Hacker News Books

If you enjoyed the Gap series, I can really recommend checking out Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey. It has largely the same gritty feeling as the Gap does but is a lot closer to us in technology.

The Kindle version of Leviathan Wakes pulled this off. They included an entire other book at the end as a teaser for another series. I was somewhat shocked when the actual book ended suddenly around 50% in.

Totally agree with you. I couldn't get past the first few chapters, because it was flat out boring.

Compared to something like Leviathan Wakes, by James S.A. Corey...Ready Player One is so....

boring.

There, I said it too.

I tried getting into it, but found it a little on the slow side. Perhaps it was because I had just read Leviathan Wakes directly before it, which is a lot more fast-paced and similarly covers human colonization of the inner solar system and asteroid belt (aka "Belters")

Ready player one - Good bit of fun for a gamer/80s enthusist

Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger - I had no idea what was going on, i just know i enjoyed it

American Gods - slow starting but great book

Leviathan wakes - book that the netflix series 'the expanse' is based on

A Song of ice and fire books 1 to 3

As it relates, the only reason I could find that quote to reply to you was because I have the book in digital format. I remembered the word leather, and "leather" only appears in Leviathan Wakes 8 times, making it easy to find.

I love paper books as well, but I think the authors have prophetically captured the inevitable. Cutting down forests to only add tangibility to our bytes just isn't worth it.

If the book crew is better, I'd hate to see what the crew on the show is like. I've only read Leviathan Wakes so far, but I found most of the characters to be really flat. I think the book suffers from the same issue as many other books in the science fiction genre: there's so much focus on developing the setting that the characters are underdeveloped and seem very generic.

Here is a partial list of the books I read this year. These are all books that stood out to me which I enjoyed:

Fiction Books:

* Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, Abaddon's Gate, Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey

* Homeworld, Out of the Black (books 3 & 4 in the Odyssey One series) by Evan Currie

* Furies of Calderon, Academ’s Fury (1 & 2 of the Codex Alera series) by Jim Butcher

* The Aeronaut’s Windlass also by Jim Butcher

* The Queen of Zamba by L. Sprague de Camp

* Giant of World's End by Lin Carter

* Batgirl of Burnside (graphic novel)

Non-fiction Books:

* Here is Your War by Ernie Pyle - the 1st of his books chronicling American soldiers in World War 2

* Vagrant Viking by Peter Freuchen - auto-biography of the Danish explorer/Nazi resistance fighter/writer/film-maker

* Voices of 1776 by Richard Wheeler - the Revolutionary war in the words of people who were there.

The non-fiction books surprised me because I really enjoyed all of them and I usually only read fiction or technical books. The Odyssey One books by Evan Currie also stood out to me because I found the first one for a low price on Kindle and I was blown away by the story.

Leviathan Wakes
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8855321-leviathan-wakes

I put in SevenEves (my favour book) by Neal Stephenson and Leviathan Wakes by JSA Corey and the recommendations include:

Game of thrones,
Bernard Corwell books
Isaac Asimov

I've read these and I would put them in the same camp as the input books so I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to be doing.

Nice idea but, unless I'm missing something, not the expected behaviour.

I would more have expected "the old man who climbed out the window and disappeared", Clarkson's biography and maybe a Jack Reacher type stuff (which I also enjoy but on the other end of the spectrum from the input books)

The Magicians is a lovely book; I actually interviewed Grossman when the first one came out, in 2010: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/10/14/an-interview-with-lev-gro.... If you like it, try Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy too.

Leviathan Wakes disappoints: its plot and political economy are interesting but on a sentence-by-sentence level one wishes for more. If you haven't read it yet try Peter Watts, Blindsight.

A bunch of books: Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (as well as several of the sequels), American Gods by Neil Gaiman, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, The Magicians by Lev Grossman, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling, The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, and a bunch of others.