Eat any good books lately Worf?

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

"Ready Player One" was a series of references without jokes.
People complain that "Family Guy" is just references, but it isn't, it takes the cultural jargon and makes a joke with it. It is a subversion to see IceMan's ice bridges go to a gay bar. But, all "Player One" does is list things. There are whole pages with just lists of movie titles, authors, games, and no commentary or insight.
It is kind of clever when he figures out where the first key is, but holy shit do I not care about him talking about how much time he spends reading all the pop culture flotsam the game creator grew up on.

It didn't help the Audio book reader was Wil Wheaton and hearing him play an obnoxious, girl inept, know it all dweeb IS JUST THE WRONG THING TO DO.

I haven't read Ready Player One, but just from the movie trailer it seemed like that kind of story. That is, less of a story than a shameless cash-in on nostalgia. Granted, movie trailers usually aren't a very good way to judge movies, let alone the book it was based on. Still, that was my impression. Not that that couldn't be fun to some degree if that's what you're looking for. I did enjoy Stranger Things quite a bit, for example.

I'm currently reading Elephants Can Remember (Agatha Christie) and Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky).

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Dreadnought by April Daniels.

The best YA novel I've read in a long time. The best novel PERIOD I've read in a long time. The first time I've really fallen in love with a book since I don't know when!

Amazing superhero fiction. It does a great job of grounding the fantastic in reality, having the magic and super science and mutants coexist feasibly, and the concept of Hypertech does a really great job of fleshing out the improbable super-science and addressing logical holes.

Plus, representation-wise, this is an awesome book that could save a lot of lives.

[Fixer]

Finished Temeraire: Empire of Ivory while I was abroad.

Definitely the weakest of the series so far. The entire African expedition was plodding and boring, with none of the interaction between characters we had come to know over the first three books. Only the last couple of chapters which sets up a nice cliffhanger and a good lead into Victory of Eagles are really relevant to the overall plot and all of Africa's worldbuilding is apparently of zero relevance to the rest of the series.

Even if you're a fan of of the series you could learn all you need to know by reading the wikipedia summary of the book and easily give this a skip.

Also finished "All these worlds" in the Bobiverse series which brings that to a conclusion. Entertaining still, though there's some numbers thrown about for accelerating very large objects to very large proportion of the speed of light which even a layman's knowledge of relativity would suggest an amount of energy greater than the mass of our entire solar system colliding with another identical antimatter solar system. Something that frustrates in an otherwise hard science fiction setting.

Also the audiobook is a couple of hours shorter than the previous. Considering that the first book didn't really end at a good terminating point and that it's a collection of multiple parallel storylines it feels like this trilogy could have been condensed into a single book or a duology without issue which would have gotten more value for book credits.

Other than that, fun technological solutions and entertaining sci-fi.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

You're really damning these works with faint praise.

[Fixer]

Oh that's just me being a nitpicky son of a bitch.

I think the Temeraire series or at the first three books were really good. Can't go far wrong with Napoleonic era wars with a British airforce of dragons. Supposedly Empire of Ivory is the nadir of the overall series and I can see why.

I also rather enjoyed Bobiverse and would recommend it as a good listen. However if I compare to to the Expeditionary Force series you're paying the same amount in Audible credits for roughly half the content and I personally think it edges out with better writing, characters and voice work. Though admittedly that's a personal preference. Essentially you can get 15 hours of Expeditionary force for 1 credit, while having to pay 2 credits for the same volume of content in Bobiverse.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Well, knowing how to efficiently spend Audible credits is very important for me. =U I've got a Gold account that I can't downgrade and a net-negative cashflow.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

I'm about halfway through an audiobook of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein is the one premier classic sci-fi author that I haven't gotten into... and I'm still not into him, I'm afraid. The revolution that takes place in the book has been told (so far) in a dry, impersonal way. There's a lot of Heinlein's philosophizing on politics and society, but I don't find the philosophizing insightful enough to excuse the lack of tension.

[Fixer]

Just finished Fear the Sky.

Pretty good, though it was probably a book that would appeal to me more than most.
A story of an alien infiltration using advanced technology and the conspiracy built to counter them. Great attention is applied to how the two forces manipulate affairs while they attempt to avoid the notice of the world at large. The stakes for humanity being the complete extinction of their race should be they discovered.

You can tell it's Stephen Moss's first book though. Despite some excellent knowledge and description porn of military equipment, the man cannot write an action scene to save his life and the prose occasionally wanders into the awkward, twice into the hilarious.
There is at no point in any book you should describe an afterburner as "God's bunsen burner"

A definite recommendation if like the genre though.

[jstrahan]

Anything in the Gor series, by John Norman, is good. Tarnsman of Gor is the first in the series. ...ummm...some feminists may not like it.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Jstrahan...
Feminist friendly or not, are you really recommending the works of John "Muchly" Norman as good writing? o.0