| Next book help 16:15 - Aug 19 with 8564 views | WokingR |
Looking for recommendations please having just finished the Wheel of Time series. Hopefully, something of equally epic proportions.
I've done the Foundation Series, The Malazan Empire & Game of Thrones.
With a week away coming up, any suggestions/recommendations would be gratefully received. | | | |  |
| Next book help on 17:45 - Aug 20 with 2551 views | distortR |
love 'his dark materials', but 'battlefield earth' is, in my subjective opinion, the worst three quarters of shite i have ever read! was staying somewhere and that was the only book lying about, when i left i didn't bother trying to find a copy to read the end. i'd rather re-watch the blackpool and blackburn games back to back. | | | |
| Next book help on 11:55 - Aug 22 with 2401 views | WokingR |
Thanks again to everyone who took the time to add to this.
I've already read some but now have a long reading list of books I'd never heard of.  | | | |
| Next book help on 12:01 - Aug 22 with 2378 views | Metallica_Hoop |
I've not long finished Joe Abercrombie's new 'The First Law' Trilogy. As always with Joe lots of battles, sex and everyone mostly is a K**t oh and a dab of majik too.
The Expanse books are really good. [Post edited 22 Aug 2022 12:01]
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| Beer and Beef has made us what we are - The Prince Regent |
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| Next book help on 12:18 - Aug 22 with 2361 views | Nushnool |
I'll second this recommendation, read this book a couple of months ago. It's quite a time commitment, but worth it.
Another book that made a big impression on me last year was The Three-Body Problem, the first in a trilogy, again of epic proportions. Science fiction, by a Chinese author. | | | |
| Next book help on 12:33 - Aug 24 with 2261 views | TacticalR |
I won't make any recommendations because it sounds like the kind of books I read (mainly non-fiction) are not what you are looking for.
I recently got a bit more organised about reading and now have a spreadsheet in Google Sheets listing what I'm going to read next, with columns with extra information like the number of pages in each book, estimated reading time etc. It's easy to shift the order of the rows around if a new book comes up that looks interesting. Maybe that might help tackle the void after finishing a book? | |
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| Next book help on 13:05 - Aug 24 with 2227 views | MrSheen |
Too tempting for an old cricket scorer like me! My reading volume shot up during lockdown so I started rejecting books of less than 400 pages because they wouldn’t keep me going long enough. I also started to notice how many pages I was reading an hour - with non-fiction much slower - bigger pages and less white space for dialogue, on top of any adjustment for the complexity of the subject or treatment. What do you have as your default rate? | | | |
| Next book help on 15:29 - Aug 24 with 2163 views | QPRSteve |
Have you tried fantasticfiction.com?
Quite often has books recommended by the author and may list similar authors you may like.
You can follow authors and it will notify you with news of new books and publication dates.
I find it really useful. | | | |
| Next book help on 15:47 - Aug 24 with 2143 views | robith |
Was gonna say Malazan but I see you've done it. Fair play. I'm 30% of the way through Memories of Ice, currently tracking to finish reading the series c.2030. Though in fairness I took a break cos the ending of Deadhouse Gates was absolutely traumatising.
Have you tried any Joe Abercrombie? It's very grimdark, but he has an amazing trilogy called The First Law, which then has a sequel trilogy The Age of Madness with some returning characters/'s children set 20 years later, along with 3 spin off books of separate little stories. The first trilogy is your classic topsy turvy political driven fantasy, but the second trilogy imagines a fantasy world going through the industrial revolution.
They're absolutely brilliant and if you liked the books you've listed, I guarantee you'll love them
We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged [Post edited 24 Aug 2022 15:48]
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| Next book help on 20:38 - Aug 24 with 2077 views | stowmarketrange |
I’ve just started reading Vagabonds by Oskar Jensen.It’s all about people living in poverty in 18th century London.
Absolutely heartbreaking to have 2 infants die in the same hovel and not be able to bury them quickly, and so they were kept in the larder for up to 10 days.
Totally different level of poverty then compared to modern times. | | | |
| Next book help on 00:48 - Aug 25 with 2001 views | DannyPaddox |
Would grace any coffee-table [Post edited 25 Aug 2022 1:01]
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| Next book help on 12:19 - Aug 25 with 1873 views | THEBUSH |
Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry | | | |
| Next book help on 13:36 - Aug 25 with 1814 views | dmm |
If you like social science fiction, Chris Beckett's Dark Eden series (3 books) thoroughly entertained me and many in my family. It's imaginative and immersive stuff from an author who has a real insight into human societies: https://www.goodreads.com/series/124316-dark-eden | | | |
| Next book help on 18:43 - Aug 25 with 1746 views | distortR |
that is SO wrong.......... | | | |
| Next book help on 19:12 - Aug 25 with 1714 views | danehoop |
"grimdark" sounds suspiciously like Warhammer 40K language slipping in there? | |
| Never knowingly understood |
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| Next book help on 19:46 - Aug 25 with 1682 views | Nushnool |
Or an Immortal song about the grim and frostbitten northern kingdoms. | | | |
| Next book help on 21:59 - Aug 25 with 1617 views | TacticalR |
Since you asked...I make an initial estimate of 2 minutes a page. That's 30 pages an hour, so in theory it should take about 10 hours to read a 300-page book. It's worth knowing that if someone casually suggests to you that you read a particular book - they might not realise that they are suggesting a major commitment of time.
But I have a much, much better way of estimating, which only works with electronic books (the only time I read physical books is when there is no EPUB or PDF version available). I have a separate Google spreadsheet for every book - these are quick to set up because I can extract the table of contents file (toc.ncx) from an EPUB (at least ones without DRM) using Sigil, and I have written a software utility that will extract the chapter titles from the toc.ncx file, which I then copy to the spreadsheet. It only takes a minute to set up each spreadsheet.
The reader I use (Barnes and Noble's Nook App for Android) shows me the time of each software bookmark (some readers like Kindle for Android won't give you the time of the bookmark). As I read through the book I bookmark the chapter at the beginning and at the end, so I know how long each chapter has taken. Once I put those values into the spreadsheet for that book, the spreadsheet will calculate how long each chapter has taken and how long each page is taking. It then uses that value to calculate how long each remaining chapter will take, and how long the book as a whole will take to finish.
All this might sound complicated, but it has made me much better at finishing books. It helps me understand when a book is taking much longer than I thought it would take, which otherwise be a vague sensation in the back of my mind. It's got nothing to do with speed-reading.
Anyway, I didn't mean to hijack WokingR's thread, which is supposed to be about fantasy/sci-fi epic recommendations.
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| Next book help on 22:30 - Aug 25 with 1582 views | robith |
been taken from there, but used a lot in fantasy fiction now - Joe calls himself it
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| Next book help on 22:56 - Aug 25 with 1548 views | MrSheen |
That’s fascinating. I see you have Adam Smith there. When I’ve read bits of Gibbon and Edmund Burke, I’ve had to go backwards and forwards so often to get the meaning out of their 18th Century prose (not always successfully) that I’ve slowed down to about 10-15 pages an hour. I was given all 8 volumes of Decline and Fall for my 50th birthday, but it’s a retirement project.
Used to read everything on Kindle, but completely gone off it recently 1) because maps are so terrible and 2) because I found I couldn’t remember the titles or authors of what I’d read because of the lack of reinforcement from picking them up and opening them. Perhaps spreadsheets are the solution. More fool me because a big part of my library is inaccessible on a device I never use or even charge. [Post edited 25 Aug 2022 23:01]
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| Next book help on 01:09 - Apr 6 with 1130 views | hubble |
I can't sleep, it's raining outside (which is nice, I love the sound of the odd car swishing past) and I'm ready for a new good book. I've read some incredible books in the last few years, books of all genres, and it would be good to share some of them and get this thread going again.
I'm going to start with one of the most recent I've read, which is David Mitchell's (not the comedian) Utopia Avenue. It is simply astonishing. I'll give you the basic info: it's set mainly in London (and mainly in Soho) and it's about a fictional band who come together in 1967. They interact with some of the greatest musicians, actors and venues of the time. But like his other books (Cloud Atlas or number9dream, for example) he weaves together 'reality', 'history' and different dimensions of thought and experience, but in such a brilliantly readable way*. And it's a great story. I can't recommend it enough.
*which is more than I'm doing!
. [Post edited 6 Apr 2023 1:29]
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| Next book help on 01:21 - Apr 6 with 1109 views | lave16 |
Andrew Masterson - the second coming --Joe Panther is a psychotic, alcoholic, violent, substance-abusing heroin dealer who also believes he is Jesus.
Fantastic read very entertaining | |
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| Next book help on 01:28 - Apr 6 with 1106 views | hubble |
Sounds good, thanks! | |
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| Next book help on 08:38 - Apr 6 with 1016 views | kernowhoop |
'Great escape: the final day' by Iman Optimist. | | | |
| Next book help on 09:18 - Apr 6 with 948 views | stantheman10 |
Which one's please as he has written at least 5 on football | | | |
| Next book help on 09:46 - Apr 6 with 896 views | robith |
Forget the recommend if you're a sci fi guy The Rememberance of Earth's Past trilogy.
I've read the Three Body Problem and The Dark Forest and they're two of the best science fiction books I've ever read.
There was a netflix adaptation planned but it was by the Game of Thrones guys and they seemed to have made a book set in China cast entirely of English blokes they worked on GoT with so it may have been dropped. I tried the Chinese adaptation on YouTube but it's absolutely bananas | | | |
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