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The Goldfinch was fantastic, definitely in my top 5 favourite book of all time, if not top 2 along with the Empire Falls by Richard Russo and The Stand by Stephen King.

It is a great book. It also explains why the ending to The Stand sucks so hard, which always bothered me :)

I had no idea what I was getting into when I read The Stand back in high school. I thought Stephen King was a "horror" author, and the only thing I knew about him was that he wrote IT. The Stand remains one of the best books I have ever read.

The Stand is an actual classic, I should have mentioned it if I mentioned King. 11/22/63 is more of a less-epic, mature character work. Cheers to good taste!

It's funny you mention that, because he doesn't bring up bicycles in several of his post-apocalypse books (I'm thinking of The Stand as one specific example -- the characters all walk from one end of the country to the other).

I think The Stand is one of his best novels. It is also one of his longest novels (almost 1,000 pages). It is also one of his earlier novels, so maybe it's missing "the fat."

I've read enough of the list that I think I'll hang onto it to check out stuff that I haven't read.

Obviously it's down to personal preference which of these are the best, but I'm curious how other readers feel about a couple of these (potentially contrarian views):

1. Speaker For the Dead is my favorite of the Ender stuff.

2. I like Endymion duo better than Hyperion. (maybe my favorite ever, actually)

3. The Stand is also an all-time great to me, especially in light of current events.

4. I think the author should read more Niven - I guess he didn't really like Ringworld, which is another of my favorites.

The best books I've read in the last decade (that I can remember, I've only been keeping reading lists since ~2015) are mostly important because they have contributed to my inspiration and style as a writer.

* The Road - Cormac McCarthy

* Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

* No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

* On Writing - Stephen King

* 11/22/63 - Stephen King

* The Stand - Stephen King

* Hell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson

* East of Eden - John Steinbeck

* Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion

* In Cold Blood - Truman Capote

If COVID originated from bats or whatever, then the reason we don’t see multiple viruses going around simultaneously is because animal–human crossover, though it certainly does happen, happens more rarely than that.

If COVID is a virus of whatever origin that escaped from a Chinese lab (only mentioning this because it’s a popular theory among ordinary netizens and the WHO expressly didn’t rule it out, though it called it not a likely scenario), then we don’t see multiple pathogens going around the world because all developed countries’ top-security bio labs are – thankfully – quite secure. Stephen King’s The Stand and Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone have kept readers awake at night with fear for decades now, but the labs they describe have managed to keep their pathogens from escaping.

Also, some horrible pandemics of yore like bubonic plague were easy to stamp out by modern hygiene practices, which is why they only pop up today in undeveloped places with poor hygiene (e.g. prisons in Madagascar).

Funny, if I think of my favorite books I'd probably say the Three Body Problem trilogy, A Deepness In The Sky, and The Stand...maybe because I haven't read 11/22/63 yet. I better read Altered Carbon since you seem to have exactly the same taste as me.

I'd add that reading the whole Three Body Problem trilogy is highly recommended since it gets higher concept every book. And personally I enjoyed A Fire Upon The Deep just as much as A Deepness In The Sky.

In Stephen King's book 'The Stand', he comes to the same conclusion: Doctors and surgeons to keep people from dying. Mechanical and civil engineers trying to get electricity back up etc. Groups of people will fiercely fight for 'this talent' and do whatever it takes to keep it.

The Dark Tower is one of my favorites, probably because King doesn't feel constrained by convention or genre. And if you have read King's other works you will appreciate the connections to his universe throughout, particularly The Stand and Salem's Lot.

Like others have said, the first 2 books are particularly good. But, be warned that the second book deals with a lot of racial and sexual issues, and King does not have a filter. The fourth book is a prequel, and really stands on its own as a novel, but really threw off the rhythm of the series for me. I had a hard time getting into it because I wanted to resume the primary storyline. The ending does come with a warning, but I think it was perfect.

Reading this reminded me of another great author who had an episode of weird racial views - Stephan King, in The Stand (which is absolutely one of my favourite books), had a chapter where he's detailing the horrors of society breaking down, and one of the events he catalogued was the mutiny of a bunch of black soldiers who then started killing their white compatriots in a grotesque gameshow. That very explicit fear of militant black men dates the book more than anything else.

As someone born in the very early 90's, it's weird seeing evidence of people taking seriously these thoughts I've only seen caricatured.

I read a few of each in High school. Koontz was fun but to me felt a bit more targeted for mass appeal (as weird as that feels to say in comparison to King). Then again, for King I was reading stuff like The Stand and The Dark Tower series, which may or may not be indicative of the rest of his work (which I mostly know through the movies made from them)?

I don't get this either, I think if you're finding it really difficult to read a book then maybe you're not reading the right book. A book should suck you in and not let go until you are finished. I love reading, and I just finished The Stand which was a long book at ~1300 pages but I just could barely put it down over the week or so that I was reading it, even with full time programming work, commutes, and caring for a child with my partner.

Preppers. Zombie Movies and our love of apocalypse is fascinating. Repping is similar in some ways to Cosplay, I think. It's a hobby intertwined with the way our fantasy obsessed minds work. It enables people to keep engaging with their fantasies. In this case, the weirdly persistent apocalypse fantasy.

When I was about 14-15, I loved Stephen King's "The Stand" and some of my friends liked it too. The youth fetish culture didn't really exist in that time and place, but the book and its post apocalypse world fascinated us. We talked out what we'd do and how. Find an island. Rescue damsels. Train dogs.

It's a persistent sort of a fascination. Interestingly so. It would be fun to find out more about the art history of zombie apocalypses.

Under this, in some way, is the fact that major catastrophes and cultural "rebooting" plays a pretty substantial role in human history. I find the idea that the world's flood myths (Noah, Atlantis..) relate to catastrophic flood events. Religions tell us about past catastrophes and promise future ones. There are some pretty interesting suggestions that the early fertile crescent civilizations' (eg Egypt) sudden rise are actually rebuilding events following the catastrophic demise of earlier (EG Gobleki Tepeh in Turkey) civilizations. There's also a lot of genetic evidence of major population collapses at several points.

There's also post war baby booms and some other bits and pieces suggesting that we are hard wired to think apocalyptically.

Interesting stuff.

Interesting. I’m actually heartily in favor of the “completionist” mindset. I adopted it from playing videogames. With videogames at times I would end up hopping from game to game to game, never really finishing many of them. And in a weird sense it felt less fun and it definitely felt less worthwhile. I couldn’t have more than surface level conversations about the content and I never felt like my opinions were holistic enough of that content either.

Now I only play one game at a time and I really try to finish it unless it straight up is just not fun for me. I’ve slogged through parts of games where I’ve become bored after X number of hours and ultimately been much happier for it as I witnessed everything the game had to offer (especially with regards to story). Final Fantasy XV comes to mind here. The gameplay had become tired after 30 hours or whatever but getting the whole story arc (for all its flaws) was extremely worth it.

I’ve carried this over to books. Unless I’m really not interested I will stick with the slow parts and generally I’ve been happy with the results. The Stand by Stephen King comes to mind here. It’s like 1,200 pages of tiny font and is pretty slow in the middle but has some stupendous moments and is really an epic tale I’m happy to have under my belt. I do have to pair this with a conscious “required” reading time, e.g. an hour before bed so that I’m always hitting a minimum rate so I don’t slow to a snails-pace and read a book a quarter or something.

That's why I think it comes down to what your using the book for. If it's a resource for something, then digital just makes sense. If it's for blowing your mind with a story about Flagg and the super-flu killing almost everyone on Earth, then it's almost a trophy or monument to your experience. Especially a book like The Stand.

To me, it's the difference between the 100k photos I have sitting in the cloud and the photo albums my mother has sitting on her shelf, which she knows by heart. Or having access to pretty much ALL the music on the play store, or holding a new album by Jack White and seeing the artwork off a screen. Maybe it's just a luxury now to have physical items, or maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic, I don't know.

Does it matter? Hmm. That's a good point -- it may not.

But ZAMM and Atlas Shrugged certainly felt to me a bit dishonest in that these works are primarily delivery devices for the authors' philosophical ideas. Other authors inject philosophy and ethics into their "straight" fiction, such as the philosophical rant-free work of Tolkien (LOTR = a treatise against fascism) and Stephen King (The Stand = a treatise against organized religion), but their philosophies never smack you in the face. [edit: grammar]