Fiction

Watership Down by Richard Adams

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This book is very polarizing.

I also really recommend that people avoid the Netflix animated series and the old standalone movie for this book, it is a wonderful book to go into mostly blind.

I also say the preface/intro by the author is required reading for the context a person needs to make the most of this book.

The easiest way to describe this book is “Lord of the Rings books but with rabbits”. To elaborate just a bit, this book is about rabbits and their point of view of the world. It is like LOTR as in the protagonists go through and epic journey and there is rich lore to their world and how they perceive the world at large.

Yes rich rabbit lore. With many myths and legends about their world.

Yes I recommend this book.

I’m serious

This book got me engrossed about a new world and stories while making me think critically. That sense of being engrossed is why I recommend this story.

If you are familiar with the series or movie, I still recommend at least the forward.

(note: I did not care that much about the series, good voice actors and that’s about the only thing that was beyond competent; I have only seen clips of the movie which may scare off readers, YES THOOSE CLIPS)

Thrawn (2017)

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This is a recommendation with a huge caveat. How deep do you want the rabbit hole?

We all know Star Wars has a myriad of characters, settings, and timelines. This is a great book if you love the empire era. This book also paints the empire in a very different light then in any other media namely the “boring sides” of logistics, protocols, and bureaucracy; mixing in xenophobia, life under empire rule, and of course space battles. With that said, I still recommend any fan interested to know who Thrawn is, read this book. It is well worth your time. This book is smart and clever with gripping story (yes even with the bureaucracy). Also if you are an audiobook lover like I am, I highly recommend/warn the sound effects and pure production in the book.

Because of this book, I give the mentioned caveat.

I think to the surprise of no-one I am a Star Wars nerd. Because of this, I read 9 other books featuring Thrawn. ( Thrawn: Alliances, Thrawn: Treason, Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command, Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising, Thrawn Ascendancy: Greater Good, and Thrawn Ascendancy: Lesser Evil) I could recommend them. But I find myself when I talk about these books with peers I really can’t.

It is a struggle to convince someone to read one book let alone 9. I do absolutely enjoy what I have read, and think if people take the time to sit down and read them all it will be worth their time. But it is a commitment too far to say “read 9 books and tell me what you think”.

Basically this is THE book I recommend, and IF you want more there is plenty more, but if you only read one, this is it.

Reading List of 2021

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This is the big list of books I completed in 2021.

I would like to say there is a pattern, however I think that would be a lie.

The list is in (mostly) sequential order

note: just because it is on this list does not mean I recommend it or will not recommend it later, this is more the list of stuff I thought would be worth reading.

  1. The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad
  2. Eating the Dinosaur
  3. Song Machine
  4. Humble Pi
  5. Liquid Rules
  6. Better Than Before
  7. Libertarian Walks into a Bear
  8. All Creatures Great and Small
  9. Watership down
  10. Thrawn ascendancy: Greater Good
  11. White fang
  12. A Clockwork Orange
  13. Creativity INC
  14. Heavens river (Bobiverse)
  15. Mathematics of love
  16. The Ice Diary’s
  17. Shadows of the Empire (abridged)
  18. The Android’s Dream
  19. Sword of Destiny (Witcher)
  20. Invisible hook
  21. The Godfather
  22. Four Fish
  23. Orconomics
  24. Eaters of the Dead
  25. Cosmos
  26. Super Freakonomics
  27. Lies my Teacher Told Me
  28. Prisoners of Geography
  29. Nordic Theory of Everything
  30. Everybody has a Podcast Except You
  31. Thinking, Fast and Slow
  32. Curious
  33. Thrawn Ascendancy: Lesser Evil
  34. Existentially Challenged
  35. Consider the Fork

The Reluctant Adventures of Fletcher Connolly on the Interstellar Railroad

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Another recommendation where I am technically recommending the entire series.

This is a goofy book with a good plot. Very much a space opera, lots of planets and types of aliens. The characters, for lack of a better term, are down to earth. They all feel very rational and unique. Namely the main character, Fletcher, is very Irish. This book does lean on the reader liking British/Irish humor to get some of the nuanced jokes. The audio book also hammers this fact down. But I still recommend this. There is a lot of fun and adventure to be had.

The sci-fi world is great at poking fun at trends, creating aliens, and revising earth. The author knows when to lean into the campy humor and when to use a well-crafted plots and twists.

This book/series is a fun romp, funny, adventurous, and thought provoking in only a way sci-fi/ space operas can pull off. Also, the individual books are really short, and the collection feels like one book when put together, so I technically count this as 1 book in my head.

Orconomics: A Satire

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Note: I recommend going into this as blind as possible, keep reading at your own risk

When I experience fantasy in different mediums, I seem to find there is a lot of “generic” tropes that make me look over many works of fantasy. Classics like LotR still hold up great, subversions such as the Witcher Saga keeps me invested with the personalities and subtle ways the world works.

This book is somehow both serious and well developed and satirical at the same time.

This book does feel at times that it is some ones vanilla Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and the characters, for me all seemed to fall in line with my expectations.

The story does develop and the final act really ties together the entire book. But honestly the biggest reason I recommend this is that odd part of the name “onomics”. This is an economics book disguised as a fantasy novel. I would say this book has more to do with “The Big Short” (the story behind the 2008 financial crisis) than it does with LotR and I love it for that.

If the idea of economics is off putting: 1) Sorry, I like economic books 2)This is a great fantasy book regardless, you do not need to be an economist to enjoy

We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

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Technically I am recommending the entire bobiverse (We are Legion, For We are Many, All These World, Heavens Rive and hopefully 2 more soonish).

This is a killer Sci-fic concept, perfect for people who like to think about Sci-fi meeting reality.

“What would it be like to be a Von Neumann Probe?” (A Von Neumann probe is a self-replicating spaceship).

I don’t like giving too many spoilers (I recommend you read these books for yourself after all); but to give a bit more context, this follows Bob. Bob is a regular man who dies and his conscious digitized into a self-replicating drone. He escapes earth and makes clones, both as a spaceship and as his conscious, all following his adventures in the galaxy.

Plenty of wit and good ideas, it is hard to recommend only the first book, all of them are great