That’s a pretty good idea, especially considering that it has been decades since I last read it.
I have hit all three of those. Generally, the watch books are my favorites. Night Watch is still my most favoritest (and one that I reread not infrequently in paperback), though there are a few late ones I’ve just lately read that I also really liked.
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The Children of Ash and Elm
The most in-depth, analytical and downright fascinating history of the Vikings I have ever read. It covers politics, religion & belief, trade, warfare, culture… Pretty much everything you would ever want to know about them.
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Still more Discworld, starting on The Murderbot Diaries (waiting for #2 from the library), and waiting for book 4 of The Expanse series.
I dragged my feet on this one as the season of the TV series that covered it was boring to me. I liked the novel version better to be honest: It was a story that worked better with the ability to add narration of character’s thoughts.
In slightly-related news, I re-read Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children which is a weird story based on (according to a note from the author) a drunken conversation about some of Robert Heinlein’s eccentricities and odd phrasing. This led to me attempting to read Heinlein’s Friday which I think is the going on the relatively short list of books I’ve abandoned reading.
There’s a lot of similarities: Both are first-person narratives about a female-identifying courier/secret agent type who gets wrapped up in mystery and has lots of awkwardly-described sexual encounters as they stumble through a mystery. At least in the case of the SC book it’s understandable, as the protagonist is a robot designed to service long-dead humanity.
Friday is a rough read. Heinlein has written some interesting books but this is a later work and it’s painfully obvious that some of his personal interests are being discussed in detail. It feels intensely dated in a way a lot of old science-fiction doesn’t: I went on an Asimov streak a year or two back and his stuff always has a strong “50’s” tone, but still feels less dated somehow than this book, which is from 1982.
Saturn’s Children and it’s sequel, Neptune’s Brood are weird books. There’s some swerves into ‘body horror’ territory and plain old psychological horror in a few places, and that’s saying something when every character is a post-human entity designed to serve a no-longer existent human race. The sequel gets weirder as it was inspired by the financial crisis several years ago so has a protagonist that is a forensic accountant and thoughts on investments. Much less accessible than his ‘Laundry’ series, which just has Lovecraftian entities trying to destroy the world.
Some of his later stuff was really kinda squicky. I remember that one was kinda questionable even when I first read it as a teen with not exactly discerning taste. I, having zero experience with women, remember thinking that a lot of the protagonist behavior and reactions seemed highly implausible.
The Expanse novels are fortunately in high demand from the library, forcing me to wait a few weeks between them, else I would have consumed them all by now. I want to re-watch the series again; I keep getting bogged down trying to watch S5, just because it requires more focus and time and attention than I can generally give television.
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Older Heinlein is where it’s at. His later stuff is all about old men living forever and having sex with young women.
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That’s accurate. I was also trying to figure out how to say, “Lots of strong independent women that just really enjoying ‘tamed’ and ‘kept’” that felt wrong to me when I was looking through the notes.
I’m currently in a phase where I’m trying to balance myself between ‘deep’ reading and ‘popcorn’ reading. The latter is my term for a lot of genre fiction type stuff that is fun, but not particularly deep.
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I think Thud! might be one of my favorites, I read it shortly after I became a father and Sam’s life is changing there almost as much as it was in Night Watch, but in more relateable ways for me.
I still regret not buying the children’s book. The Aching series is also worth a good read.
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I finished Ready Player Two yesterday. As I mentioned back in July, Ernest Cline said he had been working to make it be a sequel to the first book and the movie. Mostly it’s a sequel to the book and is written in the same “how it happened” style. But there’s also about twelve direct references to the movie and the new quest that’s at the heart of the story comes from there, and this time, it has a deadline that it has to be solved by.
I will need to go back and read Ready Player One at some point or just listen to the audiobook read by Wil Wheaton to remind myself if it has the same mass quantities of details about pop culture for its quest as RP2. Regardless, if a RP2 movie is greenlit, I know they’ll do the same as before. They’ll swap out all the tiny steps that were taken to solve the quest in favor of action, and a lot can be covered visually instead of talked about.
Cline might be able to get one more book out of this storytelling style if he goes ahead with a sequel to Armada. Or possibly two if he does an Armada sequel and then Ready Player Three. RP2 provides for a completely separate path to take or a differing/continuing path within the OASIS. After that, Cline should look at a new style as this one might be getting played out.
That said, Cline did a good job of keeping the story interesting. There were a couple of times where “just one chapter tonight” turned into two, and one where I read a couple of pages of the next chapter to where it reached the point of an easier stopping point.
As a bonus, if you go to the Ready Player Two website, there’s a list of all the songs mentioned in the book and a link to the Spotify playlist.
Update: early development on an RP2 movie started in December.
Okay, second update: That same article says Universal Pictures is working on a movie for Armada, and Cline does have a different kind of story in the works.
(Maybe next time I’ll look for an article first before finishing a post.)
The Final Twist - Jeffrey Deaver. It’s in his Colton Shaw series. A little different from his normal stuff but in the same vein. It’s good so far, but I expect it to be, since all the other ones are good. 
Chaotic good.
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I’ve just started it, but I’ve been looking forward to getting this for a while. JMS and Aaron Sorkin are two of my “I wanna write like them” writers.
As I remember it was basically “I love the 80s” meets Goonies. Big major references in the early section to early D&D (which would trend to the 70s) and 80s movies. The latter section (when the protagonist is basically living in VR and has money to spend on wish fulfillment) has a lot more rapid-fire references to more obscure stuff. I skipped the movie for no reason other than it would be one I’d have to watch solo but it looked like they kind of kept up with this.
I think my issue with RP1 (Which only really kicked in when I thought about the book after reading it) is the timeline seems wonky. The deceased guy would need to starting their super-cyberspace-MMO now at the latest. If they’re very young for it they’d maybe be in their 40s, but I think 50s would make more sense to be the right age to really ‘absorb’ the 80s references. I caught many oft hem, but some were a bit older than me, and I’ve been known to dive back into 80s nostalgia due to my own weirdness.
It’s a really stressed timeline I think.
If anything I felt RP1
So I just got a kindle paperwhite (love it), does anyone have a place to get free kindle books? Preferably high fantasy, Sci-fi, and cyberpunk ?
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Baen usually has some. I think I got the entire Honor Harrington series for free from them.
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You might also want to subscribe to Bookbub - they send emails with “on sale” ebooks that often include free offers.
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Kindle Unlimited is a good source, if you read as much as me anyway. I’ve had a sub for years and it’s saved me an absolute fortune.
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Oh, I should have said, if you have Prime you get one free book a month too (Prime first read), but Amazon also randomly drop the price of ebooks to zero or 99p. I’ve picked up a lot of books that way - some of which I’ll probably even get around to reading eventually…
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You guys rock! ive got enough books to last me forever!!!
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