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Favorite fantasy book far and away is "The Way of Kings" (a random Sanderson), favorite sci-fi book is Snowcrash (Neal Stephenson)

Strongly recommend either The Way of Kings or Mistborn. They're the first books in two separate series of his. The Way of Kings is epic fantasy. Mistborn is somewhere between fantasy and YA.

Brandon Sanderson is my go to recommendation for fantasy nowadays. Mistborn is a great place to start but The Way of Kings is the real meat and potatoes. He also links all these books together in the same universe and it's fun to notice the connections.

For the book you mention, The Way of kings. There are two audiobook publishers; McMillan Audio for the single voice work and Graphic Audio (a different company) for the multi voice.

Yes!

I recently picked up the Way of Kings but found the way he described the action/fantastical elements really jarring. It was like he felt he needed to spell it out rather than let the reader discover it organically. I've been told I need to struggle through though as it's supposedly a great story.

I started reading sci-fi(mostly hard-sf) after I read the commonwealth saga, 'Pandora's star' and 'Judas unchained'. It was just really entertaining and unlike anything I've read. Also really recommend 'Snow crash'. Also adding a couple fantasy recommendations: Lies of Locke lamora, and any basically any novel by Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn: the final empire, Warbreaker, The way of kings etc.)

Very true. I read the Mistborn series and absolutely loved every minute of it, so I picked up The Way of Kings thinking I like Brandon Sanderson and it's a popular book of his. I didn't make it past the second chapter because the story demands I memorize dozens of ridiculous names, made-up words, magical objects, and fictional cities right off the bat.

Suspending disbelief is not the problem. The problem is when the author writes something so unbelievable that there's never a chance to suspend. It's all disbelief, all the time.

Again maybe I'm ruined by years of reading bad sci-fi and fantasy, maybe I would have been better off if I read it 20 years ago. But Snowcrash and The Way of Kings both start their story with all of the hallmarks of every awful book I've ever read.

I'm sure the durian fruit tastes great, but unfortunately I've smelled a dumpster before and now durian is ruined to me forever.

Wow, turns out I still have it on GitHub, including the results I ground out 8 years ago. The script probably doesn't work, but the results are still good:

https://github.com/johnfn/GoodReadsScraper

Particularly, load bigdata.js into nodejs and then run a command sort of like this to parse out the results, filtering out young adult/romance/religion stuff/comics:

    bigdata.filter(f => f.ratings > 5000 && !f.genres.includes('Young Adult') && !f.genres.includes('Religion') && !f.genres.includes('Romance') && !f.genres.includes('Sequential Art')).map(f => f.title)

I get some pretty interesting stuff. First result is the Constitution... OK, fair enough... but the next 10 or so are:

    'A Song of Ice and Fire',
    'Collected Fictions', (by Borges)
    'The Name of the Wind',
    'Infinite Jest',
    'The Complete Works',
    'The Way of Kings',
    'The Wise Man\'s Fear',
    'Ficciones',
    'A Storm of Swords: Blood and Gold',
    'The Complete Stories',
    'Labyrinths',
    'Don\'t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!',
    'The Hiding Place',

Is it an amazing list? Eh. Is Name of the Wind better than Infinite Jest? Probably not. They're both fantastic books, though! And still, it's way better than Listopia. Also, this data is 8 years old. I bet it would be way better if I were to clean it up and run it in 2020.

> Have you been successful at learning Japanese?

So far I got good at kanji, and I know about 2000 words. It's enough to enjoy reading stuff like "Welcome to the NHK".

> If so, any good suggestion?

You might want to start with learning about Spaced Repetition:

1. https://ncase.me/remember/

2. https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

For further reading see links provided by Gwern. Then, specific to Anki:

1. https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz60qTP2Gx0

Those tools will help to retain what you memorize. Further, see https://massimmersionapproach.com/ for guidance on language learning. It focuses on immersion, that's, reading books, listening to stuff, etc. I got good at English by means of immersion, reading The Way Of Kings and other awesome books like that, and now with the systematic approach from Mass Immersion Approach it goes even better than before.

Here are a few recommendations based on things I've read this year and last:

- Infinite by Jeremy Robinson

- The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson (this series is a rabbit hole)

- Scythe by Neal Shusterman

- Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

- Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

So far this year, I've read the following:

- Revelation Space

- Armada

- I, Strahd: The Memoirs of a Vampire

- The Sleeping Dragon

- Wizardry: The League of the Crimson Crescent

- Snow Crash

- Scythe

- Off to Be The Wizard

- Spell or High Water

- An Unwelcome Quest

- Thunderhead

- Everlost

- Replay

- Stranger in a Strange Land

- The Amulet of Samarkand

- Everwild.

I'm currently reading A Conjuring of Light and The Way of Kings.

I was able to read so much more than I usually can because of audiobooks. I had a long commute for a couple months, so that helped me knock a book every week or so off my list.

Of the books I've already read this year, I think I would recommend Scythe and Thunderhead the most, but Snow Crash is a must-read, and Stranger in a Strange Land is pretty interesting, but I think a lot of it was lost on me because of the time period-specific language used throughout; it made it hard to understand the interactions between people.

As far as what surprised me? Probably Snow Crash. For some reason, I read somewhere that Ready Player One ripped off Snow Crash and while reading it, I just couldn't understand why they would think that... the two are really nothing alike. Pretty much the only common ground is a virtual world...

The way of kings by Sanderson. Or any of Sanderson's series for the matter.

One genre that is always missing from HNer's and YC's recommendations is Fantasy.

It feels like most people here read books to acquire knowledge and philosophy to apply to real life.

Most fantasy books are read for entertainment and imagination. There's no hidden message to parse and put toward your next start-up project. That doesn't mean Fantasy books are a waste of time though if they're engrossing and entertaining. That's why I read them.

Some fantasy recommendations:

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch

The First Law series, by Joe Abercrombie (especially the standalone books #4, #5 and #6)

The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson

I have no life outside of reading and consume nearly 200 books/year, so I'd love to offer up a few 2018 favorites!

Doctor Dealer: The Rise and Fall of an All-American Boy and His Multimillion-Dollar Cocaine Empire (by Marc Bowden).

Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (Ryan Holiday).

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (Sam Quinones).

American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic (John Temple).

Rosemary's Baby (Ira Levin).

The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922 (Edmond Taylor).

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (Jeffrey Toobin).

The Way of Kings: The Stormlight Archive, Book 1 (Brandon Sanderson). This year was my fourth read. Don't get me started :/

Tend read more Sci-fi/fantasy. Some good ones this year:
Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss http://amzn.com/B0010SKUYM
Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch http://amzn.com/B000JMKNJ2
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson http://amzn.com/B003P2WO5E
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson http://amzn.com/B002GYI9C4
The above four are the first book in their respective series. I've also enjoyed the sequels to all of them. Several of the series are not yet finished.

Several of the books are on this list from several years ago by NPR: http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-s...
flowchart of the NPR list: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2011/09/flowchart_for_navig...

Alchemist by Paulo Coelho