenal the dust jacket just takes away from it. Am I the only one that thinks like this?
I went to a book club yesterday as the only guy. It was fun. We talked about the book and the pros and cons of the book and it was what I wanted. It just felt odd that the stereotype of a book club, that’s its dominated by women members came to be true. I know men read, but I have no idea why the demographics of a book club aren’t 50⁄50?
Milk and Honey is the worst thing I have ever read.
Am I missing something? Am I too stupid to comprehend? Do I not understand poetry?
It’s litterally just fragmented sentences.
“I was hungry.”
“I opened the fridge.”
“It was empty.”
“I am strong.”
I must say though I am not the biggest fan of poetry it self. I haven’t read alot of it as I find it sometimes too difficult to understand what the author is trying to say.
However, Milk and Honey just seems to go in the opposite direction by literally just putting words that make sense one after the other to which people exclaim “this is the best thing I have ever read” or “Milk and Honey changed my life”
Can someone describe my feelings more eloquently than me? Am I alone in this? My own theory is that people like Milk and Honey for the same reason they - and this is controversial - like the Alchemist. Which is to say that they’re both easy to …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnmxK0o_I9A
‘Inhibitor Phase’ (a new Revelation Space novel) comes out in a couple months.
‘Eversion’ (a standalone first contact novel) comes out in 2022 sometime.
Just finished up Consider Phlebas and although heard not as highly regarded found it great, interesting characters, plot that moved from start to finish. Looking forward to getting to the other books in the series.
This is sort of a follow up post to my prior post about Player of Games. I’m through a good part of the next book, Use of Weapons and I’m liking it a lot more then PoG (except for the weird reverse storyline of the numeral chapters). That being said, I’m further convinced that the Culture really isn’t the near perfect utopia it and others claim it to be.
My issue here is that, despite the veneer of an equal union of biological and AI life, it’s clear the AI is the superior “race” and despite the lack of real laws and traditional government, the AI minds are running the show and the trillions of biologicals under their care are merely going along for the ride.
Again I say this reading through two and a half books in the series but time and again biologicals whether culture citizens or not are being manipulated, used like pawns, and often lied to by the minds for their purposes and they never seem to face any kind of sanction for doing so. Even if these purposes are for the “greater …
Yes I get dragons are more fantasy, but I’m curious if any have crossed into the sci-fi world.
So I just read A Canticle for Leibowitz and I liked it a lot. I guess my taste inclines to religious toned sci fi books. I am open to any reccomendations.
I just want to say that I am halfway through the Cyberiad. I just finished the story where the duo is hired to create some new hunting game for a king. I have never, in my history of reading science fiction, laughed that hard while reading a story or a book. There were tears running down my face. My wife had to ask me if I was OK, I was almost in convulsions. If I had known it was going to be this funny I would’ve read it long ago. Who knew the author of the Ever so serious Solaris was this funny.
I’m gonna say this every time:
“I don’t make love, I fuck hard.” - Fifty Shades of Grey
This was the kind of dialogue that made me die of laughter when it was supposed to come off as sexy.
I cannot fathom the fact that no one involved in the film stopped that from happening, but that can be said for much of the script and the novel. And honestly, Jamie Dornan tries his best but he could say just about anything and it would sound terrible. He is not a good actor.
Edit: My post made it to the front page, woooo!