441–450 of 599 posts
Obviously the Culture is not the total ideal to strive for, but it did give me a vision of where we could go culture-wise (with a lowercase 'c') which was notably brighter than what I had maintained prior.
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Dune holds up way better if you pretend it's just one book (the first one). It stands alone very well and IMO is completely worthy of its status in the classic sci-fi pantheon. On the other hand, I finished TBP, but I disliked it enough that I didn't go back to the other two volumes. What makes them better than the first, in your opinion? (purely for my own curiosity re: whether I should go back and read them)
I recommend you read books 2 and 3 in the REP series. TBP is comparatively really slow (IMO necessarily), but the series really picks up in 2 and 3 in a way that makes you appreciate the foundation that book 1 laid.
Les Misérables was one for me.
The selection might seem trite, but I suspect that there wasn't a book with bigger impact on me than Hobbit, for very simple reason. It made me into voracious reader, put me on a path of reading, actually reading. All because my father prodded me to read out loud first few pages so that I could show off how well I read. That was enough to get me hooked and probably nothing compares in impact. Then there was LOTR, later on Silmarillion, and to this day I remember sometimes surprising amounts of trivia from them. A definitive positive impact.
- Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Had an impact mostly unrelated to its sci-fi content but related to more down to earth things mentioned. Whether it was positive impact remains an unanswered question, over 18 years later.
- Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. A book series that, now that I think of it, fed probably disturbing amounts of growth of my personal morals. Unclear on how positive that impact was, but I think it was? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"East of Eden." Steinbeck draws beautiful vignettes of human life and emotion, and I think the book's main idea about human motivation is largely correct and explains a wide variety of behavior. It helped me see both myself and others with more clarity.
Greatest book I’ve ever read. Timshel.
But I'm not entirely sure about his discussion of the word "timshel" in the original Bible. I'm a native Hebrew speaker, and I don't read any "may" into it - it's more of a declaration of the future like "you will rule/control it" rather than "you may rul/control it".
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>Maybe Ender went too far, but he did act in self-defense the book is literally about a kid committing genocide and the reasons why he should feel okay about it (ie a pretext). or did you not read it through to the end?
Did you read the sequel? He literally spends the rest of his life making up for that mistake as speaker for the dead.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. My best friend in 7th grade had older siblings and they had all read Ender’s Game. He read it and told me I had to read it. Being the impressionable 7th grader (2006-7) that I was I gladly obliged. I found the book to be deeply fascinating. It opened my eyes to ‘new’ technology like ‘ansible’ (can communicate anywhere in the universe instantaneously) and really opened up my imaginati…
whenever someone mentions ender's game in a positive light i worry about that person https://web.archive.org/web/20070206121131/http://www4.ncsu.... tldr; orson scott card is a bigot and ender's game is nazi apologia. if you don't want to read the above it's been written about in numerous places (google "ender's game book fascism").