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Shit, man, I didn't know you guys were into Worm. I got up to chapter 15, but had to quit because I was reading it and not doing important stuff. I have it bookmarked; I'll get back to it someday!

Yep, Weissreich even wrote a fanfic on it!

I binge-read Worm as it was finishing up, followed Pact but eventually fell behind, binge-read the rest when it finished, started Twig but never caught up. Now that Twig is finished I gotta read that too (probably concurrently with Parahumans 2).

The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem

Seconding this recommendation. The entire 三体 Trilogy is phenomenal.

The Three-Body Problem

Seconding this recommendation. The entire 三体 Trilogy is phenomenal.

In my opinion, its greatest strength is the world building. It's detailed and sounds plausible (not a physics nerd). Add to that an epic scope over the 3 books and it makes for some masterful, engrossing science fiction.

I recently finished Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which I think I mentioned elsewhere but is about various games and the challenges their developers had in making them...everything from how one person made Stardew Valley over the course of years to how the Diablo III team were paralyzed by the task of creating a sequel to Diablo II to how the Dragon Age: Inquisition team lived in the shadow of the criticism behind Dragon Age II. Interestingly enough, since finishing it I've seen the book pop up on many holiday gift guides, including on The Verge and Polygon.

I'm now reading Unfu*k Yourself: Get out of your head and into your life, which at least so far is about how people tend to sabotage themselves with negative and doubtful thoughts and how someone can overcome them. For example, the first chapter talks about how a lot of people complain about parts of their lives but are content enough with them that they don't do anything to change them. It talks about having an honest discussion with yourself on if you're willing to take the steps needed to change things (I'm willing to take the time and effort to find a better job), if you're motivated to change because you're not willing to do something (I'm not willing to tolerate being overweight and unhealthy anymore), or if you're content and not motivated to change cause if that's the answer at least you've resolved the issue and can move on. The book also mentions that even if we're in a shitty situation that we have no control over, we can still control how we react to it and that alone can improve how we feel.

Recently finished Empires of EVE: A History of the Great Wars of Eve Online by Andrew Groen. I downloaded this book about a year back after watching Groen's interesting talks on the subject, but didn't get around to reading it until now.

The book covers the history of the battles over nullsec in Eve from its inception in 2003 up to the end of the Great War in 2009. With tens of thousands of players involved, it's this very interesting military history that highlights the evolution of tactics and strategies over the years. But the most interesting part is the underlying propaganda war. As Eve is a voluntary hobby, leaders need to convince players to even participate and continue the fight, and as a result it seems that most of the efforts are devoted not to military supremacy, but to breaking the hearts and minds of the enemy. It's quite fun to read about these personal squabbles between alliance leaders, played out in these clever schemes and epic battles.

My wife works in residence life at a university, so she joined the group that chooses next year's freshman common read (the book that all incoming freshman will read so they have something in common to talk about, I guess, or maybe there's a first-year class that will talk about it?).

Just finished reading #NeverAgain, one of the candidate books, which is a sort of an autobiography/"manifesto" written by David and Lauren Hogg, two of the survivors of the Parkland Shooting last year.

I enjoyed the autobiographical parts (I've always enjoyed biographies) as the two siblings recounted their childhood and the lead-up to the shooting as well as the shooting itself, their reactions to it, and the beginning of the whole March for Our Lives movement. The second-to-last chapter included ten actual policy points (like universal background checks, banning high-capacity magazines, ending interstate gun trafficking, funding of gun violence research, etc.), which I thought was useful so that it wasn't just rhetoric. Also, the final chapter was quite enlightening as it listed every person who was killed in a school shooting since Columbine, which was more than I realized.

David comes across as a bit narcissistic, though, as he (I think unintentionally) reveals that he is driven by a need to be known and remembered, which seems to be competing with his fight for justice -- his younger sister, however, seems quite genuine and broken from the loss of her friends. He was also quite defensive about all the attacks and conspiracies targeted at him in the media and then talked about all the "sick burns" his classmates made on Twitter, which seemed a bit smug -- like, all the kids totally pwned the trolls and haters, yo.

Overall, I'd give it a 3/5. An interesting and quick read if you want to know more about the subject from firsthand survivors.

If it hasn't been suggested yet, I very highly recommend the Saga of Tanya the Evil, known in Japan as Yojo Senki. The animated adaptation of it, called both depending on where you see it, is extremely good, however the light novels are better than the show.

If you do not know what a light novel is, it's the other adapation of books in Japan, whereas most know Manga, being the Japanese comics, light novels are the Japanese literature books, like our every day books here.

There are currently 4 novels out in English, though I believe there are 8 or 9 in Japanese if you know the language.

The plot is based on an alternative world that has a WW1-esque scenario, and the main character is suddenly reincarnated into this world from our own after being murdered, as a sort of test. The test is put upon him as a trial by a god-like figure known as Being X, since he was atheist, almost laughing at the vary thought of a deity. The character is reincarnated as a young orphan girl in the alternative world, which features stuff like magic. Our main character, referred as Tanya, has a high magical aptitude and is drafted into the military by choice at the very young age of nine, as a magical officer. The tales continue from there.

So, does anyone have a recommendation if I'm a fan of Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker?

I don't know of any books by Clive Barker so I can't provide any recommendations there but for Neil Gaiman I can recommend two books.  American Gods is a good book of his that has a fair amount of humor but the story is interesting.  Its basically about all kinds of gods interacting in the US and these interactions are all converging on the life of an inmate who is about to go on parole.

Good Omens/Bad Omens (something along those lines) is a good book if you like comedy.  Its basically a biblical end of the world story written like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Monty Python skits.  It focuses on an angel, a demon, and some humans at the time that stuff starts happening that had been planned a long time earlier.

I recently read the entirety of the Revelation Space series, by Alastair Reynolds. It strikes this wonderful balance between hard sci-fi (Reynolds is a physicist) and space opera. The worldbuilding is great (he paints a very grand scope in a non-FTL human interstellar civilization, and the technologies and applications he invents are quite interesting), and some of the books/stories have some rather novel narrative elements in them.

Reynolds does have an issue with characterization (he often has trouble making characters with believable motivations/actions who aren't psychopaths) and plot resolution (the ending of the main series at the end of Absolution Gap is rather whelming), but the ideas he explores makes his writing quite worth reading.

The first book of Wild Cards, the superhero anthology series edited by George R. R. Martin, is free on Tor Books until the 14th.

We have a free games thread but not a free ebooks thread so I'm posting this here.

Have been doing my best to resist flooding this topic with legit the thousands of amazing books I've read over the years.  However, I just finished the League novels by Sherrilyn Kenyon, and holy crap they are grade A romantic fantasy trash. (written for adults, sorry kiddos)

As with all great trashy smut, the series uses a fair number of repeating themes in every book, so they get a bit predictable, so if you want a prime sample and don't intend on reading the series, Born of Betrayal is the #1 badass starring Jullien eton Anatole, an exiled prince from a planet of humanoids that consider human flesh a delicacy.  These books feature space travel, a variety of culture clashes, and some nigh uncomfortably warm sections that don't need to be described here.

If you prefer less extraterrestrial stories, another series by Kenyon is the Dark-Hunter novels of which Acheron and Styxx are the best novels.  These feature a large range of gods and magic contrasted to the aliens and technology in the League novels.  Note, there are a lot of books in this series as well, but Acheron and Styxx are the best ones, read in that order.

Redshirts, the Star Trek parody novel by John Scalzi that won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2013, is free on Tor books until the 20th.

Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, I'm interested in learning more about social capital and the decline of civil society and Putnam's book is one of the most important in the area.

Anything Jules Verne, but especially Journey to the Center of the Earth and From the Earth to the Moon