I’m on book 4 of the Wheel of Time, about a third of the way through it, and I am struggling so hard to find the motivation to keep reading this series for one singular reason:

The War between the Sexes.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew this was a central plot element going in, but holy shit, it’s way worse than I prepared myself for. Men and women fucking hate each other in this series. Even those characters that are in a committed relationship feel like they can’t stand to be in the same room as each other. A character can be having a very interesting internal monologue relating to their arc, and then someone of the opposite sex comes in, and the plot has to be put on pause so we can have the required 5 minutes of pointless arguing this chapter. Everyone is so goddamn stubborn when it comes to the opposite sex and it’s making every character become unlikable.

When I read book 3 and Perrin was slowly falling for Faile, I was filled with genuine dread. …

I made a post on this sub asking for recommendations for books with noble characters doing noble deeds, emotional stories, and wholesome friendships, and someone suggested The Protector of the Small series by Tamora Pierce.

For some reason, I can’t find that comment anymore - either I’m somehow overlooking it, or the redditor who recommended the books deleted it.

Whatever the case, I just want to thank the person who suggested this series to me. I’ve just finished First Test, and I absolutely loved it. It was exactly what I was looking for.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately after going through a bit of a reading slump and trying to figure out what kinds of books pull me back in. One thing I keep coming back to is magic systems where using magic genuinely costs the character something that matters. Not just “he was tired afterward” or “she got a headache” but something that creates real tension and forces actual choices. Sanderson does this well in a few places but I think the Stormlight Archive softens it significantly as the series goes on and the characters just become more and more capable with fewer tradeoffs. The example that’s stuck with me most is the Powder Mage trilogy by Brian McClellan, where the cost felt embedded in the character’s identity and relationships rather than just their stamina bar. I’m also thinking about the Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix, where Charter magic and Free Magic both carry genuine weight and danger that you feel througout the …

Wow was this an insanely fun read. I had seen a lot of praise for it on this sub and finally decided to jump in and purchase the first book. I was not prepared for how fun of a read this would be, I absolutely zoomed through it. As someone who is a huge cat lover I fell in love with the character of Princess Donut. Just an insanely fun book with the humor of the Borderlands video games. I just ordered the rest of the series that is currently out and cannot wait to dive into them!

I love reading a long epic series where the final book is the biggest battle EVER fought in the history of the world. The culmination of all the battles/fights throughout the series. Bonus point if the book is also the longest book in the entire series. I prefer the fight against a Dark One and A Chosen One. But anything works!! It can be indie and trad. But I prefer indie to support indie authors.

The most obvious answer will be Wheel of Time. And yes I’m making my way through it and can’t wait for the final book.

I”m not talking about books you hated and DNF, but series you thought was just ok enough to keep reading, since you already got halfway or put time into it, but at the end realised it was not worth it to have kept reading and were better off DNF it?

For me it was The Soul Thief Trilogy, zero mentions of it online, by the way it looked, being a complete finished trilogy and how often I saw it advertised I thought it was a very popular series, but after reading it you can clearly tell it was a debut series (the author is actually a nurse primarily!)

I honestly think many people might have picked the book up because it is similar in name to The Assassin’s Apprentice and The Queen Thief series. It was overstuffed getting longer with each book yet less was happening, clearly ripping off the Throne of Glass series, setting up events and repeating phrases for ages about the FMC’s motivations and the MMC’s smell, but then fading to black when the hyped up events …

As an avid reader and perfectionist A type personality, I find it hard to not finish books, even when I struggle to like them.

I started reading The Circle and my wife noticed that I’d been going to the bathroom without my kindle (tmi but read a lot on the throne). I told her that the book I was reading just failed to keep me interested and connected. First 100 pgs, pretty good. Over all theme, understandable.

Everything else, and I do mean everything, is completely flat.

She asked me why I didn’t just stop. Verbatim, “You’re never going to be able to read everything you want in this lifetime if you waste time on the books you don’t.”

My mind was blown. Screw this book.

I recently started another book that was set in St. Louis, MO. While this isn’t my hometown I’ve spent a decade there. GEOGRAPHICAL NONSENSE. Do authors even bother to research the areas??? The main characters were struggling to find a landmark to explore. UM, THE ARCH???????

I wondered, what are reasons/most …

From the author:

“I’ve had fun in life, but I’m not sure it was ever happiness, not ever a zephyr that lasted. You can have fun and then everyone leaves, and you’re left with yourself and your thoughts and your feelings of loneliness and failure in the world and that overriding fear: “Does anyone really love me? Or will I ever love someone? Will I ever love myself? And why doesn’t anyone really know me?” All those questions you have when it’s quiet. That’s why I always have the TV on: to drown out the noise inside my head. And that’s why I’m writing to you now, to tell you who I am, so that at least someone knows before it’s too late.”

As a fan of Jules Verne, it’s an unfortunate fact that many of his lesser known works (and he has a lot) do not have a good English translation. Many of the old, public domain translations are deficient, while modern translations tend to be good, so I’m alway interested in new translations.

There are now plenty of “new translations” being sold as ebooks in Amazon. But looking through them, it’s the original French text (which is in the public domain) passed through an automatic AI translator tool, without even a revision afterwards, which allows you to follow the story but makes many sentences awkward to read. As the original books are in the public domain and not under copyright, scammers do this to try to trick people into buying without being aware that they are buying an automatic AI translation.

I’m not linking, because I think it might break the sub’s rules, but for example, if you search amazon for “David Petault”, which is …

Off the top of my head, I know many people pronounced Hermione wrong. The would pronounce it like “Her-me-one”. I was completely guilty of that.

When I read Twilight back when I was a teen, Carlisle became “Car-liz-le”. It wasn’t until I made a friend during a vacation who turned out to be from Carlisle, Massachusetts that I realized I was really off.

I’m currently on Chapter 12 (where’s Cathy’s locked herself in her room after fighting with Heathcliff and Edgar), and I’m suddenly not sure *why* I’m reading this.

What am I suppose to be getting out of it? What do the people who like it enjoy about it?

I knew going into it that it’s not a romance, that it’s more about obsession, toxic relationships, etc. I also knew it’s not a story with heroes and people you want to root for. So my expectations weren’t off.

And I did enjoy it for a while. But now I’ve hit a point where I’m like “ok, they’re all troubled, immature and toxic- what else?”

Is there anything else going forward beyond these people just being awful to each other?

I’m gonna take a break from it regardless, but I’m just trying to understand what I’m “missing,” if anything at all?

Blade Runner is a great movie, and I just love it. But this week, I finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? They’re really different, and both are worth your time.

And the main question in Blade Runner is whether androids beings deserve moral treatment. It’s a profound question. But ultimately, it concerns replicants specifically, their inner essence, and their right to exist.

Dick’s question concerns us. Namely, what happens to human empathy when it becomes a performance. In the novel, empathy literally becomes a commodity, people use mood organs to tune into appropriate emotional states, participate in collective empathy rituals through mercerism, which can be either fiction or reality, and the humanity test is literally a measurement of empathy. Androids fail it not because they cannot imitate empathy, but because they cannot feel it spontaneously.

And then there’s Deckard, who by the end of the novel has killed so many beings that feel, …

I recently read it for the first time since I first saw the movie when I was probably thirteen, and my impressions were completely different. I remember that as a child, Ender was a genius to me, misunderstood and overly pressured by adults who did not appreciate him. The scenes in the battle room seemed cool. The ending seemed triumphant and unexpected, after which I recommended this film to all my 12-13-year-old friends…

Reading it now as an adult, it all comes across as a horrific story of child abuse disguised as the aesthetics of coming-of-age adventures.

It seems as if the adults in this book only do terrible things (certainly in relation to children). They deliberately isolate the child, traumatize him, manipulate all his relationships, and systematically destroy his ability to trust anyone, all in order to create a weapon with enough conscience to feel guilty about what he has done. The whole project of Ender’s upbringing is to break him with precisely calibrated …

Usually older sci fi doesn’t really hit for me, it just feels dated. But I listened to the audiobook of Neuromancer on a whim, and I was pleasantly surprised. The story does feel a bit generic now that cyberpunk is a popular thing, but I thought it was still engaging and enjoyable. Also his cyberpunk has this menacing mystery to it that I can’t really put my finger on, but it just feels like it has a more complex tone and texture than other cyberpunk.

I really love Gibson’s writing style. It’s super sharp, rich, and fun to read, with no wasted words or sentences. He has a way of finding these perfect metaphors. It feels like he meticulously crafts each sentence, packing it with information without making it too overwhelming or ostentatious. It’s cool how the tight, quick writing matches the vibe of the chaotic, fast-paced world.

A lot of older important works are hard to enjoy for a modern reader because of the “Seinfeld isn’t funny” …

*God Emperor of Dune* is the book that divides Dune fans. After the action and intrigue of the first three novels, Herbert gives us a 3,500-year-old worm-man having philosophical conversations in a desert palace. So many readers bounce on it (understandably). I believe *God Emperor* is the most ambitious and profound book in the entire series, and in my mind it remains the completely absolute best of the cycle. It reads less like science fiction and more like Nietzsche mixed with a little bit of Dostoevsky. It is thick, it is heavy, it is not an adventure. There is no hero, there is no protagonist. There is an antagonist and the antagonist is the star of the show. Herbert pushed himself in ways he never could have with the earlier books. He is a poet whose poetry happens to look like prose. *God Emperor* is his most poetic by far.

I believe most readers miss this: the Golden Path is not a strategy. It is Leto’s vow. He has seen all possible futures, and he knows that without his …

I havent seen much chatter on this anywhere so I figured id post this for those that might be interested.

I ask this question as someone who has just read the book and been greatly impressed.

The structure of Hyperion remains extraordinary. Six different narrative voices, six different genres operating simultaneously within a single story, a mystery that deepens rather than unfolds, and a universe filled with ten thousand years of history. It’s as if the author literally trusted readers to be able to keep six completely different tonal stories in their heads at the same time and catch the hype.

The books I’ve most often seen compared to it in terms of ambition are Fire Over Deep and The Malazan Book of the Fallen, but I’m not sure either of them does quite the same thing.

So I think Hyperion still remains the pinnacle of a very specific combination of literary ambition and genre storytelling, and books that have tried to match it have either leaned too far in one direction or the other, without achieving that perfect balance.

Or maybe I’m wrong about this and …