World War Z has hit differently after major life stages: College, marriage, kids, global pandemic, etc.
It’s too bad the zombie tv universe is flooded at this point. I’m hoping in ten or twenty years we get a premium streaming channel anthology show based on the stories in this book. The movie they made from it had so little to do with the novel.
Easier to say which books I WOULDN’T read again.
The Art of War in the Middle Ages. Just interminable.
There was another book, I can’t recall the name of it unfortunately. It was about ethical non-monogamy but went into such blatantly STUPID territory that I classed it as “should not be set aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force.”
One of the more stupid statements was about how gangbang porn is prevalent (multiple men, one woman), but the inverse doesn’t exist. I was like “Fuck off, you aren’t looking very hard then…”
The Dispossessed
Left Hand of Darkness
Yeah. Ursula Le Guin always surprises me; when I re-read her books, they’re often better than I remember.
Interstellar Age or any book from Jordan Peterson
Speaker for the Dead
Eisenhorn
Count of Monte Cristo
The Emperor of All Maladies
Moby Dick
Lords of Silence
All honorable men: History of the war in Lebanon
Adams and Victor’s Principles of Neurology
The Biology of Cancer
Japan to 1600
History of Medieval Russia
The Baltic: A History
On War
The Back Channel
Timbuktu (By Villiers)
Sorry if this is too many, just looked at my book app for ones I keep reading.
Speaker for the Dead
Interesting! I enjoyed it much less than Ender’s Game, but they were such different books it doesn’t surprise me that someone else would prefer it.
Moby Dick
Right‽ Such an amazing read. It does take a bit to get into the cadence, I find, but so worth it.
I loved Enders Game, Enders Shadow and Speaker for the Dead. It had a great emotional importance to me. Especially Enders Shadow, it was one of the first books I read that properly described starvation. I went through a lot as a child, and Beans story of a starving, smart, small kid really resonated with me in the period after my own tribulation. I don’t think Shadow has the same impact on people without some of my experiences, so I chose to use the main arc and I’ve always felt that Ender would rather be remembered as The Speaker more than anything else. Probably silly, but I’m fine with that. In short, I agree, Enders Game is the better book. Speaker is just the pay off.
Moby Dick has always infuriated and enthralled me. I read 5 pages, hate myself. Start reading again in 15 minutes because I can’t get it out of my head.
I liked Ender’s Shadow much more than Speaker for the Dead, which felt preachy to me. I just didn’t click with it.
Both Game and Shadow are great books, and excellent choices.
It’s been a really long time since I read Speaker, but I really liked it.
First, middle school me loved how different it was from Enders Game. It was a challenge, and it felt like the author was purposefully shedding the fans of the first novel with something less approachable.
Second, it hooked me in immediately with the mystery, and then really wrestled with what would anthropology with non-human cultures look like, and how could they go wrong? And how could that bridge be mended? In a way that middle school me could appreciate.
It seemed to complete Enders Game in the sense that in the first novel, he accidentally genocides a species based on a historic cultural misunderstanding between alien sentient races, and Speaker is his chance to learn from his experience and prevent it from happening again. I ate up that moral.
I may have rose-tinted glasses and only remember the good parts.
Also I remember liking Xenophobia (?) but even then I realized that even though the OCD descriptions were really interesting, there was something *off about making them all Asians with genetically-engineered disabilities to keep them from being too smart (I forget the exact plot, but that felt pretty icky even though I didn’t understand why and still can’t really explain it).
I liked Enders Shadow because Bean’s background was eye-opening, but the other Shadow novels felt pretty weird in how they framed and simplified world politics.
The Sandman Slim series
https://www.goodreads.com/series/46424-sandman-slim
And
The Dresden Files series
Dresden files are so good! Dead beat is my favorite
I want another Dresden Files show. That would be great.
Is that the magical hard-boiled detective? I forget the name but I liked that one.
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - Becky Chambers
I loved that one.
Neuromancer moves faster than some movies. Absolutely worth rereading
The Martian. I’ve read it twice, and would love to read it again. It’s so good.
Nobody has yet mentioned A Gentleman in Moscow, so I will. It’s fairly recent, but I know I’ll read it again in a couple of years.
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
Books. Multiple.
The Practice Effect by David Brin. It’s an isekai (it’s not anime, but it’s an isekai) where things get MORE useful when you use them, reversing entropy.
Sentenced to Prism. MC is sent on a mission to a world inhabited by silicate based life forms. Shenanigans ensue. Mildly autistic coded MC.
Resurrection Inc. The dead are resurrected as mindless zombie robots. Sometimes it goes wrong and the dead regain their memories. The MC does. Hijinks ensue.
edit - more
Mistborn Chronicles - an orphan gets super powers in a very messed up world. A group recruits her for a heist.
Loved Sentenced to Prism! I loved the plot of the Mistborn Chronicles, but I struggled a bit with the audiobook narrator. Maybe I should actually read them…
I read them and flew through them, despite being a slow reader. The second arc though (Wax and Wane) is one of my favorite series ever. It’s set in the same universe, just centuries in the future and is basically a western. They’re great fun to read. Would recommend.
Most of The Culture series
I’ve read Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch three times, currently reading The Color of Magic for the first time and then I’m going to re-read Mort
I’ve read Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game three times, but that was for school. Pretty good children’s mystery book, though
