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I'm looking for a decent book about the Tunguska event. I don't really care for speculations but would like to read about the facts and testimonies relating to the event. Is there a book of that kind out there?
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Feb 1, 2012 15:03
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4 Day Weekend posted:I've always loved reading, but I've never really read the 'classics' or 'staples' until recently. So far I've read Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Life of Pi and To Kill a Mockingbird, plus a couple others. I was just wondering if there's a list or even just some recommendations? Preferably the short ones first, so I can re-read it and analyse all the themes/motifs and symbols. Some short ones: The Stranger by Albert Camus, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, most of Kafka and so on.
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Feb 13, 2012 19:18
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Urdnot Fire posted:I'd like some accurate military (maybe science) fiction. Battle: Los Angeles was at least somewhat accurate in this regard, so I suppose something similar to that, though it doesn't have to be sci-fi. Mostly looking for well-done military fiction. Joe Haldeman is a Vietnam veteran and he wrote the acclaimed Forever War based on his own experiences. I am not a military man myself so I can't judge it's accuracy but I liked the novel a lot.
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Feb 25, 2012 09:19
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Progressless posted:I'm looking for books that build on humanities social interaction with aliens (think Mass Effect), and if possible doesn't drone on and on about new space faring technology and such. Any recommendations? Brin's Uplift series and Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist are both very similar to ME in casting humanity as the newcomers on the galactic scene.
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Mar 14, 2012 08:47
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PonchtheJedi posted:I have a couple, if anybody can help I'd be very appreciative. Fire in the Valley, if you'd like to read about young Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and other key players in the industry. It's a fun read about the early days of personal computing. Starts in the 70's, though.
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Apr 3, 2012 13:20
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Hedrigall posted:Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, particularly in book 2, Redemption Ark (and book 3 too, I presume, although I haven't read that one yet). Well, Chasm City is actually book two in the series. It's also outside the main plot but such an awesome mix of space opera and cyberpunk thriller must be recommended, bioships or not. Go read it you nerds, you'll love it.
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Apr 26, 2012 08:25
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DotyManX posted:Can anyone recommend a book along the lines of A World Lit Only by Fire ? The default response would be Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Life in a Medieval City by Francis and Joseph Gies is also very good. They also wrote Life in a Medieval Village, but I haven't read it so I don't know whether it's any good.
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Apr 30, 2012 20:20
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Woohoo posted:I'm doing a little reading project "Missed childhood", which consists of reading all the teen/young adult classics, such as Three musketeers, Ivanhoe, Treasure Island, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Sherlock Holmes and so on. I did the same a couple of years ago. Make sure not to miss Wilkie Collins' Moonstone. J. Meade Falkner's Moonfleet is good if you want smugglers. Charles Kingsley's Westeard Ho! is a rather epic tale of Elizabethan era adventure. e: Kipling's Kim!
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May 6, 2012 13:23
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Basic Beater posted:This might sound like an odd request, but does anyone have any ideas for books that might make me a more interesting dungeon master? Head over to the Malazan thread http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3393708 It's a sprawling ten book fantasy series that started as a GURPS campaign. The series is very strong on world building which could interest you, I guess.
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May 15, 2012 12:54
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Tots posted:I just got a job that pretty much lets me power through books and I'm not very well read at the moment. I'm trying to get through the "must-reads" now, and stuff that I have an academic interest in. Aside from that though, I'm not sure how to describe it, but I like reading about people. Especially like outcast type people, doing drugs, going to bars, loving off, whatever, and everything else that kind of life entails. This probably sounds retarded, whatever. Book recommendations? Charles Bukowski. Especially Post Office, Women and Pulp.
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Jun 6, 2012 19:05
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ErrantSystems posted:
Ian McDonald's River of Gods is a novel that matches your request. I don't want to spoil anything for you so I'll just say it's one of my favorite books of all time.
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Jun 24, 2012 09:18
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based gaddis posted:
Croatian goon at your service. What kind of fiction are you looking for, new stuff or classics? Any particular subjects? I am rather knowledgeable about the subject and there is a lot of good stuff coming from the region. If you need another short fiction fix, Bosnian author Miljenko Jergovic wrote Sarajevo Marlboro while his city was under siege during the nineties and I really like the book. It will give you good insight into the Balkan wars of the nineties. Avoid his later stuff, though. If you want a good horror novel look no further than Borislav Pekic's Rabies. It's a large scope worldwide zombie contagion type of thing, a bit like Stephen King but with good writing. May be hard to find. Pekic is Serbian but he wrote most of his works in London. Zoran Feric and Vedrana Rudan are probably the best contemporary Croatian authors that you can find translated into English. I'd recommend Renato Baretic‡ as well, but I can't find any proof that his works had been translated. (Full disclosure: I know them all personally. I can't tell you which one I like best. But I will: start with Vedrana. Her prose is pure FYAD.)
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Jul 28, 2012 02:44
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Bawjaws posted:Just finished Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky brothers, thought it was amazing. I highly recommend. It's not Soviet, it's Russian, but I think you might like Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033. Ignore the fact it was made into a videogame. It's a very good post-apocalyptic novel with awesome rambling fantasy bits that only a Russian author can write.
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Aug 6, 2012 20:59
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Fog Tripper posted:Into the third book of the WOOL Omnibus. I chose it simply by amazon reviews. It was at the top of the reviews for SciFi, clicked buy-now to our kindle and off I went. I'm kind of itching to get it since it's just 5.99 for the omnibus. It's not YA, I hope?
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Aug 9, 2012 19:17
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Captain_Indigo posted:Thanks for all the help with my previous request - girlfriend is eating her way through a massive pile of new books and says thank you. Now it's my turn. If you care for alternate history, there are two books that are exactly what you're looking for, Len Deighton's SS-GB and Robert Harris' Fatherland. They are both detective mysteries set in timelines in which the nazis won.
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Aug 29, 2012 19:01
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Steiv posted:I'm looking for funny travel writing. For reference, one of my favorites is Bill Bryson, for his ability to combine humor and history in his writing. I'm not particular about the location, as long as the stories are entertaining, though I am interested in the Arabic-speaking world. Suggestions? PJ O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell is the funniest travel book of our time, if you don't mind the author being a conservative prick.
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Sep 10, 2012 17:16
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Solaron posted:I just finished Mao's Great Famine - one of the first good non-fiction books I've read in recent history that's not something from Dawkins/Hitchens/etc. It was pretty incredible to read and struggle to comprehend the incredible struggle that China went through in those years, only 50 years ago or so. The one and only A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1881-1924 by Orlando Figes. One of the best and most enjoyable works of non-fiction I have ever read.
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Oct 20, 2012 00:33
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WastedJoker posted:Can anyone recommend books about alien invasion/humans exploring alien artifacts (along the lines of Rama)? Peter Watts' Blindsight, Alistair Reynolds' Diamond Dogs. John Varley's Titan, if you like complicated centaur sex.
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Dec 15, 2012 23:59
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Walh Hara posted:Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety The awesome PKD short story that inspired Battlestar Galactica
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Jan 24, 2013 20:19
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Blade_of_tyshalle posted:That's a very tenuous supposition, unless it was stated by the creators of that thing you put in tags. I thought I read that in Ron Moore's BSG Bible a couple of years ago. Hovewer, all I can google right now is a review blasting the show for appropriating Dick's story without attribution.
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Jan 24, 2013 23:40
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Kinetica posted:I'm looking for something to scratch a rather particular itch- Something science fiction with noteable construction and building within the world, shaping it to what people want. Like showing the expansion of shipyards, building of cities and worlds, creation of massive fleets and such. One of the story strands in Peter F. Hamilton's massive Commonwealth Saga is exactly what you're looking for.
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Feb 28, 2013 18:31
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Christoff posted:
How deep do you want to go? Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy demolishes most of the myths about German economy during the thirties and the forties. It does get a little bit scholarly and you do need a decent grasp of basic economic theory to get through, but it's worth it.
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Apr 20, 2013 19:45
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A Spotless Domain posted:I love Cyberpunk, and in particular Ghost in the Shell. Other than novelizations and manga, can anyone recommend a novel or a series that delves into similar themes--prosthetic bodies, cynical realpolitik between rival government agencies, futuristic crime, shifting identity, and the existence of a cyber-"soul"? I've already been through most of Gibson, Stephenson, and Dick. I feel like nothing ever comes close to capturing the most interesting aspects of the genre the way GitS/SAC does and I'm not even a huge anime nerd. Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels, especially the first one, Altered Carbon.
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May 24, 2013 21:52
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A Spotless Domain posted:Big "thank you" to whoever recommended Altered Carbon! I read it over the weekend and loved it. I assume the rest of the Kovacs books are pretty much up my alley then? If you're looking for more cyberpunk noir, not really. The second one is a weird Indiana Jones in space type of thing, the third one is all out space mercenary action, as far as I can recall. Maybe you should try Alistair Reynold's Chasm City. It takes place in his Revelation Space universe, but it works rather well as a stand-alone novel. The badass main character and the overall noirish plot have a lot in common with Altered Carbon.
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Jun 3, 2013 23:41
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Illegal Move posted:Could somebody suggest some books about tomb raiders or treasure hunters? Something in the vein of Indiana Jones or Uncharted? Haggard's King Solomon's Mines is the archetypal treasure hunter story. I think it's in the public domain and available on Gutenberg.
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Jun 19, 2013 18:36
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hybriseris posted:I'm not necessarily looking for non-fiction recommendations or even books about murder - I'd really just like some meaty, disturbing, visceral reads about anything that leaves me closing the cover and feeling like I just looked at something I shouldn't have. Littell's The Kindly Ones. It's a novel about an SS officer. He joins something called Einsatzgruppe and goes to the Eastern front. In Lviv he helps move all the town's Jews to a nearby ravine. Then we find out the ravine is known locally as Babi Yar. Then it starts getting really disturbing.
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Jun 30, 2013 22:11
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specklebang posted:You're welcome. There is also this very high tech SF book that is central to an imminent and unstoppable apocalypse. http://www.amazon.com/Final-Days-ebook/dp/B005BOHZ76/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1380001507&sr=8-1&keywords=final+days+gibson. The sequel, The Thousand Emperors is already published. I want to thank you for this one, finally something in the genre that doesn't insult my intelligence that isn't by Reynolds or Banks.
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Sep 25, 2013 10:33
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artichoke posted:I'm currently looking for books - fiction or non - about the Yugoslav wars. I knew many refugees growing up because they fled to places in the Midwest where the Catholic Church had set up havens for them. My high school had a ton of these folks, but most of them didn't really talk about what they'd left behind. So anything about the refugees, or the politics of the territories over there, or really anything that's well-written would be great. Laura Silber's The Death of Yugoslavia is, I think, still the best and most accessible overall view on the Yugoslav wars. It is also available as a BBC TV series. Tim Judah wrote a few pretty decent books about the latter phase of conflict between Serbia and Kosovo. I also liked Marcus Tanner's Croatia: A Nation Forged in War. It's more of a general history of Croatia with a focus on the war. For fiction I would recommend Jergovic's Sarajevo Marlboro. It's a short story collection about the siege of Sarajevo that kind of captures the spirit of the whole affair.
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Oct 14, 2013 21:41
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WastedJoker posted:Thanks - I've read some and others turned me off reading the blurb but I'll give Blindsight a go and Shogun (if I can avoid seeing the main character as Tom Cruise). Don't worry, he's actually Richard Chamberlain.
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Oct 16, 2013 15:15
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SylvainMustach posted:I just finished re-reading Dune and finished Dune Messiah for the first time. I've also just started Children of Dune and have the rest of Herbert's sequels. Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos is a four book space opera with tons of cool religions, prophecies, secretive monastic orders and messiahs. The quality does plummet towards the end, so it's similar to Dune in that aspect as well.
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Nov 10, 2013 02:41
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WastedJoker posted:I just finished Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie and very much enjoyed it even if it took some getting used to the fact the main character, at times, was a single "consciousness" spread throughout a great number of "individuals". You should probably check out Robert J. Sawyer, although his stuff sometimes feels like it should've been cut off at novella length. The best AI themed novel, in my opinion, is Ian McDonald's River of Gods, although it's more cyberpunk than the type of sci-fi you're looking for.
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Jan 6, 2014 15:19
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I'm looking for a good modern history of Iran, something encompassing the 1953 coup, the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. Specific books on the said subjects would also be welcome.
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Jan 9, 2014 17:31
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Thank you guys, these will keep me busy for a while.
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Jan 9, 2014 23:55
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barkingclam posted:I enjoyed Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski, but it stops short of the Iran/Iraq war. I finished this last night. If you're going to read one non-fiction book in your life, try this one. Seriously. It's the kind of book that haunts your mind throughout your daily life. Beautiful writing. I learned so much about Iran from just a few hundred pages. Thank you for the recommendation!
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Jan 13, 2014 21:16
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mdemone posted:Every one of my computers will forever be named Abulafia and I don't care if it's stupid and no one gets it (nobody ever has). DO YOU HAVE THE PASSWORD?
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Feb 20, 2014 18:53
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Evelyn Nesbit posted:Books about cults, preferably well-written? Lawrence Wright's Going Clear. It's recent, tremendously well researched and interesting. It deals with Scientology as a cult, its relation with Hollywood as well as Hubbard's personal life.
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Feb 28, 2014 18:24
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massive spider posted:The nazis, or at least the people who were somewhat complicit. Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. It's a fictional SS officer's memoir. The novel tends to veer into fantastical territory later on, but the first half might be just what you're looking for. Babi Yar
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Mar 10, 2014 19:41
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I am looking for a noir or detective novel set in LA, preferably during the forties and fifties. I've already read The Big Sleep and the LA Quartet.
Take the plunge! Okay! fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 18:41
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Thans for all the detective recommendations. Exactly what I was looking for. I'll probably start with Lew Archer.
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May 2, 2014 21:10
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nomadologique posted:Looking for a book that involves the sea in some way. Can be more or less important, but should play a reasonably large role. Contemporary-ish (last 50 years or so). Not Old Man and the Sea. Does modern weird fantasy work for you? China Mieville's Scar is really good and it's all about the sea in that book.
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May 6, 2014 22:23
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